4th Civil Support Team and Coast Guard
Continue Joint Venture to Protect Georgia Coast

When it comes to protecting Georgia’s Coastal Empire, the Guard’s 4th Civil Support Team (CST) and the U.S. Coast Maritime Safety Office at Coast Guard Air Station Savannah continue in earnest the joint mission of keeping the residents of those communities safe.

The two organizations have partnered since 2002 to provide the state’s Atlantic seaboard with an added protection from the devastating effects of chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive (CBRNE) weapons. Georgia’s 4th and the Coast Guard have collectively written the operational concept for the CST mission in a maritime environment, said Maj. Jeffrey Allen, the CST’s commander.

Georgia’s 4th CST and Air Station Savannah have conducted several training missions in the past few years in which Coast Guard HH-65 helicopter aircrews deliver a CST strike team onto the deck of ships at sea. These “vertical deliveries” use the aircraft’s rescue hoist to safely insert and extract CST members and Coast Guard personnel onto suspect vessels that require searching before they enter Port Savannah.

Besides airborne operations, the 4th has responded to several requests for assistance from the Coast Guard Maritime Security Office in Savannah to accompany Coast Guard boarding parties in searching for and identifying CBRNE materials aboard vessels attempting to enter the Port of Savannah.

The 4th CST-Coast Guard partnership has also been called upon during national special security events such as the Global 8 Economic Summit held on Sea Island in 2004. During the summit, where the heads of state for eight countries and countless other dignitaries occupied a Georgia coastal community, CST and Coast Guard members were at hard at work behind the scenes monitoring maritime traffic and interdicting suspect vessels as they approached the area of the summit, Allen explained.

Prior to G-8, the CST and the Coast Guard Atlantic Strike teams came together to interdict a vessel suspected of smuggling illicit radioactive materials into the U.S. in the spring of 2002. Besides these incidents, the teams have responded to several searches of suspect vessels off Georgia’s coast.

The future of joint CST-Coast Guard operations may include CST operators responding to a suspect cargo container at a U.S. port or assisting Coast Guard port security units in the interdiction of CBRNE materials at other ports of entry. Overall, the partnership will ultimately prove vital to the protection of maritime critical infrastructure and key resources.

The benefit of the joint CST-Coast Guard partnership is the combination of subject matter expertise, which has permeated both communities, and spurred other teams to develop similar partnerships, Allen said. The Coast Guard is unmatched, he continued, at its mastery of coastal security enforcement, while the National Guard’s CST’s nationwide are arguably the most technically proficient CBRNE operators in the world today.

Such a combination creates a formidable layer of security for our national coastal boundaries, Allen said.