This morning, at the peak of the rush hour, San Francisco was attacked by a creature of monstrous size and appetite. Hundreds, perhaps thousands are dead or dying.
Children stare in horror as the Duck moves close to shore
The scene just before the massacre
USCGC Waesche (WMSL 751) attempted to stop the behemoth, but its six pound 57mm projectiles, were according to her captain, “Like water off a duck’s back.”
No one is sure where the feathered horror came from. Scientists speculate that global warming may have released the monster from a glacier’s icy grip. Fox news contends that it is an Islamic Suicide Duck (ISD). MSN reports that it is a product of Disney Studios, an artificial intelligence enhanced animatronic attraction gone terribly wrong.
No one can say where the Demonic Duck will strike next. Meanwhile, Phil Robertson of A&E’s “Duck Dynasty” has been called in as a consultant, as the National Command Authority considers the nuclear option. The Department of Homeland Security has approved a $2M grant to rebuild the San Francisco Fire Department gym destroyed in the attack.
Navy Air/Sea PEO Forum has published a report on Coast Guard cutter procurement written by Ronald O’Rourke of the Congressional Research Service. As far as I can tell this is the same information he has given to Congress. It is fairly long, but very complete, accurate, and balanced.
There are a number of troubling issues identified in the report, most of which boils down to the fact that while the fleet continues to age, funding for replacements continue to fall and most recently is less than half of the approximately $2.5B/year really needed to recapitalize the cutter fleet.
An immediate concern is that, the Offshore Patrol Cutter (OPC) has again slipped to the right with the first ship now expected to be funded in FY2018 instead of 2017.
Another area of concern is how the leadership is portraying the Program of Record (POR).
The Coast Guard estimates that with the POR’s planned force of 91 NSCs, OPCs and FRCs, the service would have capability or capacity gaps in six of its 11 statutory missions—search and rescue (SAR); defense readiness; counter-drug operations; ports, waterways and coastal security; protection of living marine resources (LMR); and alien migrant interdiction operations (AMIO). The Coast Guard judges that some of these gaps would be “high risk” or “very high risk.”
Public discussions of the POR frequently mention the substantial improvement that the POR force would represent over the legacy force. Only rarely, however, have these discussions explicitly acknowledged the extent to which the POR force would nevertheless be smaller in number than the force that would be required, by Coast Guard estimate, to fully perform the Coast Guard’s statutory missions in coming years. Discussions that focus on the POR’s improvement over the legacy force while omitting mention of the considerably larger number of cutters that would be required, by Coast Guard estimate, to fully perform the Coast Guard’s statutory missions in coming years could encourage audiences to conclude, contrary to Coast Guard estimates, that the POR’s planned force of 91 cutters would be capable of fully performing the Coast Guard’s statutory missions in coming years.
We are not being competely honest in that we are painting to rosy a picture of the program of record.
Australian Defence Magazine reports a new version of the Dauphin helicopter. This one to be made in Korea in both civil and military light attack forms.
“The Coast Guard’s Fiscal Year 2016 budget request falls $69 million short of fully funding the Offshore Patrol Cutter (OPC) and instead relies on a funding transfer authority that would let Department of Homeland Security leadership provide the additional funding if the program is deemed affordable and on track, Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Paul Zukunft told the House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday.”
There is supposed to be provision for transferring money into the account if the program is “affordable” and if the Department has not already spent the money on something else.
This is a new low for the Department in failure to act responsibly.
The Coast Guard Compass reports that the Senior Coast Guard leadership had a Facebook town hall meeting. Some how I miss this, but I have since started following the Commandant’s page. You can find it here.
Friday, March 13, the Coast Guard, Navy and Marines issued a new strategy document endorsed by all three services. It is a substantial update and revision of the existing tri-service strategy.
“Tall Ships this summer, the Tall Ships Challenge sailing festival will showcase dozens of boats large and small, including stunning replicas of historic ships like L’Hermione, shown here.” (Photo courtesy Tall Ships Philadelphia Camden 2015)
Not a lot of Coast Guard connection, other than that the Eagle will be there, and there will be a lot of work done by the Coast Guard, both regular and aux., to make it go smoothly, but it ought to be a great event.
I would like to talk about the United Arab Emirates’ 24 boat, Ghannatha program, because they seem to have departed from the usual form for patrol boats, both in their mission and their armament, apparently heavily influenced by the Swedish and Finnish Navies. They are neither typical lightly armed patrol boats nor heavily armed missile boats. In fact they come in three “flavors,”
Six motor gunboats capable of carrying a platoon of 40 troops
Six boats with automated breech loading 120mm (4.7″) mortars capable of both direct or indirect fire, and
Twelve missile boats with missiles of an intermediate size (larger than Hellfire, but much smaller than Harpoon).
These boats are aluminum construction and actually only about half the displacement of the Coast Guard’s 87 footers, giving them shallow draft.
For comparison the dimensions on these of the boats relative to the Coast Guard’s 87 footers looks like this:
Ghannatha: 24×5.4×1.2 meters (first twelve)
WPBs: 26.52×5.92×1.74 meters
Figures from Combat Fleets of the World, 16th edition.
The gunboat/transports and the mortar boats were originally built to a common design, 24 or 25 meters in length (depending on source). While they appear to be patrol boats and have “P” for “patrol” hull numbers, they were built to land troops and supplies (explaining the shallow draft). The gun and mortar boats are being modified as noted above. The 12 missile boats are slightly larger, the design lengthened to 26.5 meters (87 feet).
This weapon arms the six transport/gunboats. They are most like a typical patrol boat. The weapon is not that different from the 25mm Mk38s that arm Webber class except that they have an almost insanely high rate fire, in that, at 1700 rounds/min, they can fire the 90 rounds on the mount in just over three seconds, probably about the time it will take for the first round to hit the target. There is also apparently only one type of round, so it may not have been the best choice.
This system, which will arm six of the earlier boats, has a range of up to 10KM (11,000 yards) and a maximum rate of fire of 10 rounds/min. There are Laser guided munitions available.
This system will arm the twelve slightly larger new boats. The missile weighs 310 kg and is 3.85 metres long. The warhead weighs 70 kilogram (154 pound). The missile, has “an effective range in excess of 30 km, is a fire and forget, all weather sea skimming missile with inertial mid-course navigation through way points and active radar terminal homing. The Mk2/N system incorporates a mission planning function to optimize operation.”
These missiles give these boats a range almost double that of the 57mm or 76mm guns.
NavyRecognition reports on the Naval Defence Exhibition, held 22 – 26 February 2015 in Abu Dhabi, UAE. for me the most interesting reports were:
Light Weight 40mm Gun that required no deck penetration. It is not a competitor for the 57mm but compared to the Mk38 25mm, it probably does have enough additional range to allow it to engage beyond the 4,000 yard range that I believe is necessary to prevent extemporized armaments from targeting vital systems (like the gun) on our cutters. The Mk38 mod2 reportedly has an effective range of only 2,500 meters (about 2,750 yards).
New sonars suitable for small vessels, including a towed synthetic aperture sonar suitable for sub-surface-channel mapping and variations of ASW sonars currently in USN service that can be hull mounted and towed by vessels as small as the Webber class.
Chuck Hill's CG Blog 