Week 1 Key Insights

Mike Kearnes

Published in

H4D_IntelliSense

2 min readApr 9, 2019

Key Learning Moments

Interdiction is inhibited by a lack of cooperation across agencies.

“This is 99% of the problem” because of competing priorities and a lack of full domain awareness [1.07]
The Navy and Coast Guard already have some systems in place to provide a common operating picture, but it is unclear who has access to the information and how it is shared. [1.01, 1.02, 1.04, 1.08]
Different agencies prioritize apprehension at different times: CBP-AMO and the Coast Guard focus on at-sea interdiction compared to CBP-Field and other law enforcement, who prefer arrests occur later to allow the take-down of the entire network.

New Hypotheses

Trust and cooperation between agencies will do a great deal to alleviate the pain between agencies.

Hypothesis 1: interdiction efforts to identify suspicious vessels are limited by the lack of trust and cooperation between agencies

The Coast Guard has assets to “see about 85% of the cocaine moving north, but can only interdict about 25–30% of it.” [1.10] So how many more could they interdict with better inter-agency cooperation?
Agencies don’t want to share data. CBP doesn’t want to share data with CA, because CA has policies opposite to the goal of Federal agencies.

Hypothesis 2: existing technology and the current sensors are not sufficient to detect all potential problem vessels but the lack of coverage is still NOT the biggest factor contributing to the problem

It is a limiting factor. But building out a sensor network requires a lot of funding different agencies are already putting in.

Mission Model Canvas Changes

Change:

Mission Achievement for our team is to create a platform that integrates U.S. agencies’ efforts to effectively share information on an easy-to-use map interface to increase the number of drug interdictions.