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Guarding the nation's borders and airports is hard enough, but security experts are brainstorming how to watch over the country's 12,000 miles of coastline during a two-day conference this week at Point Mugu.

When the 200-nautical-mile buffer zone that makes up U.S. territorial waters is included, that amounts to almost 2.5 million square miles of open water to patrol.

It's the kind of problem that keeps some officials up at night, said Craig Powell, a former Navy SEAL and now manager of the Littoral Dominance Center. The facility, part of the Center for Asymmetric Warfare at the Naval Postgraduate School on the base, is hosting the conference.

"We're first looking for the best way to define the threat," said Powell, who kicked off the conference Tuesday with a dizzying matrix on how to first identify risks and then protect against them.

The term Littoral Dominance is itself hard to get a handle on. Littoral refers to the coastline, but in this context it specifically means the 200-mile coastal zone. Powell defined dominance as the ability of a country to quickly identify and intercept a threat.

Over the past decade or so, protecting coastal waters has become a growing concern. About 40 percent of the world's population lives within 50 miles of a coastline, and some of the world's biggest cities are on the water, making them particularly vulnerable to threats from the sea.

Economic stability also is dependant on safe seas. About 90 percent of world commerce moves through coastal waters, said Powell's boss, David Banks, director of the Center for Asymmetric Warfare.

Until now, much of the homeland security focus has been on borders, with little attention paid to the coast. "But the easiest way to wreak havoc in our nation is in the place where there is the least amount of security the world's shorelines," Banks said.

Conferencegoers, which include representatives from the Department of Homeland Security, the Navy, the U.S. Coast Guard, private industry and think tanks like the Rand Corp., are looking at threats to all countries, not just the United States.

Officials from Singapore and Canada are attending the conference, and some of the discussion has focused on threats peculiar to small islands and African nations that can't afford the kind of high-tech tools employed by the United States.

The threats don't involve just terrorism or the military, said Powell. They include things like drug trafficking, piracy and environmental disasters. For small nations, the best defense might simply be using local knowledge and information from fishermen to track suspicious vessels, and teams of small, relatively inexpensive boats to quickly chase down the suspects and inspect them. It's not an impenetrable defense, but it might be good enough for the kinds of threats small nations face.

The United States has many more resources, including sophisticated radar, the Navy and well-coordinated Coast Guard sea and air patrols.

The conference concludes today, and Powell hopes it will result in the drafting of a "white paper" on the threats and the best ways to respond.

Ultimately, Powell said, he wants something that can be given to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice or Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.