The U.S. Coast Guard and the challenges ahead

For over two centuries, the U.S. Coast Guard has safeguarded our nation’s maritime interests at home, in the ports, at sea, and around the globe, and looks to have more responsibilities today than at any time in the service’s history.

Coast Guard personnel and assets are conducting counter-piracy missions in the Gulf of Aden, protecting Iraqi petroleum pipelines and shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf, and helping in the government’s response efforts to the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill off the coast of Louisiana, the largest oil spill in the nation’s history. The Coast Guard remains deeply involved in all of these missions in addition to its traditional and better-known search and rescue, drug interdiction and port security missions.

The Center for American Progress believes that the accelerated pace and expanded scope of these domestic and international missions are the new standards for the Coast Guard. The Center also believes that if the Coast Guard is expected to maintain its current level of operations effectively, it must be provided with the leadership and resources necessary to transform and modernize itself.

However, the Center does not believe that the service has the ability to carry out its statutory missions with the high standards expected from them, nor do they believe the Coast Guard will be able to meet its 21st century challenges without correcting the current imbalance between responsibilities and capabilities.

According to the Center for American Progress report on the Coast Guard, entitled Building a U.S. Coast Guard for the21st Century and released on June 9, 2010, the Obama administration decided to freeze all fiscal year 2011 nondefense and homeland security discretionary spending in January 2010. This category does not include the Coast Guard. This exemption was thought to mean that defense and homeland security-related funding could increase or at least would remain constant. Yet when the administration’s FY 2011 budget proposal was unveiled in February 2010, the Coast Guard’s total funding was cut to $10.1 billion, or nearly 3 percent less than the amount appropriated for the current fiscal year (which ends on September 30, 2010.)

If the Coast Guard’s budget is authorized and appropriated as proposed, its total budget next fiscal year will be lower than that of next year’s total purchase of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters ($18,981,928,201) by the Department of Defense -- next-generation fighter aircraft that are not needed in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The Center for American Progress has found that as a result of an already constrained fiscal environment, the Coast Guard currently is engaged in making difficult trade-offs, even before any further cuts to its budget are announced. The recently retired Coast Guard Commandant, Admiral Thad Allen, says the service is now shifting funding away from programs that support current operational capacity in order to focus its scarce resources on asset modernization and recapitalization programs. This is the same trade-off that confronted his immediate predecessors, Admirals Thomas Collins and James Loy. Meanwhile, the Center says the service has lowered its performance goals in anticipation that it will not be able to meet previous standards, as a result of major asset decommissionings.

The age and condition of the Coast Guard fleet is already affecting the service’s ability to carry out its missions, according to the Center’s report. For example, the Coast Guard’s prominent role in the U.S. humanitarian mission in response to the massive 7.0 magnitude earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on January 12 of this year. Less than 24 hours after the earthquake hit, one of the Coast Guard’s largest and most capable cutters, the Forward, arrived in the Baie de Port-au-Prince to provide crucial command-and-control and search-and-rescue capabilities. Hours later, Coast Guard helicopters and other air assets evacuated the first U.S. citizens from the disaster, and provided much-needed damage assessments while partnering with the United Nation’s stabilization mission in Haiti to provide transport for its senior representatives.

The Coast Guard was a critical player in the United States’ successful relief effort in Haiti by being the first to respond, but the service also experienced serious equipment and logistical challenges as a result of the age and condition of its equipment. Twelve of the 19 cutters that were eventually sent to Haiti required emergency maintenance, while two of them had to be recalled from operations for emergency dry-dock repairs. Coast Guard helicopters that were needed to assist surveillance and rescue missions instead had to be assigned to transport spare parts and equipment to Coast Guard assets in the field.

The deteriorating condition of the service’s ships and aircraft, however, is merely a symptom of larger challenges facing the Coast Guard, as it attempts to modernize its force, reorient its command structure, improve its defense readiness, and meet future threats, among other key initiatives. In order to sustain the Coast Guard’s capability over the long term, the service must overcome a host of challenges, including fiscal, personnel, and defense readiness challenges.

The Coast Guard’s current situation is not new. The service has a long history of adaptability and resiliency in the face of ever-changing operating and bureaucratic environments and fiscal constraints, but the Center’s report has found that meeting all of these challenges without sufficient budget support is simply not possible.

In order to modernize to meet 21st Century threats, the Coast Guard must once again adapt to a new bureaucratic environment and receive appropriate levels of funding. The Center for American Progress believes that if the Obama administration and Congress do not help the Coast Guard overcome these obstacles, gaps in the service’s capabilities will only be magnified in the future, and the men and women of the Coast Guard and the nation will suffer.