I have long felt the way to make cutters readily adaptable for various wartime missions would be to have provision for containerized sensors and weapons. Of course that would only work if the Navy had containerized sensors and weapons to put on the cutters and has identified previously trained crews of reservists that can be recalled to active duty to augment cutter crews.

This seems to indicate that the Navy is moving in that direction, at least in terms of hardware.

“I want to containerize everything,” (Chief of Naval Operations–Chuck) Caudle said. “That’s why I kicked off the containerized capability campaign plan to get after this challenge at scale.”

In fact there was a recent announcement the Navy wants a low-cost missile interceptor packaged 60 to a container and they wasn’t 500 of them completed in 12 month.

Coast Guard assets have several advantages over putting containerized systems on merchant ships in that the crews are military. Secure military communications are already installed. Larger ships have a SCIF (Special Compartmented Information Facility). All have at least basic self defense capability. The larger cutters already have data links.

Other than a place to put the container and utility connections, all a cutter really needs to exploit even the most sophisticated containerized weapons is a Cooperative Engagement Capability.

Containers could be sited on the flight deck, but I would hope to see at least two positions on NSCs and OPCs where containers could be placed without interfering with helicopter operations.

To me the most urgently needed containerized systems for cutters would be an Active/Passive towed array, and support for operation of MH-60R ASW helicopters.