MARITIME SECURITY

Since 1790, we have been the "law of the sea."

Originally established by Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton as the Revenue Cutter Service, the Coast Guard began as an armed maritime law enforcement service with the mission of enforcing import tariffs. Since then, we have taken on ever-greater maritime security challenges including protecting our nation's security against terrorism.

When you're selected for one of the Coast Guard's law enforcement teams, you'll find yourself really mixing it up, and doing everything from:

• Apprehending modern-day pirates and yes, they're out there;

• Tracking and arresting drug runners and migrant smugglers;

• Enforcing fisheries conservation laws and vessel-safety regulations.  May not sound quite as thrilling, but this is critical work.

Our stats tell our success story; on our "average" day, we will interdict 26 undocumented migrants at sea and seize $2.4 million worth of illegal drugs.  You can be a part of that story.

Drug smugglers use a 6-million-square-mile area that includes the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico and the Eastern Pacific as "transit zones." Although the drug runners we chase everyday have seemingly limitless funding and cunning, we counter them with our ceaseless Coast Guard determination and devotion to duty to even the playing field, and make their jobs "problematical."

Our migrant-interdiction operations are as much a humanitarian effort as they are law-enforcement missions. In fact, most of our cases that involve undocumented migrants start as search-and-rescue missions on the high seas, rather than in U.S. coastal waters.