The 2001 terrorist attacks brought momentous change to the Coast Guard, and the service can take pride in the past three years' efforts to adapt to its new operating and political climate. Unfortunately, the immediate task of absorbing new missions has demanded so much attention that the service has not adequately accounted for how debilitating an influence its pre-11 September readiness shortfalls continue to be or how much more mission growth it is likely to see. To deal with these factors, the Coast Guard urgently needs a dramatic invigoration of its maritime law enforcement capabilities, beginning with a massive expansion of the Integrated Deepwater Systems acquisition project. Without focused growth, the Coast Guard will be unprepared for its homeland security missions and unable to support the global war on terror.
Readiness Problems before 11 September
The Coast Guard of 10 September 2001 was in the throes of a severe readiness crisis. The catabolic processes by which it had steadily consumed its infrastructure finally had pushed the service to the brink of operational meltdown. Then-Commandant Admiral Jim Loy had publicly declared the Coast Guard no longer would maintain readiness on the backs of its sailors, rob maintenance and training budgets to cover the higher operating costs of obsolete cutters, or otherwise disguise the longstanding and systemic funding shortfalls. Instead, he would retire certain ships "early," which in Coast Guard parlance means after two or three times their predicted service lives but before a replacement is built. He would scale back operations to sustainable levels and maintain only core response capabilities. With these drastic measures, he hoped the Coast Guard could hold its breath until the Deepwater cutters and aircraft came on line.1 Like the young man this past spring who sold all his possessions and staked his entire financial worth on a single spin of a roulette wheel, the Coast Guard of 10 September had depleted its surge capacity and placed all its hopes on Deepwater.
The Coast Guard of 10 September was in no position to expand its mission reach to combat terrorism. It saw drug smuggling and illegal immigration as national security threats with terrorist connections, but its open-ocean cutters and aircraft were too old, too slow, too few, and too detached from information networks to compete against well-capitalized smuggling organizations.2 In addition, it was a foregone conclusion that the Coast Guard could not answer should the Pentagon's call for sustained help enforcing sanctions, supporting expeditionary warfare, or providing maritime deterrents to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. These critical limitations were apparent before 11 September; they did not disappear on 11 September; and they still wait to be addressed.
Thus, it was a very unready Coast Guard that on 11 September was handed a multitude of homeland security missions. The work to accept these new missions has consumed the organization for three years. An early priority was implementing adequate antiterrorism and force protection measures at bases that had hitherto given these issues little thought and less investment. Outside the gates, new work included harbor patrols; cruise ship escorts; establishment of new units; security of military load outs; and heightened scrutiny of merchant ships, cargo, and crews. Overseas, the Coast Guard sent two dozen units and detachments to support Operation Iraqi Freedom.3
Current Coast Guard Readiness
This crush of new work has proved that poor readiness plus accelerated operations tempo equals further degraded readiness, even with incremental budget growth. The General Accounting Office (GAO) reported to Congress that use of Coast Guard ships, boats, and aircraft has increased 39% since 11 September—an increase that would be alarming even if the Coast Guard had not joined the war on terror already at a point of readiness extremis.4 On top of that, the costs of moving to the new Homeland Security Department and launching initiatives on risk assessment, intelligence coordination, field reorganizations, federal and international security regulations, and maritime domain awareness have diverted both money and managerial attention from the readiness crisis.
The inevitability of the readiness arithmetic asserts itself even when officials strain to emphasize good news. For example, Commandant Admiral Thomas H. Collins in his 2004 State of the Coast Guard address assessed the condition of his three priorities—readiness, stewardship, and people—as "very, very good today, and it's getting better."5 He detailed many operational successes from the past year and draws encouragement from the news that "the president's $7.46-billion budget for the Coast Guard in '05 is a 9% increase over fiscal year '04."6 Unfortunately, this optimism is tempered by the Commandant's own acknowledgment that certain indicator lights on critical readiness measures are glowing bright red. In-flight helicopter engine failures, patrol boat hull breaches, and unscheduled maintenance days for cutters have increased so sharply that the Coast Guard was compelled to alter the timelines of Deepwater to hasten the arrival of replacement assets.
Another sign of readiness desperation apparent in the speech is the purportedly good news that the five Cyclone (PC-1)-class patrol boats transferred from the Navy soon will have white hulls. These are boats the Coast Guard had declined as too tired and too expensive when the Navy offered them up prior to 11 September. Intercepting broken-down Navy ships on their way to the scrap yard helped bring on the current crisis. It is not likely to be a winning strategy for resolving it.
Another limit to Coast Guard preparedness is the modest ambitions of the Deepwater project itself. Despite being pushed as the long-term answer to the Coast Guard's readiness woes, Deepwater was designed only to replace legacy assets and fulfill 1998 mission requirements. The program was conceived during the mid-1990s amid such an air of budgetary timidity that the task force whose report provides the most authoritative validation of the need for Deepwater thought itself bold to declare the continued need for Coast Guard missions at all. It envisioned no mission growth and made only passing references to terrorism.7
Deepwater simply was not designed for the Coast Guard's post-11 September responsibilities, and the GAO's concerns about the cost of Deepwater miss the point. It should be obvious—even to the GAO, which acknowledges the service's increased responsibilities and declining readiness8—that the problem is not that Deepwater is too big, but that it is too small. Expanding the program is essential; merely sustaining it would be negligent; reducing it would be reckless.
Long-Term Mission Growth Potential
Coming to terms with the limited aspirations of Deepwater is important because it is likely the Coast Guard has seen only the beginning of post-11 September mission growth. President George W. Bush likens the global war on terror to the Cold War and warns that it will be a protracted struggle lasting many years.9 This prediction is shared by eminent historian James Schlesinger, who notes, "Bin Laden and his ilk may be fanatics, but they are deadly serious and thoroughly persistent. We must anticipate, therefore, a conflict that will continue for many years."10
It takes little imagination to see how this long-term struggle could require the Coast Guard to assume maritime sovereignty roles far greater than its already formidable task of preventing terrorists from using or disrupting the U.S. maritime transportation system. Two years before becoming National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice spoke on the "responsibilities of being on the right side of history," and noted that "the United States stands today as the only military force of any consequence in the world capable of doing the things that the world really needs done."11 What Dr. Rice noted five years ago is even more evident today. The scale, efficiency, and creativity of our national security investments have created such insurmountable barriers to entry that no nation aspires to build a military that might challenge us in full-scale conflict, and few nations are capable of providing significant assistance in a world that still needs considerable policing against transnational and asymmetric threats.
This lack of partners in a still dangerous world makes it plausible to predict a long-term scenario in which—despite significant gains in establishing democracies and market economies in the Middle East—the persistence of international Islamist terrorist groups or other destabilizing forces requires the U.S. military to enforce a Pax Americana to sustain the global economy and protect the advances of freedom. Abroad, the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard, augmented by ad hoc or regional coalitions, could patrol some or all of the major maritime choke points—Gibraltar, Suez, Panama, Malacca, Hormuz—preventing smuggling of weapons of mass destruction and other first-order contraband, suppressing pirate and terrorist attacks on shipping, and protecting canal and port infrastructure. Closer to home within the exclusive economic zone and the Western Hemisphere drug transit zones, the nation would expect more-capable enforcement of fiscal, immigration, sanitation, and customs laws than that delivered before 11 September.
Fundamental Coast Guard Work
Enforcing U.S. maritime sovereignty will require more ships to be boarded in more parts of the world for more reasons, and this work necessarily will fall to the Coast Guard. Recent suggestions to overcome posse comitatus restrictions and have the Navy contribute more directly to homeland security do open for discussion the possibility of assigning the Navy the leadership role in open-ocean interdiction or visit, board, search, and seizure operations.12 After all, the Navy has supported counterdrug operations for a generation, and most boardings conducted by Coast Guard law enforcement detachments embarked on Navy ships do require technical assistance from the Navy ship. The Navy has interdicted prohibited materials under the Proliferation Security Initiative, and special operations forces have conducted untold boardings. In addition, the Coast Guard does not have the operational reach to be in all the places vessels need to be boarded. Despite these considerations, two overriding reasons call for beefing up the Coast Guard instead of handing the job to the Navy.
First, assigning the work to the Navy would create within that service the very tension between defense and homeland security missions that caused Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld last summer to question the Coast Guard's continued role in expeditionary warfare.13 The Homeland Security Department was created specifically to avoid entrusting domestic security to agencies with higher priorities. If large-scale conflict breaks out, the Navy will be obliged to resolve competition for its resources in favor of defense operations. Thus, it is imprudent to ask the Navy to accept responsibilities it could fulfill only on a "We're there 'til you need us" basis.
The second reason is the fundamental distinction between Coast Guard missions and Navy missions. The Coast Guard is America's bridge between maritime civil enforcement authority and military capability. It is well and good to have a Navy ship conduct interdiction operations in support of the Proliferation Security Initiative, but what happens when the boarding team encounters illegal activities or unsafe conditions unrelated to what they came aboard looking for? Under what authority will they address fiscal, immigration, sanitation, or customs violations they encounter? With what training and operational processes will they engage in interagency consultation and secure the situation in a manner that protects the government's prosecutorial, environmental, and other interests?
Questions of statutory authority aside, it is not realistic to ask the Navy to master the intricacies of establishing a legal basis for boarding imperfectly identified vessels; stopping vessels and getting aboard without endangering either the vessel crews or the boarding teams; accounting for all ship's spaces; examining cargo, crew, and vessel documents; applying international and U.S. safety and environmental standards; preparing cases for subsequent prosecution; transferring contraband, evidence, and suspects; and otherwise conducting the work of civilian law enforcement professionals in addition to its present employment.
Boarding ships at sea and applying the rule of law to the messy details are Coast Guard work. The solution to an underequipped Coast Guard is not to ask someone else to do the work but to equip the Coast Guard to do its work properly.
Expand Deepwater
Thus, the great and inescapable necessity is to make Deepwater bigger and get it delivered sooner. Unfortunately, current Deepwater discussions are mired in debates over whether it should take 15 or only 10 years to equip the Coast Guard for its pre-11 September missions. Neither plan will do. The answer is to build to perform the missions the Coast Guard reasonably expects to see over the next 20 years—or at least to the missions it already has. The GAO has noted a 39% increase in Coast Guard resource utilization. That should be the minimum starting point for considering how much larger Deepwater ought to be.
But expansion alone is insufficient. It also is necessary to modify the concept of Deepwater's high-end Maritime Security Cutters to reflect their likely employment in the global war on terror. Envisioning neither mission growth nor an extended struggle against terrorists, the 1999 task force merely called for flexibility and multimission capability. Today, we can see the need for specialized platforms capable of accompanying expeditionary strike groups and delivering full-service law enforcement and maritime interdiction operations.
These cutters should be crewed and equipped to overcome any resistance in getting aboard a target vessel (special forces qualifications are not out of the question). They should have the equipment and training to discover and secure any concealed contraband, to neutralize chemical-biological-radiological and other hazards, and to handle any other boarding contingencies. In addition, there need to be enough of these platforms for the Coast Guard to promise their sufficient availability to the Navy. In short, the Maritime Security Cutters should support boardings so reliably and so well that no expeditionary strike group commander would want to entrust any boarding to any other unit.
Making the Case
The Coast Guard has not come to terms with how much the increased operational tempo has exacerbated its readiness problems. It has not publicly acknowledged that Deepwater will arrive too late and buy too few operating assets to meet current mission requirements.14 And it shrinks from even contemplating how mission requirements will increase if world events follow a predictable path.
The Coast Guard urgently needs bold and focused growth to meet the missions that properly fall within its portfolio. Unfortunately, the greatest obstacle is the service's own reluctance to calculate the full cost of fulfilling its statutory obligations. For too long, the Coast Guard budget cycle has consisted of force fitting budget requests within preset growth limits, telling Congress it can maintain current services with whatever whittled down figure survives, quietly figuring out which pieces of the infrastructure must be allowed to atrophy to keep things running, and praying for a supplemental appropriation to get past the next maintenance crisis.
To end this destructive routine, the Coast Guard needs to find the multiplication key on its calculator and present a theoretical budget based on actual mission requirements. Then the service needs to make the case in public before both the administration and Congress. It may ruffle feathers, but getting the Deepwater assets the service needs is well worth the risk.
Captain Vanderplas is assigned to the Department of Homeland Security Headquarters Integration Team. He holds master's degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the College of William and Mary and was the Coast Guard fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
1. Adm. James M. Loy, USCG, "Transformation: State of the Coast Guard Address," speech at Andrews Air Force Base, 22 March 2001, available at www.uscg.mil/hq/g-cp/history/Loy/SOCG01.htm. back to article
2. Adm. James M. Loy, USCG, "A Unique Instrument of National Security," speech to Naval War College, Newport, RI, 14 December 1998, available at www.uscg.mil/hq/g-cp/history/Loy/NWC.html; and "Winning the Drug War," speech to U.S. Naval Institute, Annapolis, MD, 27 April 2000, available at www.uscg.mil/hq/g-cp/history/Loy/USNIDrugWar4-27.html. back to article
3. Two high-endurance cutters, two helicopters, eight patrol boats, four port security units, six law enforcement detachments, one buoy tender, one pollution response detachment. back to article
4. Margaret T. Wrightson, Director, Homeland Security and Justice Issues, "Coast Guard: Key Management and Budget Challenges for Fiscal Year 2004 and Beyond," Testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Oceans, Fisheries, and Coast Guard, Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, GAO-04-636T, 7 April 2004, available at www.gao.gov/new.items/d04636t.pdf. back to article
5. Adm. Thomas H Collins, USCG, "State of the Coast Guard," speech at National Press Club, Washington, DC, 25 March 2004. back to article
6. There is some confusion in this claim. U.S. Coast Guard Fiscal Year 2004 Report: Fiscal Year 2003 Performance Report, Fiscal Year 2005 Budget in Brief reports a $7.46 billion budget for 2005, but that is only $430 million or 6.3% more than 2004. Operating expenses are budgeted to increase 9.6%, but that is a more narrow claim, one that obscures the 7.6% decrease in acquisition, construction, and improvements. back to article
7. U.S. Coast Guard, Report of the Interagency Task Force on Coast Guard Roles and Missions, 3 December 1999, available at www.uscg.mil/news/reportsandbudget/21stcentury/executive.html. back to article
8. Wrightson testimony, p. 1. back to article
9. George W. Bush, "Remarks at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy," 6 November 2003, available at www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/11/20031106-2.html. back to article
10. James Schlesinger, "The Strong Horse? Failing to Stay the Course in Iraq Would Be a Provocation for bin Laden," Opinion Journal, 25 April 2004, available at www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110005002. back to article
11. Condoleezza Rice, "American Foreign Policy for the 21st Century," speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, 15 January 1999, available at
http://www.lawac.org/speech/pre%20sept%2004%20speeches/rice.html. back to article
12. Andrew Webb, "Posse Comitatus and the Military in Domestic Law Enforcement," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, January 2004, pp. 44-45; and LCdr. Geoffrey A. C. Mones, USN, "The Coast Guard Needs Help from the Navy and Marine Corps," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, January 2004, pp. 40-45. back to article
13. John Mintz and Vernon Loeb, "Coast Guard Fights to Retain War Role," The Washington Post, 31 August 2003, p. A07. back to article
14. I remain skeptical that unmanned aerial vehicles, automated identification systems, or other innovations will substantially reduce the Coast Guard's requirement for Deepwater cutters and aircraft. It seems more likely such tools will increase the number of vessels the Coast Guard is aware of and will want to subject to the scrutiny of live boarding teams. back to article