The U.S. Coast Guard, the nation's fifth armed service, faces an organizational crossroad. The key to its continued existence as an armed force may lie in the service's often-overlooked role in national security.
The Coast Guard faces block obsolescence of its entire fleet of deep-water cutters and aircraft, those platforms capable of operations more than 50 nautical miles offshore. The Coast Guard must either recapitalize or get out of the Deepwater mission business.
Although clearly a Coast Guard imperative, Deepwater missions also are a critical component of the U.S. National Security Strategy. Such a capability remains essential for the Coast Guard's role as an armed service and for the nation at large. The service's Deepwater Project must become a national security priority.
Today's Coast Guard
The Coast Guard provides services and benefits to the nation through a distinct blend of humanitarian, law enforcement, diplomatic, and military capabilities.1 In the Deepwater environment, it contributes to national security through drug and migrant interdiction, fisheries enforcement, search and rescue, the International Ice Patrol, and marine pollution enforcement and response. The Coast Guard also plays critical roles in peacetime forward presence, crisis response, combat operations, and across the range of engagement scenarios from small-scale contingencies to major theater wars.2
To put everything in perspective, the Coast Guard is smaller than the New York City Police Department and has the same operating budget, yet it has a much broader operating area, significantly greater operational complexity, and a more diverse asset mix.3 The Coast Guard is clearly a small service with a national responsibility and a global mission.
In general, the Coast Guard goes about its duties almost anonymously. Its actions are largely invisible to most Americans, although the vast majority live within 100 miles of navigable waters. Only extraordinary events bring the service to the forefront of the public's consciousness. The greatest challenge for the Coast Guard is to justify and garner congressional support for its Deepwater recapitalization project.
The Coast Guard is part of the Department of Transportation and must compete solely within that department for scarce federal, nondefense, discretionary funding. It has a number of missions that could enable it to survive initially without new deep-water platforms; however, the future of the service as an instrument of national security remains in its ability to execute its Deepwater missions. If the Coast Guard does not fit into the national security picture, it is unlikely to be able to justify its existence as a national armed service receiving federal funding, and the service as we know it most likely would disappear.
The Integrated Deepwater System
The Coast Guard's "Strategic Vision 2020" assumes there will be no major changes to the service's traditional roles and missions, and that future pressures in the maritime regime only will increase demand for its services. Given its vision, the Coast Guard must design, engineer, and acquire assets that possess an intrinsic flexibility to adapt to national priorities.
The Coast Guard acquired most of its assets used in Deepwater missions—high- and medium-endurance cutters, long-range aircraft, supporting command, control, and communications systems—from the early 1960s through the mid-1980s. Although some cutters and aircraft already have received mid-life upgrades, during the next ten years the Coast Guard faces the simultaneous block obsolescence of its entire deep-water fleet and aircraft. Operating in a rigorous, highly corrosive, and hazardous environment, these aging assets have excessive operating and maintenance costs and a capability gap that limits their effectiveness. This includes deficiencies in such fundamental capabilities and technologies as cutter speed, sensors, night operations, communications, and interoperability.4
The block obsolescence of the Coast Guard's deep-water fleet presents both a threat and an opportunity. The threat is that the mismatch between roles, mission, and tasks and the quantity and quality of assets to carry them out could overwhelm the service and force it to get out of the Deepwater mission business entirely. The opportunity for the service is to take advantage of leading-edge technologies, systems, and operational techniques that could enable it to do its jobs more effectively.
Maritime Security
The maritime threats the United States faces today should not change significantly over the next 20 years, although their intensity may increase. These threats include illegal migration and contraband smuggling; resource protection threats involving both living and inorganic marine resources; asymmetric and nonmilitary threats that include weapons of mass destruction and terrorist activities; continued support of U.N. sponsored sanctions and security operations; and security, defense, and resource protection implications of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. Clearly, the Coast Guard figures prominently in efforts to counter these threats.
U.S. laws such as the Posse Comitatus Act (18 USC 1385) prevent the Navy from taking direct law enforcement action, leaving the Coast Guard as the only maritime law enforcement option outside the U.S. contiguous zone. Stemming the flow of illicit narcotics and illegal immigrants has become a national priority. The Coast Guard always has been on this frontline of homeland security.
The anticipated rapid growth in maritime traffic and the critical demand for fish protein for food for an expanding world population pose two large threats for national maritime security. The oceans and waterways, in addition to carrying legitimate commercial trade vital for our economy, also can serve as conduits into the U.S. homeland for transnational threats such as pollution, illegal immigration, drug smuggling, and international terrorism. Someone has to be in place to sort out the legitimate maritime traffic from the criminal or terrorist threats. The Coast Guard has that skill already and exercises it every day.
The Navy is ill-equipped and ill-experienced to sort maritime commerce. Standoff weapons are of little value in that threat environment, and even if the Navy learned to conduct this sorting effort, it would have to risk scarce and highly valuable assets. After the attack on the USS Cole (DDG-67), the Navy likely would not relish having to come alongside potential terrorists. In addition, militarizing transnational threats would give terrorists and drug traffickers a degree of legitimacy that would run counter to national policy. It is best to continue to use police and the law enforcement efforts of the Coast Guard against these threats. In addition, it would not make strategic sense to risk a high-end Aegis platform in the low-tech mission of contact sorting and boarding, and the Navy's disdain for smaller platforms makes it unlikely it would ever have the organizational commitment to acquire, develop, and effectively deploy them.
National Security Strategy
The National Security Strategy highlights several threats that are clearly Coast Guard roles and missions. Vital interests include the protection of critical infrastructure such as the water system and the transportation system. Important national interests include preventing harm to the global environment and protecting the nation from destabilizing refugee flows. The National Security Strategy also lists natural and manmade disasters such as humanitarian and other interests.
Transnational threats such as terrorism, drug trafficking and other international crime, illicit arms trafficking, uncontrolled refugee migration, and trafficking in human beings threaten U.S. interests. In addition, failed states such as Haiti can spark refugee crises that can destabilize a region. The National Security Strategy also identifies the international competition over scarce resources in the environment, such as fish, as a potential threat to our national security. The Coast Guard works to combat these threats every day.
In the Western Hemisphere, the Coast Guard's main operational area, the top security concerns are drug trafficking and illegal immigration. Already the Coast Guard is working against these threats, and because responding requires an organization with law enforcement authority, an organic deep-water capability is critical. The Coast Guard works extensively with many of the nations in the region in combined law enforcement operations and in providing training to national coast guards and maritime police organizations. The goal is for this region to develop its own effective law-enforcement capability.
National Military Strategy
The Coast Guard has an important role in each of the three pillars of the National Military Strategy: shape the international environment, respond to the full spectrum of crises, and prepare now for an uncertain future.
To shape the international environment, the Coast Guard is involved in peacetime military engagement virtually worldwide with its training teams and port visits. To respond to the full spectrum of crises, the value of the Coast Guard is its inherent capability to conduct multiple, concurrent, smaller-scale contingency operations including peace operations and humanitarian assistance. For example, in Haiti in 1994 the Coast Guard directed Navy ships in the effort to stem illegal migration, then shifted to a subordinate and different role when the National Command Authority directed the subsequent military intervention. To prepare now for an uncertain future, the Coast Guard's answer is its Deepwater program.
The National Military Strategy also emphasizes strategic agility and requires our armed forces to be versatile and able to conduct multiple missions simultaneously. This is the essence of the Coast Guard and its motto, Semper Paratus. When a Coast Guard cutter gets under way, it has the capability to respond to almost any mission virtually anywhere.
"Joint Vision 2010" posits an unpredictable future in which the bulk of our nation's maritime security activities will be concentrated at the low end of the spectrum of conflict. In this environment, the Navy and Coast Guard will have to be able to deploy forces with greater flexibility, adaptability, and affordability. In September 1998, the Coast Guard Commandant and the Chief of Naval Operations signed the National Fleet policy statement. Under this concept, both the services will maintain their distinctive heritages, capabilities, and identities, but will ensure that their individual strengths are complementary.5 The Navy will provide highly capable, multimission surface combatants designed for the full range of naval operations, from peacetime engagement through major theater war. The Coast Guard will provide maritime security cutters, designed for peacetime and crisis-response missions and filling the requirement for relatively small, general purpose, shallow-draft warships.6 The National Fleet is a way for both services to support National Security and National Military Strategy objectives while maintaining stewardship responsibilities, ensuring interoperability, and avoiding redundancy.
The Coast Guard currently has 43 major cutters. In the era of a 600-ship Navy, these cutters were an afterthought. Today, however, with regional instability, world strife, and just 116 Navy surface combatants, the Coast Guard's 43 cutters and 49 high-speed coastal patrol boats take on much larger significance in the National Military Strategy. The President and the unified commanders will require a full range of naval capabilities to meet the maritime challenges of tomorrow, and the Coast Guard is vital in this regard.7
In addition, as the Department of Defense downsizes, the Coast Guard remains ready and willing to step up to fill important roles in the National Military Strategy. Although the Navy is reorienting toward the littorals, it still intends to fight with large surface combatants. The Coast Guard's deep-water assets are well suited to operate and fight in the littorals.
Conclusion
The Coast Guard remains the maritime model for most non-NATO and non-world-power nations. Many develop Coast Guard-like maritime organizations that give them great flexibility in exercising sovereignty over their maritime affairs. In addition, the Coast Guard, because of its humanitarian background, offers policy flexibility. A cutter can make a port visit to show U.S. interests and send a much different and less threatening message than a nuclear-powered submarine or guided missile cruiser.
The Coast Guard is relevant and necessary for national security in the current and projected maritime environment, but it does not have the hardware it needs to met the anticipated threats. It needs an immediate and massive recapitalization effort. The Integrated Deepwater System will provide the capability, flexibility, adaptability, and interoperability the Coast Guard and the nation need to meet the objectives of the National Security Strategy.
The future of the Coast Guard as an armed force rests on its ability to secure funding for the Deepwater procurement. Unfortunately, it may take a catastrophic accident or similar disaster to focus national-level attention on the capability gap in the aging Deepwater fleet.
1. President's Interagency Task Force on United States Coast Guard Roles and Missions, The Coast Guard of the 21st Century (Washington, DC, 2000), p. 1. (back to article)
2. "United States Coast Guard Deepwater Project" (back to article)
3. NYPD statistics from <www.ci.nyc.ny.us/html/nypd/html/brass/pc.html>. USCG statistics from Department of Transportation, U.S. Coast Guard, Budget Estimates Fiscal Year 2001 (Washington, DC, 2000), PPA-1–PPA-9. (back to article)
4. "United States Coast Guard Deepwater Project" (back to article)
5. Adm. James M. Loy, Commandant, U.S. Coast Guard, "A Unique Instrument of National Security," presentation to staff, students, and faculty of the U.S. Naval War College, Newport, RI, 14 December 1998. (back to article)
6. Department of the Navy and Department of Transportation, U.S. Coast Guard, National Fleet—A Joint Navy/Coast Guard Policy Statement (Washington, DC, 1998), p. 1. (back to article)
7. Adm. James M. Loy, Commandant, U.S. Coast Guard, "Shaping America's Joint Maritime Forces: The Coast Guard in the 21st Century," Joint Force Quarterly, Spring 1999, p. 5. (back to article)