Yesterday I outlined some basic questions that have to be answered to justify the OPC program. I’m sure there questions have already been answered in one form or another, but we need to make sure the answers are widely understood and we need to apply whatever influence we may have to help the program along.

We have already gotten some good answers in the comment section, and I’m going to make my own stab at it. I’ll answer each of my questions in detail later, I’m still polishing them, but first, I’d like to provide basic justification for our large cutters.

Why do we need them?

The US EEZ is roughly 3.7 million square nautical miles, about 30% more than the entire land area of the United States. The Coast Guard is the “Department of Emergency Services” for the entire area–fire, flooding, medical, and the only law. Only a small portion of the area can be serviced by patrol boats, so perhaps 3 million square nautical miles must be patrolled by larger cutters. A fleet of approximately 40 cutters can keep no more than about 20 on patrol at any one time, so each  cutter is patrols an average of about 150,000 square nautical miles. On average they would be 1,000 miles apart. Because we don’t distribute the ships evenly, in fact, many times they are closer together in areas of interest, but in other areas the separation is even greater.

If we decide not to build these ships, or some sort of large cutter, we will see a rapid decline in our patrol forces beginning in 2020 running down to a force of only the National Security Cutters with typically no more than four cutters on patrol to cover the entire area.

American citizens are on those waters and they deserve and rightfully expect a minimum level of protection.

The nation and the international community take many of the things we do for granted, but like in the movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” consider what that area would be like if there were no large cutters. Some of the things that don’t happen because cutters have been there:

• Fleets of foreign fishing vessels don’t deplete our fishing stocks
• Pirates don’t terrorize fishermen and pleasure boaters
• Fisherman don’t die of treatable injuries
• Ships don’t pollute indiscriminately

(Somehow the conspiracy theorist in me suspects that the movement to end the OPC program is a result of elements profiting from the NSC, wanting to make sure the NSC program is not truncated in favor of more much cheaper OPCs. If successful, we might even see a continuation of the NSC program.)