The largest public-private partnership you've never heard of.

It wasn't long after planes struck the twin towers and the pentagon before people asked the question, "What's the next target? Where are we vulnerable?" The global supply chain popped to the top of the list. Millions of uninspected cargo containers entered the U.S. every year. Drug cartels had exploited this vulnerability for years, but now the stakes were measurably higher. (I used to work for a 3-star General at the Defense Intelligence Agency who back in the mid-1990s was asking the question, "If you want to smuggle a weapon of mass destruction into the U.S., where would you put it?" He'd answer his own question: "At the center of a ton of cocaine...because that's getting in...").

Governments and private industry both realized that neither could do this alone, and so the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism, or C-TPAT, was born. C-TPAT is a voluntary (italics are mine) public-private partnership between the trade industry and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The grand bargain is that in exchange for members of "the trade" ensuring a certain level of security within their supply chains, CBP grants benefits, primarily in the form of reduced security inspections when goods arrive in the U.S. The fundamental premise of this was to create a "known shipper" program so CBP could reduce the size of the haystack they were required to search -- now they could focus finite resources on the "unknown," and less on the known.

So why do I put "voluntary" in italics? Because for companies that are large importers, that believe in being good corporate citizens, and have a brand to protect C-TPAT isn't voluntary, it's necessary. Companies that find themselves in this situation also realize that the global supply chain is only as strong as it's weakest link -- so they have a vested interest in ensuring that everyone else's supply chain is at least as secure as theirs.

Today more than 10,000 companies have applied to become C-TPAT members, and more than 6,000 have been accepted into the program -- CBP claims this membership makes it the largest public-private partnership ever, and I've yet to hear anyone refute the claim. C-TPAT is by no means a perfect program, but it's a good start. In a future post I'll give you some of my thoughts about how the program should evolve.