http://www.informationdissemination.net/ which has been providing excellent coverage of the crisis in Korea, also found a piece of particular interest to the Coast Guard in Der Spiegel (in English) recounting an interview with a man purported to have piloted vessels smuggling cocaine North for two years including semi-submersibles.
It makes interesting reading.
The Indians have had a lot of incentive to secure their maritime borders since the terrorist attack on Mumbai of November 26, 2008, an event they refer to as 26/11 just as we refer to 9/11. The success of this attack was a direct result of a failure of their Navy and Coast Guard. For more information on how the attack developed, including the murder of two Indian Coast Guard boarding officers, go here. Since the attack, India has embarked on a program to triple the size of their Coast Guard, a component of the Ministry of Defense that grew out of the Navy in 1978.
The Hindustan Times reports of an interview with Vice-Admiral Sanjeev Bhasin, flag officer commanding in chief of the Western Naval Command, provides and update on their efforts.
“…securing India’s western coast is the Navy’s biggest challenge. The threat perception of terrorists using the sea route, as they did for 26/11, has increased.
“India has a huge coastline, stretching 7,600 km, and we have island territories as well. We, along with the Coast Guard, have fortified patrolling. But there are grey areas where [unauthorised] landings can be carried out because the state governments concerned had not kept them under surveillance till 26/11 occurred.”A detailed plan has been chalked out with the Coast Guard and the Director General of Lighthouses to revive lighthouses and set up 30 radar stations along the western coast.
“Trials of two such radar stations have started at Okha and Kandla in Gujarat.
“The Navy has found it tough to monitor fishing boats. This is a weakness identified [and exploited] by the terrorists. About 30,000 fishing boats are registered in Gujarat, 20,000 in Maharashtra, 20,000 in Karnataka and 2,000 in Goa.
“Radar stations fitted with the Automatic Identification System (AIS) have been planned along the coast.
“AIS devices will also be installed on these vessels. It is a massive problem and it cannot be taken care of only by the Navy and Coast Guard.
“We need fishermen’s cooperation; we want them to be our eyes and ears. They have been very cooperative.”
In October, I questioned why there seemed so be so little progress on the National Security Cutters.
In fact there has been a significant milestone. Monday the contract for the fourth National Security Cutter was awarded and the contract includes an option on the fifth ship. The Acquisition Directorate said , “The contract is a fixed price incentive type. It is the first National Security Cutter production contract to be awarded directly to the shipbuilder, outside of the Integrated Coast Guard Systems commercial lead-system integrator contract framework. The Coast Guard is the Systems Integrator for its recapitalization programs and is responsible for their management and execution.”
Rhode Islander hears from a relative, “Some long lead time equipments for NSC-4 (HAMILTON) have already been delivered to NORTHROP GRUMMAN SHIPYARD (NGSB), including the 2 main engines (MTU), all 3 caterpillar generators, all the reduction gears, the air conditioners, and pieces of the weapons systems. Therefore, you can conclude that NGSB should be ready to begin cutting steel on NSC-4 within a couple of months at the latest. Meanwhile, NSC-3 is proceeding well with key milestones such as generator light off and main engine light off occurring before Spring 2011, and Sea Trials still scheduled for latter next summer. Final delivery of STRATTON (WMSL-752) to the active duty Coast Guard crew should happen in less than a year.”
Hopefully, we won’t have to wait four years for HAMILTON (WMSL 753) to be delivered and given that the option has already been negotiated that number 5, JAMES (WMSL 754) will follow close behind.
We know the Coast Guard is working on UASs (Unmanned Aircraft Systems). Perhaps they should also be looking at optionally manned surface vessels. I’m thinking in terms boats that can continue to fill the role of the RHIBs we already have, but with the additional capability of being programmed to conduct a (semi) autonomous search that complements the mother-ship’s own search to almost double the mother-ship’s effective search capability. It looks like the technology, including obstacle avoidance, may already be out there.
Of course we can do a complementary search with a ship’s boat now, but the endurance of the crew limits this option. We can’t routinely expect a boat crew to operate effectively in a search mode for long periods, but a RHIB could operate for eight or more hours even in weather conditions that would be problematic for a boat crew. With the sensors linked to the mother-ship where sensor operators can be rotated, the search should be almost as effective as a second cutter.
The new 154 foot Hero Class Cutters (FRC) will not operate a helicopter, but a optionally manned RHIB could allow them to effectively patrol an area almost twice as large as they could search unassisted.
A large cutter might use it to complement helicopter or UAV search patterns, filling in when air resources are not available. It could also search in the shallows, close inshore, where we could not take a ship.
Because it is relatively difficult to detect, an optionally manned RHIB, scouting 20-30 miles ahead of the cutter, might detect smugglers that attempt to avoid the cutter by using their own scouting vessels.
The Coast Guard did look at the “Protector,” a small unmanned surface vessel, in 2006, but that looks like a very different concept of operation.
The Singapore Navy already seems to have adopted this technology. Units of various capability are already being offered by Italian, German, and Israeli vendors, some with partners in the US.
Seems the Russians have an innovation we might want to look into. “naval-technology.com” reports, “The Russian naval infantry is to be equipped with bulletproof life vests…(the vest)…provides full ballistic protection against light weapon threats in addition to being a floatation device. Delivery of the life vests will begin in 2011.”
Considering the drowning of ME3 Shaun Lin, Oct. 13th, during an exercise, perhaps we need to take another look at how we are equipping our boarding officers, to make sure that their flotation devices can in fact keep them afloat, even when wearing full boarding equipment.
Combining ballistic protection with the flotation device would, if nothing else, simplify preparation for boardings. It also looks like a good idea for our exposed gun crews on crew served weapons.
This tread has some interesting photos of modern icebreakers. Hopefully someone is thinking about this topic in the context of what our new construction icebreakers will look like.
The US does have a couple of ice capable research vessels that are referred to in the tread that I had not been aware of, the 94 meter (310 foot) icebreaker R/V Nathaniel B. Palmer, 
built in 1992,
and the 76 meter (251 foot) ice-strengthened (Ice class ABS A1) RV Laurence M. Goul, built in 1997. Both were built by Edison Chouest Offshore Inc., Galliano, Louisiana,
(Thanks, Steve, for the link)
In Science Fiction, an “alternate reality” is a common plot device. It allows you to think “outside the box” and sidestep some of your preconceptions. A recent post, “Maritime Security Operations and the ‘Myth’ of Piracy,” allowed me to look at how Coast Guard missions are done in an alternate reality, the UK. I’d like to recommend it, not because I agree with the conclusions, but because they are so different.
What would be Coast Guard missions in the US, are fractured among several agencies in the UK. Many are done by the Royal Navy and fixed wing Maritime SAR has been done by RAF Nimrod ASW aircraft (Just as it is done by CP-140 Auroras in Canada). Deep defense cuts in the wake of a defense review, are taking away many of the resources that have done these missions. The RN is loosing many of its older smaller frigates that have done law enforcement. Towing vessels are being discarded. The new generation of Nimrods, now almost finished at great expense, are to be discarded. This raises the question, how will these missions be done in the future?
They have a Maritime and Coast Guard Agency, but it is very small, unarmed, civilian, and relies heavily on volunteers. They do SAR with surface assets, Merchant Vessel safety, and marine pollution prevention, but no drug or fisheries enforcement and no buoy tending (this seems to be handled locally although there seems to be a bill to establish nationwide funding and oversight). They have a UK Border Agency (analogous to Immigration Customs Enforcement) that works with police to do drug and migrant interdiction, and they have more than one fisheries enforcement agency including a separate one for Scotland. None of these agencies appear to operate aircraft.
Among the comments were calls for an American style Coast Guard, but the post proposes something the author considers less radical, using the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA, a rough equivalent of the Military Sealift Command, MSC) to man ships and put them under the authority of the Coast Guard, Customs, and Fisheries Agencies, “In UK waters Fisheries officers could be carried, and Customers officers in the same way. In the Caribbean or off Somalia I would suggest the boarding parties should be made up of Royal Marines.”
And rather than use small Offshore Patrol Vessels, he proposes using Naval Auxiliaries, “I am not a big fan of smaller less flexible vessels, so lets go to the other extreme and examine the use of really big RFA’s for these maritime security operations.
“As the RN surface fleet has shrunk, RFA tankers and the auxiliary landing ships of the Bay Class have been used on the ‘Windies Guard Ship’ and other duties. While some have questioned the veracity of using a tanker to do anti-drug runner ops’ I say “so what?” – it’s a flexible asset, use it for whatever you can.”
That is a very different view. There has been a lively response to the post with over 90 replies. We have had our own experiment with manning ships for other agencies. Depending on the National Science Foundation to fund the Icebreaker program is what got us in the current situation. The poster never addressed who he expected to do air ops for his coast guard.
Looking at this alternate reality makes me appreciate what we have in terms of the opportunities for synergy, flexibility, coordination, and efficiency.
Click here for photos from counter-piracy operations, including at least one photo of Coasties. Some pictures from the Magellan Star take-down are included. (Thanks Lee Wahler)
“One day you will take a fork in the road, and you’re going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go. If you go one way, you can be somebody. You will have to make your compromises and … turn your back on your friends, but you will be a member of the club, and you will get promoted and get good assignments. Or you can go the other way, and you can do something, something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. … You may not get promoted, and you may not get good assignments, and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors, but you won’t have to compromise yourself. … That’s when you have to make a decision: to be or to do.”
These are the words of Col. John Boyd, USAF, who never made General, but was largely responsible for the F-15, F-16, and A-10. He was also the originator of the concept of getting inside your opponent’s Observation, Orientation, Decision, Action (OODA) loop as military strategy that became the basis of the Marines’ Maneuver Warfare Doctrine.
His moral dilemma, of making the hard decisions and hurting your career, or going with the flow, came to mind when I read this post concerning where responsibility lay for the death of a sailor on one of the Navy’s troubled LPD-17 Class ships. Were the officers on scene responsible or was it the result of leadership that provided poor tools to perform the job?
Recently the the author has apologized for possibly violating the Naval Institute’s editorial policy, but still, this is a great and thoughtful read.
I can’t help but think how these concepts echo our own “Deepwater” experience, and the resulting state of our cutter replacement program, now 25 years behind schedule in the case of the MECs.
As previously mentioned, the Coast Guard Compass has been running a series providing information about the men and women the first fourteen Fast Response Cutters are to be named for. Since my last post on this subject, they have completed the series. The last three in the series are:
If you would like to catch up on the stories of the other men and women these vessels are named for, you can find them below.
Incidentally, I’d like to see us start referring to these as the “Hero class” cutters, a lot less awkward than “Fast Response Cutter” and more meaningful than FRC.
Chuck Hill's CG Blog 