Studying in the Coast Guard, Bad news for FRC

Posted on June 27, 2011 by Chuck Hill

Navy Times is reporting that the House of Representatives is miffed at the Coast Guard for failing to provide three studies they have requested. Reading between the lines, it appears that the studies have been done, but the Department of Homeland Security or the administration did not like the results and is quibbling.

There is also bad news on the Fast Response Cutter (FRC) program here with an FY 2012 cut from six to four vessels.

“The report also notes that the first fast response cutter, under construction at Bollinger Marine in Lockport, La., is suffering from structural deficiencies that will delay its delivery, originally scheduled for this spring. The committee cut two cutters from the budget request for six and directed the service to hold off on expanding the annual FRC request from four to six until the first ship is delivered and has undergone operational test and evaluation.”

Who is really to blame for delaying the studies is not something we can determine, but the effect of all this is more dithering, ships getting too decrepit to do their jobs, and an inability to conduct SAR and enforce US law in the Arctic and far Pacific EEZ.

Not having a completed study is just an excuse for inaction on the part of the Administration and Congress. I hate to allow them that excuse, but while we may not know what the final fleet size should be, it is pretty obvious, we need to build more ships and faster. We need to start building OPCs yesterday and down the road will be soon enough to decide when we have enough.

Offshore Patrol Cutter (OPC) Update, 6 May 2011

Posted on May 6, 2011 by Chuck Hill

Conceptual Rendering of the OPC The Acquisitions Directorate released their draft specifications for the Offshore Patrol cutter (OPC) Monday, May 2. This is certainly a welcome step, but in some ways it seems the plan ahead has gotten murkier rather than clearer. The description of the ship available to the public has, over time, become more general rather than more specific, and the timing of critical events is now more uncertain.

This release comes five to six months after the previously announced planned release date, as had been published on their website until it was changed this week. Currently the only milestone with a projected date on the Acquisitions Directorate website is “May – June 20, 2011 – Draft Specification Review” everything else is TBD (to be determined). This was the near term plan as it had been previously published: Continue reading →

Fleet Mix–Where are the Trade-Offs?

Posted on April 25, 2011 by Chuck Hill

A recent GAO report offers some insight into how the AC&I budget will work for the next few years. The report is accessible here: Coast Guard: Observations on Acquisition Management and Efforts to Reassess the Deepwater Program: GAO-11-535T, Apr 13, 2011; Quick View Summary (HTML) Highlights Page (PDF) Full Report (PDF, 18 pages) Accessible Text

The thrust of the report seems to be that while the coast Guard has made some progress in managing its own programs since terminating Deepwater there are still a lot of problems and many of them stem from being unrealistic about budget expectations. There also seems to be an underlying frustration because the Coast Guard is not offering real alternatives to the fleet mix proposed by the discredited “Deepwater” program.

“We reported in 2009 that the administration’s budget projections indicated that the DHS annual budget was expected to remain constant or decrease over the next decade. When the Coast Guard submitted its fiscal year 2012 budget request, it also released its fiscal years 2012-2016 acquisition capital investment plan. In reviewing this plan, we found that the Coast Guard’s projected funding levels for fiscal years 2013 through 2016 are significantly higher than budgets previously appropriated or requested and therefore may be unrealistic. This unrealistic acquisition budget planning exacerbates the challenges Coast Guard acquisition programs face. As seen in figure 2, the average annual budget plan from fiscal year 2012-through fiscal year 2016 is about $520 million, or approximately 37 percent, higher than the average Coast Guard acquisition budgets previously appropriated or requested during the past 6 years.”

Continue reading →

Defense Roles and Missions

Posted on April 21, 2011 by Chuck Hill

Wednesday, April 13, the President asked for a new roles and missions analysis, with the intention of saving $400B from “security spending,” over the next twelve years. Reportedly this will include the departments of Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, and Energy, as well as DOD.

A little surprising to me this will include DHS and by extension the Coast Guard. The first thing that comes to mind of course is cuts, but that isn’t the only way things could go. There could also be some reassignment of responsibility, that result in over all savings, but leave one or more service or agency stronger than before. Of course it could also mean moving the Coast Guard into the Navy Department could be looked at again.

Will The Coast Guard stop operating larger ships and simply put boarding teams on Navy ships? or will the Coast Coast Guard be seen as a Naval asset that with a little augmentation could take over some of the Navy’s roles? Or will the CG simply be ignored?

What should the Coast Guard’s “security” roles be? For counter terrorism? For wartime? What “core competencies” does the Coast Guard need to maintain? Could this effect other missions as well?

Budget Realities Setting In?

Posted on March 2, 2011 by Chuck Hill

The Marine Log is reporting “House Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Subcommittee Chairman Frank LoBiondo (R-N.J.) set a no-nonsense tone when he opened up a hearing yesterday to review the Administration’s budget requests for the U.S. Coast Guard…’Congress must make extremely difficult decisions in the coming months to bring our spending under control and cut the deficit’…Chairman LoBiondo commended the service for uncovering some savings through efficiencies in operations and the consolidation of services, but wanted to know ‘if more operational savings can be found that will not adversely impact safety, security, and mission success.'”

He called the Coast Guard’s five year Capital Improvement Plan “fantastic,” (not in a good way, as in, it is a fantasy) referring to a planned 66 percent increase in funding over the next three fiscal years. (Assuming we are talking about a 66% increase in AC&I over the FY2012 request ($1.4B) that is a $924M increase annually, approximately a 9% increase in the total budget.)

He also took the service to task for its failure to complete a “fleet mix analysis” that the Subcommittee requested over 13 months ago. “I urge the Service, in the strongest possible terms, to satisfy our request for this document in short order…Second, the Service continues to lack the polar missions plan long sought by Congress. To add insult to injury, the Service intends to spend millions of unbudgeted dollars to refurbish the POLAR SEA’s engine and then decommission the icebreaker. This is a classic example of throwing good money after bad.”

The Coast Guard is still projecting procurement planned under the discredited “Deepwater” program, almost ten years ago, that included replacing 12 WHECs with 8 multi-crewed National Security Cutters (NSC) and replacing 29 WMECs with 25 Offshore Patrol Cutters (OPC), a reduction of 20% in the number of hulls. Meanwhile, there is little evidence to prove multiple crewing of NSCs will work; UAVs, which don’t seem to be working out for reasons beyond Coast Guard control, were supposed to do a lot of the air surveillance work; drug runners are turning to semi-submersibles and true submarines that are increasingly hard to detect; and new responsibilities are coming with the opening of the Arctic to commerce. It is also possible to make a case that the South Pacific EEZ was never adequately policed. Things have changed and they justify more, not fewer assets. Continue reading →

Relative Size, Navy and CG, Manpower and Budget

Posted on February 18, 2011 by Chuck Hill

A quick comparison between the size of the Navy Department (which includes the Marines as well as the Navy) and the Coast Guard and the relative size of their FY2012 budget requests:

Active Duty Personnel: ……………………12.7 times larger
Budget Request: …………………………….15.6 times larger
Navy Dept Acquisitions/CG AC&I: …..33.3 times larger

The FY2012 AC&I Budget Request for Vessels

Posted on February 17, 2011 by Chuck Hill

The FY 2012 budget for “vessels” is a year without major funding for the National Security Cutter (NSC) project. It only includes $77M to finish funding the fifth ship. Consequently, even though vessel funding dropped from $851.7M in the FY2011 request to only $642M, we see the start of a program to update 140-foot WTGBs, 225-foot WLBs and 175- foot WLMs, beginning with the oldest WTGB and funding of five Mission Effectiveness Projects (MEP) for 270 foot WMECs. We also see an acceleration of the Response Boat-Medium and Fast Response Cutter Programs.

But of course the plan has been to complete the NSC program before starting the OPC program and having the first OPC delivered in 2019. I don’t see how this can happen without a major bump in AC&I funding or at least a major diversion from other areas. The funding for the first five NSCs was spread over eleven years. In the last ten budgets, from FY 2003-2012, NSC funding has averaged $312M. Only in FY 2011 did funding for the program approach the full cost of an NSC ($615M requested compared to a projected cost of $697M for NSC#5), that year, there was no funding for the Fast Response Cutter Program. The Coast Guard is unlikely to get $1.2B it needs in FY 2013/14/15 to complete the “In Service Vessel Sustainment” and WMEC Mission Effectiveness Projects and each year build:

one NSC (approx. $700M)
six FRC (approx. $350M)
40 Response Boat-Medium (approx $100M)

Short of canceling one or more of the NSCs (my preferred alternative), the only way to deliver an OPC by 2019 is to build the NSCs and OPCs in parallel.

Continue reading →

How much do the National Security Cutters Cost?

Posted on February 17, 2011 by Chuck Hill

Earlier I asked this question regarding NSC #5 (WMSL 754 James), because what I had seen recently seemed out of line with the prices I had seen reported for #4 (WMSL 753 Hamilton). Someone from Headquarters was good enough to point me to a helpful 3,311 page document, the DHS 2012 budget justification (this is a large pdf), and even told me where to look (see page 1622 of the pdf). Turns out the total costs are pretty close. Continue reading →

Selling (and Saving) the Offshore Patrol Cutter Project

Posted on January 5, 2011 by Chuck Hill

Since seeing indications the Offshore Patrol Cutter (OPC) program may be in jeopardy (here and here), I’ve been thinking about how the program might be “sold.” There are a number of approaches that might be considered.

Conceptual Rendering of the OPC

It Is a Money Saver

Get it started as an alternative to the NSC. As discussed in an earlier post (Rethinking the New Cutter Programs), we can get more new cutters on line more quickly if we truncated the NSC program at six and started the OPC program two years earlier. This could also be sold as a money saving step, in that we can probably get two OPCs for little more than the price of one NSC. There is very little the NSC can do that the OPC can’t. (If we include the features suggested below, the OPC will be able to do things the NSC cannot-further justifying the change.) This gets us “over-the-hump” of starting the program. Having built the first ships of the class it will be much harder to kill the project and much easier to revive it, if interrupted. The winning shipyard and their legislative representatives will work to keep the project going. It will also mean the MECs and one HEC will be retiring at least a year earlier–the 210s will only be 54 to 56 years old.

Make the Consequences of Not Building Them Clear

Publish the decommissioning schedule. This should make the news in all the Congressional districts that will loose assets.

What is the performance difference. Publish an addendum to the latest “United States Coast Guard Fiscal Year 20XX Performance Report” showing the decrease in performance if there had been no MECs.

Publish a plan to scale back or delete missions if the the MECs are not replaced.

Pork with a Purpose:

An infrastructure (shipyard) program. It might be more expensive, but Congress can decide they want to spread the work around. They have been doing this, almost since the day the republic was formed. It would certainly be reasonable to say they wanted the construction contracted to more than one yard, perhaps even one West Coast, one East Coast, one Gulf Coast or some other split. As a stimulus program that also delivers a tangible good, building four a year, two each on the West and East Coasts would not be unreasonable. That this spreads the support base for the program wouldn’t hurt either. It might even promote some competition in the long term.

Mobilize our Allies

Mobilize the shipyards that hope to win contracts. They have political clout.

Get the fishing industry on our side. Some times they don’t like us, but we keep the foreign competitors out, and when there is a medical emergency or their boat starts sinking they’re mighty happy we are around.

Mobile the Navy League. Despite the name, this organization is a great ally of the Coast Guard as well, but I’ve yet to see us make the case for the OPC in the pages of their magazine.

Get the Navy to endorse the program. Not sure they will want to, but there are lots of reasons they should (Offshore Patrol Cutters, Why the Navy Should Support the Program), particularly if the design chosen has the potential to be a useful “low-end” warship. These are exactly the types of ships needed for partnership station, and they are the kind of ships many of our allies should include in their Navies and Coast Guards through Foreign Military Sales.

Strengthen the National Defense Angle

Bring back the ASW mission. Adding a passive towed array to the ship could help in our law enforcement mission, improving the chances of detecting and tracking semi-submersibles, but the additional military capability could also make the ship easier to justify. Beyond the support for a passive sonar usable for law enforcement, the only additions needed for a credible ASW capability would be having magazine and other storage space for torpedoes, sono-buoys, etc. to support Navy MH-60R helicopters that would prosecute contacts. There is more than enough reason for rejuvenating American ASW assets. As illogical as a US/Chinese confrontation would appear, they have been acting increasingly bellicose. The Chinese Navy already has more submarines than the Germans had at the beginning of WWII, the largest submarine force in the Pacific, while we and our allies have far fewer escort ships than any time in at least the last 70 years. There seems to be a particular need for escort ships for the underway replenishment ships, normally unarmed and unescorted, as they move from the ports where they load their supplies, to the areas where they deliver them to forward deployed task forces. OPCs could perform that mission.

Use the LCS Module Concept. This is ideal for the Coast Guard because it makes the ships adaptable for war time roles without requiring the Coast Guard to maintain either the equipment or the people. It also potentially gives the ships greater flexibility to perform peacetime roles. This requires very little more than some open space, foundations, and bringing up connections for utilities.

The Back Story

As an alternative to the LCS. Not that we can take this as an official line, but if the LCS program continues to draw criticism, particularly if the OPCs are designed to accept mission modules, it is something friends of the Coast Guard can suggest. It has been suggested in the past:

On 5 July 2009, Retired U.S. Navy Adm. James Lyons, former Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, senior U.S. military representative to the United Nations, and Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, suggested the LCS “program should return to its original target of $220 million per ship and combine with the U.S. Coast Guard to build a dual-purpose ship with a credible integral combat system that can meet limited warfare requirements. This very different ship should be built in large numbers as part of the coming Ocean Patrol Cutter Program…Such a change would achieve huge savings for both the Navy and the Coast Guard tied to large production numbers. The funding saved from canceling the LCS could be used to procure the most capable high-end combatant ship with margins enough to allow future modernization.” –This could ally us with those in the Navy who would like to divert Navy money from the LCS program to other purposes.

Coming Soon-How We Got In this Mess

Commandant on the Stump

Posted on January 4, 2011 by Chuck Hill

Looks like the Commandant is going on stump to tell people how bad its has gotten, Commandant: Coast Guard Suffering Under Strain of Tight Budgets. While previous Commandants have gotten kudos for “doing more with less,” soon Admiral Papp is going to have to say we are doing less with less.

This is the second time I’ve seen reference to the OPC being killed. (First time here)

Not everything gets reported of course. The Commandant talked about the fact that even the newest ships, the 270s, are going to be over 40 years old when they are replaced, but he may have missed the opportunity to point out that even if we stick to the current plan, all the 210s are going to be 55 to 57 years old before they are replaced–I don’t think we should let people forget that.

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