War Is Boring

Coastie Cutter Tags Along with Navy Strike Group

13.01.09

Categorie: Naval |

The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Boutwell, one of the rescue service’s ailing, four-decade-old “high-endurance” patrol vessels, has joined the Navy strike group centered on the USS Boxer assault ship, for that group’s six-month Pacific cruise. The Boxer group has made news, since it began training last fall, as the first strike group in years to include a full contingent of Marines. Previous groups had to do without, for the Marines were too busy in Iraq to go sailing for half a year.

During a Pentagon-arranged teleconference with the Boxer group’s top officers last year, Boxer CO Mark Cedrun highlighted the skills that a Coast Guard cutter brings to a Navy deployment:

The possibility exists that if we are tasked to go to a country en route to wherever they’re sending us that a lot of these folks are very interested in our Coast Guard and how the Coast Guard operates off American shores and they like to mirror that and apply that to their own country. … So they were very interested in coastal patrol, law enforcement, coastal defense and bringing a Coast Guard cutter along with us.

One likely mission, the Coast Guard said, is counter-piracy.

That’s great, and perfectly consistent with the new Maritime Strategy that calls for integrating all aspects of U.S. sea power. The problem is that the Coast Guard, in an effort to be better at these overseas missions, is neglecting its domestic duties, a point I raised in a recent piece for The Washington Monthly. The $24-billion “Deepwater” modernization scheme, intended to equip the Coast Guard with long-range, heavily armed vessels better suited for overseas missions, is late, over-budget and wracked with technical failures, all of which have a knock-on effect on the Coastie fleet’s homeland patrols:

Even before Deepwater sprung leaks, the Coast Guard was struggling to be both an overseas counterterror force and a domestic safety and law enforcement agency. “We’re not doing as many inspections as we were, we’re not doing as much drug interdiction,” Vice Admiral James Hull, Atlantic Area commander, told USA Today in 2002. “Fisheries patrols are down a little bit. So we’re stressed.” And between the decommissioning of eight [leaky] patrol boats and the advanced age of the remaining forty, the Coast Guard says it has an approximately 10 percent shortfall in the total number of hours its patrol fleet can spend on missions.

Indeed, when Boutwell‘s sister ship Dallas deployed to West Africa and the Caucasus last year, she nearly fell apart en route, suffering several fires and machinery problems. Cross your fingers that Boutwell‘s cruise will be half as interesting.

We need a Coast Guard that’s equipped and sized to handle both routine domestic missions, such as inspections and search-and-rescue, and occasionally join Navy deployments.

On a side note, Boutwell has a Facebook page to help observers keep track of her during her long cruise.

TEJ says:

January 13, 2009 at 12:15 pm

Actually fisheries, inspections, everything but SAR took a big hit after 9/11. Move to DHS just cemented the losses as ‘new normal’.
Coast Guard Admiral defines some Major Mission Shortfalls caused by Deepwater Problems « Coast Guard Report says:

January 13, 2009 at 7:06 pm

[...] Today David Axe at WarIsBoring had this to say (and more): [...]
Michael DeKort says:

January 14, 2009 at 11:20 am

The Coast Guard Admiral discusses mission shortfalls that existed in 2002. The Deepwater program was created, in large measure, to remedy this situation. Unfortunately the situation is much worse now than when Deepwater started. The surface asset program is at least 50 ships and 5 or more years behind their original non-9/11 challenged schedule. Hopefully the Obama administration will look in to and remedy the situation.