Drug smuggling becomes more sophisticated, II

the army away from the dozens of hidden submarine building “yards” along the Colombian coast.

At one point it was thought that as many as half of the subs were captured or lost at sea. This is apparently not the case because most of these subs are built for a one way trip. This keeps down the cost of construction, and the cost of hiring a crew (who fly home). That one voyage will usually be for about a thousand kilometers, with the boat moving at a speed of 15-25 kilometers an hour. The average trip will take about two weeks, because the boats have learned to go very slowly during the day to avoid leaving a wake that U.S. airborne sensors can detect.

In the past, some subs making long range trips were caught while being towed by a larger ship. Apparently the plan was to tow a semi-submersible, loaded with a ten ton cocaine cargo, long distances, and then to cut it loose for the final approach to the shore of California or some area in Europe or on the east coast of North America. While the subs are most frequently used from the Pacific coast of Colombia, they are showing up elsewhere as well.

These subs are not stealthy enough to avoid detection all the time, and the United States has been trying to tweak search radars, and other types of sensors, more reliably to detect the drug subs. The technology has already spread, with one of these boats found being built in Spain four years ago, by a local drug gang, to bring cocaine ashore from a seagoing ship far out at sea in international waters. GPS makes these kinds of operations possible.

Increased maritime patrols, and infiltration of drug gangs in Colombia, has led to a significant increase in captures of these boats. On land, Colombian soldiers and police are doing a lot of damage to cocaine production, and making boat production more difficult. All this is having an impact, with cocaine prices going up and quality going down. Drug testing and surveys indicates that cocaine use in the United States has declined 10-20 percent as a result.

Dunnigan writes that the stealthy boats are a concern to counter-terror officials. Bombs and terrorists can be transported in these vessels, and the technology for building them can be, and perhaps already has, spread to terrorist groups. The technology is improving as well. Recently captured boats had a system installed that cooled the engine exhaust, making it more difficult for infrared sensors to sport it. Thus the U.S. Navy is putting a lot of effort into improving its sensors and search techniques, for finding these boats.