Credit photo : United States Coast Guard
9/11 was a wake up call in America as far as the need for a good and interoperable communication network is concerned. A lot of progress has been made in the last decade to make sure there is an increased commonality of C4ISR systems among the different homeland security players. However some of the investments planned may be jeopardized by budgetary constraints.
In the Oped below, USCG Admiral Day explains the stakes in order to be able to never repeat the ordeal he experienced in New York on September 11th, 2001 :
«We had lost [the network] when the second tower went down—when the south tower went down, we lost everything. We were blind, because all of our telecommunication circuits were in that south tower. So that means the VTS lost all of their radar signals, they lost all the VHF communications, we were deaf, dumb and blind, because not only that, we lost our telephones.»