Thanks to the recent fracas surrounding the Dubai Ports deal, supply chain security has been thrust into the global spotlight. While it's always a good thing to confront hot-button issues by heightening public awareness, why does it always have to be such a struggle to actually do something about it? Case in point: Yet another bit of news, this time from AMR Research, offering guidance on how the U.S. should be securing its ports.

AMR Research clearly has been doing its, um, research. A recent article entitled "Securing the Global Supply Chain" kicks things off in high fashion by pointing out that about 75 percent of the U.S. port terminal operations are controlled by foreign-owned companies. Adding insult to injury, AMR reminds us that only between five percent and six percent of the 25,000 shipping containers that arrive on U.S. shores on a daily basis are actually checked for, 'ya know, little things like nuclear warheads, dirty bombs and weapons of mass destruction.

"These are containers that U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) intelligence tells us are potentially high risk," says AMR.

Great to hear! Now, what should we be doing to get a solid security plan in place? Well, according to the AMR report, we need to be mindful not to disrupt the global economy first. I mean really, think about the absurdity of this statement, taken directly from the AMR article:

Everyone wants to be confident that growing international supply chains are secure and homeland security (or global security, for that matter) isn't threatened. The trick is to figure out how to do this without inhibiting the delicate balance of the increasingly global economy. Just two years ago, a natural supply and demand imbalance at the Port of Long Beach caused major disruptions to the inventory levels of suppliers and retailers, regrettably just as the holiday season began.

I highly doubt the majority of people is going to be thinking about the holiday season if a tractor trailer full of fertilizer enters a U.S. port and is detonated in the middle of a major city. The way I see things, if we lose a little bit of global income due to the hiccups associated with beefed up security, so be it. A post-9/11 simulation exercise forecasted that closing the nation's ports for 12 days would cost the economy roughly $58 billion. And since, national security officials say the likelihood of an attack through the global supply chain is not a matter of "if" but "when." So what are we waiting for?

The government's two-tiered answer to our security woes sounds kinda flimsy. The vehicle for this is voluntary participation in a cooperative program with customs called the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (C-TPAT). The second part is requiring trading partners to transmit as much information as possible so that the government can collect and analyze the information in its new trade processing system, the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE). Perhaps these types of actions should be mandatory?

Why not make more tangible technologies such as RFID and global tracking seals requirements to become compliant with port security? Asset tracking is the area which 60 percent of businesses surveyed perceive will gain the biggest benefit from RFID, followed by securing the supply chain (33 per cent) and today's tracking seals completely secure both the locking bars of containers and trailers.