The Navy League’s “Seapower” magazine has an article about how aging assets are impacting the Coast Guard’s mission effectiveness. You can read it on line here. (You will probably have to expand it to make it readable.)

Frankly, I have been disappointed that they had not been talking about this much earlier. There has been entirely too much happy talk about how great the new assets are without much discussion of the general decrepitude of most of the fleet. Of course this has probably been our own fault. Even in this article, there seems to be little sense of urgency.  The article barely mentions the fact that the planned slow motion replacement of Medium Endurance Cutters by the Offshore Patrol Cutter will prolong the pain. After all, we don’t expect the last OPC until 2034, a fact not mentioned in the article. They refer to a “two-plus decade program” to build 91 new surface ship, but in fact the first National Security Cutter was funded in FY2001, and the roots of the program go back further still, so this is at least a three and a half decade program, that was begun at least ten years after it should have.