Recapitalizing the Coast Guard for the 21st century

Sea Power, Apr 2000 by Truver, Scott C

"These are perplexing times for the Coast Guard," James Kitfield noted in "The Stepchild Steps Out" in the October 1999 issue of National Journal. In recent years, he pointed out, the Coast Guard has seen a dramatic increase in such missions as interdicting drug traffickers, enforcing fisheries legislation, and controlling alien migration at sea. Overseas, its cutters routinely operate alongside Navy vessels to enforce maritime embargoes. A heavy hurricane season last year highlighted the mission that most Americans identify with the Coast Guard-saving lives at sea. Yet, because the Coast Guard is an agency of the Department of Transportation (DOT) during peacetime, and because it remains an oft-neglected stepchild in terms of its significant law-enforcement and national-security roles, it finds itself under severe budget strain.

Nowhere is the strain felt more intensely than in the Coast Guard's "Deepwater" forces. The cutters and aircraft that conduct multimission operations "50 miles or more to sea," as the Coast Guard defines its Deepwater operational environment, are in need of significant modernization if not outright replacement. Many are approaching or are at the end of their service lives. To deal with the need to modernize and/or replace these assets, the Coast Guard's Integrated Deepwater Systems (IDS) Capabilities Replacement Project has mapped out an innovative approach and programplan to address all of the Coast Guard's numerous roles, missions, and functions as well as the platforms, systems, and subsystems needed to carry out the service's multiple mandates within the framework of its core maritime-security mission.

Whether it will be successful in this quest remains to be seen, but the December 1999 report of the President's Interagency Task Force on U.S. Coast Guard roles and missions provides several good reasons for pressing ahead. Still, with an estimated cost of nearly $10 billion over 20 years, the Deepwater Project is the most ambitious research, development, and acquisition program ever undertaken by the smallest of America's armed services. Savvy card players already are starting to hedge their bets.

Operational SitRep

The Coast Guard is challenged, as it begins its third century of service to the nation, by a complex mosaic of maritime users, interests, and transnational dangers and problems-including pollution, the over-fishing of protected stocks, illegal migration, drugsmuggling, international terrorism, and weapons proliferation, to name but a few. To deal with these threats and problems, particularly in the Deepwater environment, the service must continue to carry out several fundamental tasks that have been among the few constants in the Coast Guard's long history:

Provide a credible presence in and conduct surveillance of several maritime regions of critical importance to the United States;

Detect, classify, and identify dangers to U.S. maritime interests worldwide; and

Take whatever legal actions are required to counter those dangers.

The Coast Guard carries out most of its Deepwater tasks through routine patrols and time-critical sorties conducted by high- and mediumendurance cutters, patrol boats, and fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft. The success of these operations depend primarily on Coast Guard, joint-service, and national-level C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) systems. Unlike Coast Guard operations in coastal and inland waterways, Deepwater missions typically require a continuous long-term presence away from home port, sometimes for months on end, and the ability to operate independently in severe environments-from Arctic waters to tropical and equatorial climates-24 hours a day, every day, wherever the nation's maritime security demands a Coast Guard humanitarian, lawenforcement, or military presence.

The service's Deepwater needs are, in a word, compelling, and require a multidimensional capability to simultaneously carry out numerous missions and tasks above, on, and sometimes even below the surface of the sea. It is not unusual, for example, for a cutter to be carrying out a search-and-rescue (SAR) mission while at the same time being engaged in counter-drug surveillance as well as fisheries enforcement and/or migration interdiction-often across vast areas of ocean, particularly in the Pacific.

Given that context, it becomes obvious that the Coast Guard's existing capabilities even to carry out all of its current-not to mention future-roles, missions, and tasks in support of America's maritime security in the Deepwater operating environment are increasingly in doubt. Existing Deepwater assets are nearing the end of their service lives. Performance is increasingly hampered and operational costs are increasing, even as the threats the service must counter are becoming both more sophisticated and more capable and the implications of poor mission performance more harmful to U.S. maritime security interests.

The Coast Guard has modernized its patrol boats and near-shore assets to some extent, but most of its longerrange equipment is obsolescent at best. In fact, of the world's 41 deepwater naval and coast guard fleets, the U.S. Coast Guard's oceangoing assets are the 39th oldest, and soon could be dead last. Other problems are a young and relatively inexperienced work force, and an unsustainable operational tempo-which in recent years has been significantly exacerbated by continuing budget constraints.