We have verified that their security processes are effective, so cargo coming in from those ports doesn’t need to have the attention of something coming in from areas of the world that do not have this same level of security. Everyone has virtually the same problem and the key is to focus on developing a single standard to the point where we can trust everybody’s work. If we don’t move in this direction then we’re just building more port security. We need to do partnerships with other countries and focus on where the threat is. Q: Looking at the budget you have now for fiscal year 2013, what do you see as the funding levels you’re going to get and what capabilities is that going to allow you to continue with? What is your focus going to be on, with probably increasing areas of responsibility but keeping your traditional capabilities ready? A: Over the last few years, our near shore and coastal assets have been pretty well funded. We have the response boat-medium, we’ve completed the 87-foot coastal patrol boat acquisition, and we’ve started the recapitalization of the response boat-small. So the inshore fleet is pretty well set, with improved capabilities and a greater number of boats than what we had a decade ago. The offshore mission right now is where we’re hurting. To do the offshore mission people have to understand that what we’re really talking about is battling transnational crime organizations [TCOs]. To fight that type of threat on the high seas takes three legs, like a stool. You need to have intel. Since 9/11 with the intel agencies working together, our intel has improved. Then, once you have intel, you have to be able to send aircraft out to be able to go find the bad guys, and that needs to be in balance. The third is that you need the end game, which is the offshore cutters with small boat and helicopter interdiction capability. Right now, we have an unbalanced stool in that with the old offshore cutters, I don’t have enough end game to go do what my other capabilities give us the ability to do. That’s why we’re focusing so much on the national security cutter [NSC], and then the follow-on with the offshore patrol cutter to replace the medium endurance cutters. I have an aircraft gap over where we need to do our job, but that leg right now is much larger than being able to do end game type efforts. So we’re trying to balance getting the cutters into play and retiring some of the older ones so that we can do the job offshore. The challenge is most of the American public doesn’t see the offshore part, and so they like to see the boats running through New York harbor, running in front of the Statue of Liberty, but the actual going out and doing the drug fighting, the migrant interdiction and similar work, doesn’t get as good of a view, and so fighting for the resources to replace our 50- and 60-year-old cutters is the challenge right now with this budget environment. Q: Despite the high sustainment and maintenance costs on the older cutters, has there been any real consideration of keeping some of them on to fill capability gaps? A: Our high endurance cutters [HECs]—the 378s—were built in the mid-60s. The turbines on those cutters are the same type of turbines that were in the Boeing 707 of the early ’60s, late ’50s. So ask yourself when’s the last time you’ve seen the Boeing 707 flying with the original engines. It shows you some of the support issues we have with that type of gear. www.CGF-kmi.com
Then you have the 210s, which were also built around that time. The Fairbanks Morse engines on the medium endurance cutters are the same engines that were in World War II submarines. All of the ships went through a service life extension project [SLEP] in the 1990s. To go and try and do another one [SLEP] just doesn’t make economic sense. They’re going to be way too expensive to run. Plus, the technology doesn’t match up. What we’re finding with the 378s, if you go into the standard references like Jane’s Fighting Ships and you look at the numbers, it gives you about a 10-12,000 mile range on them. That’s if they go out and burn all the fuel. Compare that to the NSC and you won’t see that much of a difference between the two in the range, but here’s the difference: The HEC was designed without ballasting tanks, so as they run out of fuel, if you start getting into any sea state, you have to put seawater into the fuel tanks that are empty to ballast the ship down and keep it stable. When that cutter returns to port you have to go and pump out that ballast water and scrub those tanks. That’s a cost. What happens when operating the high endurance cutters is as soon as they get down to around 70 percent fuel, they’re starting to think about refueling those ships, because they don’t want to do the ballasting. That means an HEC never comes back into port with less than half its fuel, unless it’s an extreme SAR [search and rescue] case. The national security cutter, on the other hand, was built with dedicated ballast tanks. So when they go out, they’re ballasting to offset the fuel burn all the time. Those ships are coming back with low fuel levels, and the CO [commanding officer] has been comfortable doing it. There’s also a cost avoidance in that when we buy fuel down in places like Panama it’s expensive, we’re able to do the whole cruise, come back home and refuel using DoD contracts. There are just so many things that come into play when you’re talking about the new ships that with the old ones you’ll never be able to build in by the way of the original design. It makes life better all the way across for the people involved with supporting those ships and the people operating the ships. There’s just no comparison. We tend to look at the NSC as just being a replacement for the HEC, but it’s a three generation jump. Q: How much more elasticity does the Coast Guard have in its current mission with its current equipment and when the new equipment comes online? Can the Coast Guard do much more with what it has right now, or is it really restricted by what its capabilities are? A: What we have to do right now, because everything is used multimission across our 11 mission sets, is we have to balance risk. So we’re able to push to whatever the top national priorities are and on down, it’s just that we can do less of it now. A good example was during Deepwater Horizon, when we were moving all the buoy tenders down to the Gulf to skim oil: We were doing less aids to navigation work in Alaska, less of the nav aids were maintained. Right now, with the push to recover the aids to navigation [ATON] that were damaged as part of Hurricane Sandy, some of the ATON work down in the 7th district isn’t getting done. We can balance risk still, and we have enough flexibility to balance to the higher priorities, but some of the important, but lower priority mission activities aren’t getting done at the same time. Q: Are ships assigned to districts, or are they always assigned to headquarters and pushed out to districts based mission need? CGF 4.4 | 19