Coast Guard's Clean Slate

It’s old news by now that the Coast Guard’s flagship, 5,000-ton National Security
Cutters are messed-up ships, with structural flaws and leaky electronic networks. Eight of the 400-foot vessels were planned, but cost increases, from $250 million to around $400 million for the first in the class, have long caused insiders to speculate that the Coast Guard would shrink the program. Sure enough, Navy Times just broke the story that an internal Coast Guard study raises the possibility of trading out NSCs for the smaller, yet-to-be designed Offshore Patrol Cutter (concept pictured):

*The report does acknowledges other early “issues” for the [NSC 1] *Bertholf *and the next ship in the class, the *Waesche –-
including cost bumps and questions about hull strength -- but concludes
“no other candidate could meet the speed, sea-keeping and endurance”
the Coast Guard needed.

*Still, the analysis recommends that if the Coast Guard can incorporate the features it needs into its cheaper, not-yet-designed
Offshore Patrol Cutters, it should build more of those and two fewer national security cutters, to save money. *

So that’s just six NSCs to replace the current 12 large cutters.
Reducing the Coast Guard’s inventory of large cutters entails a significant risk, in light of the vast swaths of open sea that the service must patrol, but curtailing NSC does have the advantage of giving the Coast Guard a chance to start over on ship design. After all this time and all these mistakes, we need a clean slate to finally build cutters right.

My unsolicited advice: do the OPCs right. Give plenty of time in the schedule, spend a lot of money up-front on design, make sure your inspectors and certifiers are fully qualified, and build a little extra toughness into the physical structure so that these ships can last 50
years. Because they’re going to have to.