Late in June, the Coast Guard awarded the Integrated Coast Guard Systems consortium a multiyear contract for its transformation under the Deepwater project. The total value of the contract, in current dollars, is $16.95 billion, including $11.04 billion to buy new ships, inshore craft, and aircraft. Funding is to be incremental at about $500 million each year for the next 20 to 30 years. The leading partners in the consortium are Lockheed Martin, responsible for the command-and-control system, and Northrop Grumman, responsible for the new cutters (which will be designed at the company's Pascagoula yard). The program includes upgrades of up to 49 existing cutters and 93 existing helicopters.
With many of its craft quite elderly, the Coast Guard has been planning Deepwater for about five years. For much of that time, there was widespread skepticism that the project would be approved, not least because the service's parent agency, the Department of Transportation, was said to be far more concerned with land-bound forms of transportation, such as roads. Events since 11 September have dramatized the importance of the Coast Guard as a key element of homeland defense.
For example, the easiest way to bring a weapon of mass destruction to the United States probably would be on board a merchant ship. There already have been reports of freight containers modified to carry al Qaeda operatives and their equipment. Osama bin Laden himself is said to control about 20 merchant ships through subsidiary corporations.
The most significant aspect of Deepwater probably will be the way it changes the Coast Guard's overall strategy. The central question is to what extent operations can (or should) be changed by the advent of modern command-and-control systems. Over the past two decades, the appearance of such systems radically changed naval operating practices. For the Navy, this revolution is continuing under names such as ForceNet.
These systems probably are most important as a way of transmitting to all interested parties a common picture of the positions, courses, and character of objects of interest, far beyond the horizons of the parties involved. Given such information, the Coast Guard can concentrate its efforts where they are needed. The alternative is to patrol large areas in hopes that a cutter or an airplane will be near any incident in time to affect the outcome. At least in theory, the picture-sharing reactive concept economizes on deployed forces and also puts them where they are needed a much higher percentage of the time. In adopting Deepwater, the Coast Guard is adopting the new style of a picture-sharing operation, which in military terms is usually called network-centric warfare. Much of the effort in upgrading existing cutters will go into fitting them to receive and exploit the data the new Coast Guard command-and-control system will create and disseminate.
In its antidrug and homeland security roles, the Coast Guard enforces a kind of embargo. Its cutters have to concentrate on the appropriate targets, because there can never be enough cutters to deal with every passing ship or craft. More than a decade ago, the U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf showed how effective a common operating picture could be during the maritime embargo of Iraq. That was among the earliest uses of the sort of common operating picture the Coast Guard is now hoping to create. Clearly the Coast Guard operation is likely to exploit efforts already under way by the U.S. Navy. For example, the Navy regularly tracks merchant ships on the high seas. The major differences between the common picture the Coast Guard will want to create and that already created by the Navy will be the level of detail and precision needed in coastal waters.
Conversely, the sort of system the Coast Guard is likely to build under Deepwater should be attractive to many allied navies. not just coast guards. For most navies in the world, interest is concentrated on surface ships. For the Coast Guard, the issue is whether to intercept and board any particular ship, but that is not too different from a navy's interest in engaging that ship using an antiship missile. Both would use much the same sort of software and would build much the same sort of command center. One very important Coast Guard mission is liaison with foreign navies; the Coast Guard is much closer in size and character to most foreign navies than the U.S. Navy. Having a new command-and-control system to demonstrate makes the U.S. Coast Guard a much more valuable partner. Given their own interest in surveillance, foreign navies may well want to adopt the Coast Guard's techniques and join us in creating the sort of global maritime picture that would be one key to our own homeland defense.
Only some details of the project were released at the 27 June press conference, but the designations and some of the equipment choices are suggestive. The consortium carefully labeled all material as illustrative rather than final, so the interpretation given here may be somewhat inaccurate. Two different unmanned air vehicles were shown—a maritime version of the Global Hawk long-endurance vehicle and the Bell Eagle Eye tilt-rotor vehicle suitable for shipboard operation. Given the overall network-centric operating concept, these two presumably have radically different roles. Global Hawk will contribute to the large-scale common operating picture of maritime traffic. Eagle Eye, on the other hand, will extend the horizon of an individual cutter.
The Hamilton (WHEC-715)-class replacement is the 425-foot, 3,686-ton, 28-knot national security cutter. The sketch released at the press conference shows a 76-mm gun forward and a large helicopter pad (with hangar) aft. This ship is about the size and performance that many foreign navies adopt for frigates. There has been much speculation that the Deepwater frigate might find foreign purchasers, and indeed that their investments might help underwrite the overall cost of the Deepwater program. The helicopter illustrated at the press conference was the Anglo-Italian EH-101, already in production for naval and military roles in Europe. Compared to the U.S. Navy's SH-60, the EH-101 is designed to operate more independently and thus has a longer endurance, which the Coast Guard might well find attractive for missions such as long-range interception and search and rescue. The choice of a foreign-built helicopter might make it easier to interest foreign governments in buying Deepwater ships.
The program also envisages a lower-end 341-foot, 2,421-ton, 22-knot offshore patrol cutter. Note that this class is substantially larger than the Famous- and Reliant-class cutters. Neither craft will be fast enough to intercept all ships and craft. Onboard long-range helicopters, however, should extend the cutter's reach far enough beyond her horizon to make up for that limitation.
The helicopters are likely to be particularly important in intercepting very fast intruders, such as cigarette boats. These speedboats outrun Coast Guard cutters, and in the past the Coast Guard has sometimes pressed seized ones into service. Fast interceptor helicopters, which it also has tested, seem to be a better solution. As advertised, the Deepwater helicopter fleet does not include any small fast helicopters for this role; it is not clear whether the big EH-101 would be satisfactory. Current Coast Guard helicopters usually are described as search-and-rescue craft, but the new emphasis on homeland security would imply much greater interest in arming them.
It is suggestive that the smallest of the new cutters (130 feet, 198 tons, 30 knots) is described as a fast response cutter rather than as a patrol craft. Fast response implies some other sensing system to detect something to which the cutter must run, in which case its high speed is worthwhile. Presumably plans call for despatching fixed-wing patrol aircraft on the basis of data from the overall command-and-control system. They would refine target position and cue in the small cutters. The aircraft envisaged for this role is a variant of the twin-engine CASA CN-235, already in use by foreign navies and coast guards.
This account leaves a great deal unsaid. Network-centric concepts offer enormous flexibility, because the task of creating the overall tactical picture is separated from the task of execution. The deployed platforms do contribute to the overall picture, but they can exploit information beyond their own horizons. To make that possible requires three things. First, there has to be a considerable investment in long-range sensors, such as Global Hawk and satellite systems. Second, the data from the many different kinds of sensors has to be fused to make an intelligible picture of what is actually going on over a vast area. Third, sensors and platforms must be registered in the same coordinates—when the sensors decide that something is at a particular point, a cutter at sea can expect to locate the same point, and to find the expected thing, whatever it is. The current U.S. version of network-centric warfare, which surely includes whatever system the Coast Guard erects under Deepwater, profits enormously from the existence of the Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites, since that system makes for accurate positioning by both the cutters (and aircraft) and the sensor platforms. Conversely, any vulnerability of GPS would seriously degrade all current forms of network-centric warfare, including those needed for Deepwater.
More generally, network-centric warfare is contrasted with a platform-centric approach. A platform-centric force makes up for much poorer information by adding mass. Thus, advocates of network-centric land warfare generally claim that a network-centric force can defeat an enemy force devoid of network-centric features about three times its size. In practice, network-centric forces have to be thinner than more conventional ones of equal cost because so much of their overall cost goes into the sensing and command-and-control elements that the more conventional force lacks.
The Coast Guard Deepwater cutter force is not much smaller, it would seem, than the current one. It is not clear how the added network or command-and-control elements can be paid for. The most likely possibility is that the Coast Guard will use existing naval systems. Some of the naval sensors, such as the White Cloud surveillance satellite system, are quite expensive. In some cases, too, a navy that is concentrating on littoral rather than blue-water operations may question whether spending more on them is worthwhile. In that case, a Coast Guard newly reliant on the naval systems might find itself paying a tax of some sort to help support them. Because wide-ocean surveillance is now so important for homeland security, that tax might come out of the budget of the new Homeland Security Department, and so might not—as would have been imagined before last 11 September—come out of the cutter construction budget.