Some call him an "alarmist," others claim he's "irrationally paranoid." Regardless of what you think of Commander Stephen Flynn following his appearances on 60 Minutes, the Today show, and CNN, his 20 years as a commissioned officer in the Coast Guard and his impressive list of blue-ribbon intelligence connections have forced the shipping community to sit up and listen.

Flynn's message to shippers is simple: There's a distinct possibility that your supply chain will be the conduit for the next terrorist attack—and you're utterly unprepared to respond.

The U.S. government has found him hard to ignore as well. In 2002 he authored the report, "America: Still Unprepared, Still in Danger," for the Homeland Security Task Force, which was co-chaired by former Senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman. He served in the White House Military Office during the first Bush administration and as director for global issues on the National Security Council staff during the Clinton administration.

Flynn currently is the Jean J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations—a non-profit, non-governmental institution where he's able to articulate what's really happening "without getting into too much trouble," he says. He has the ear of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Robert Bonner and the current executive branch, and is aggressively preaching the advantages of layered, resilient security measures in his book, America the Vulnerable.

Chief Editor Mike Levans spoke with Flynn last month to learn his views on the federal government's attempts to improve port security and get his recommendations to the nation's shippers for tightening control of their global supply chains. The following is the complete transcript of that interview. (Excerptsappeared in the April 2005 issue of Logistics Management.)

Logistics Management: Maritime transportation security has been the focus of your life for more than a decade. What triggered such an intense interest?

Stephen Flynn: My focus on the risk of containerization as a conduit for terrorist threat goes back to 1990. During that time, the Coast Guard was getting better at policing the frontiers and cracking down on drug smuggling, and those increased efforts created an incentive for the smugglers to find an easier way to get in. It was then that I started watching smugglers start to use containerized cargo to move drugs.

That just happened to be the same time the U.S. was removing barriers to the flow of goods, trying to increase volume and velocity of trade within the hemisphere and the rest of the world. As drug trafficking became more lucrative, they become more sophisticated about how the real marketplace worked. I started studying the supply chain trade journals—I needed to know the trends of the space they were beginning to exploit.

LM: What were the early indications that the supply chain would turn into a target?

SF: There were four driving forces that led us to this supply chain revolution. The supply chain needed to be as open, efficient, reliable, and as low cost as possible, and these forces were cascading in the mid-1980s. The lower cost was making supply chains more accessible, and the increased reliability and efficiency found people becoming more dependent upon them. And while this was going on, security was viewed as something that raised costs, undermined efficiency and reliability, and put pressure on authorities to frequently close the networks.

So, I found myself swimming upstream. I was out there saying there are folks out there with malicious intent who want to exploit this wealth-generation system we’re concocting. The late 1990s would’ve been the perfect time to integrate security thinking into supply chain design—but it didn’t happen.

LM: So, you’re suggesting that shippers have been forced to play catch-up in their supply chain security efforts due to this early lack of vision?

SF: Actually, now the private sector is being called upon to be a partner in the war on terror and they’re saying, “Hey, I’m just trying to run a business. I didn’t know what the bad guys were up to, and no one is giving me intelligence briefs.” What should become clear to the shippers in the private sector—and it’s certainly well documented by the 9/11 Commission report—is that our intelligence services are broken badly. It’s not that the government doesn’t know how to share information well with the private sector; it’s that it doesn’t have much information to share. Continued...

1 2 3 4 Next