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If that's the case then we have to check the whole waterway- if that ship followed the coast as the line's route seems to indicate, and there really was a device on board or material for same, there are a lot of targets along the way. It's a possibility a device could have been dropped in an important location overseas too, a place where our fleet may call or an important narrow straight.

Wasn't the alert supposed to be related to a person we captured from the far east?

And did you hear about Japan raising that North Korea ship? The thing had a three-engine small boat in it to get in closer to shore or ships. The thing was armed pretty good too.

The North Koreans and Jamaican smugglers (interesting juxtoposition) have both independently developed a new class of vessels called "semi submersibles". The North Koreans use them for smuggling agents, the Jamaicans use them for smuggling dope past the USCG from Jamaica to the Bahamas. I suspect the North Korean ship had a "semi submersible" in the aft compartment ready to launch agents.

Semi submersibles are wood (older ones) or fiberglass for low radar signature, and use small sailboat engines which exhaust their gases underwater to disperse the heat signature. They have only inches of freeboard above the waterline, and pumps hose cold seawater onto carpet remnents fixed over the very well insulated engine compartments to knock down any IR signature.

They go slow (@ 5 knots) for no wake signature (big "go-fast" wakes are easy to see from the air) and have a very long range, over 1000 miles if needed. They can pass within a mile of a cutter and not be seen, and are easy and cheap to build covertly, far easier to build and operate than true submersibles, and nearly as stealthy. With GPS connected to anautopilot, they can even be sent as unmanned drones. A semisubmersible carrying a WMD could be launched at sea, and sent right into a US harbor by GPS and autopilot, or a happy Jihadist could do the navigating.

I'm not saying that anything like a semi submersible is likely to be used in this case, I just want to bring folks up to speed on what's out there in the happy world of smuggling (dope, agents or WMDs).