It’s old news by now that the Coast Guard’s flagship, 5,000-ton National Security Cutters are messed-up ships, with structural flaws and leaky electronic networks. Eight of the 400-foot vessels were planned, but cost increases, from $250 million to around $400 million for the first in the class, have long caused insiders to speculate that the Coast Guard would shrink the program. Sure enough, Navy Times just broke the story that an internal Coast Guard study raises the possibility of trading out NSCs for the smaller, yet-to-be designed Offshore Patrol Cutter (concept pictured):
The report does acknowledges other early “issues” for the [NSC 1] Bertholf and the next ship in the class, the Waesche – including cost bumps and questions about hull strength — but concludes “no other candidate could meet the speed, sea-keeping and endurance” the Coast Guard needed.
Still, the analysis recommends that if the Coast Guard can incorporate the features it needs into its cheaper, not-yet-designed Offshore Patrol Cutters, it should build more of those and two fewer national security cutters, to save money.
So that’s just six NSCs to replace the current 12 large cutters. Reducing the Coast Guard’s inventory of large cutters entails a significant risk, in light of the vast swaths of open sea that the service must patrol, but curtailing NSC does have the advantage of giving the Coast Guard a chance to start over on ship design. After all this time and all these mistakes, we need a clean slate to finally build cutters right.
My unsolicited advice: do the OPCs right. Give plenty of time in the schedule, spend a lot of money up-front on design, make sure your inspectors and certifiers are fully qualified, and build a little extra toughness into the physical structure so that these ships can last 50 years. Because they’re going to have to.
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“Just 6 NSC’s to replace the current 12 large cutters” (well and the 13th as I’m not sure how useful Bertholf is going to be.)
This may not be as bad as it sounds. The Offshore Patrol Cutter is very close in size to the current Hamilton class and the “white needles of death” are very good ships. The requirements for the OPC seem to be very much in the ball-park of the original design for the Bear class…which was planned as a version of the Hamilton’s (’378′s)with a cheaper, more economical all diesel plant.
This COULD give a net improvement in capability IF the lessons from Bertholf and the 123′s have indeed been learned.
As an aside there are a great many off the shelf OPV’s on the commercial market though they are almost all foreign. There is a good overview (albeit a couple of years old) regards OPV designs here.
http://www.sfu.ca/casr/id-opv.htm
I heartily support procuring a larger number of more austere vessels for the Coast Guard, as opposed to gold plated vessels like the NSC. In the Navy such a policy will likely lead to inferior deathtrap warships…In the Coast Guard it fits our primary peacetime and warm war functions perfectly.
( I originally commented on this at Danger Room…but it got deleted for some reason)
Here’s a thought. Why not resurrect the FFG (Perry-class) design for the Coast Guard? The frigates have given excellent service, the hull is well-proven in both combat and peacetime service, and the systems and electronics can be updated at relatively low cost. Why reinvent the wheel when we’ve got a perfectly good one available?
They require crews twice as large and are expensive to maintain. Their single shaft gives poor redundancy and less maneuverability that a twin screw plant and their gas turbines are fuel hogs.
For their day they were a very good and by navy standards, economical solution for their job. Their day was the late 70s and their job was expendable escort.
The Coast Guard needs something cheaper to run.
[...] Another five NSCs are planned, but the Coast Guard has recently implied that it might cancel two of them to save money. On top of poor oversight, shoddy design and bad workmanship, Deepwater’s major builder now faces manpower shortages, according to Northrop Grumman shipbuilding boss Mike Petters: There are not enough people at the shipyard in Newport News to do all of the work that Northrop Grumman has to do. There is not enough people on the Gulf Coast to do all the work that Northrop Grumman has to do for the Navy and the Coast Guard. How are we going to make all that work? No Comments so far Leave a comment RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI Leave a comment Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong> [...]