The Coast Guard's ambitious plan to build a fleet of heavily-armed, long-range, networked vessels -- capable of serving side-by-side with Navy warships -- has had its share of setbacks. The $24-billion Deepwater project has suffered numerous delays, cost overruns and technical failures. Lately media attention has focused on the allegedly incomplete communications systems aboard the flagship National Security Cutters. But that's "barking up the wrong tree," according to blogger Springbored. "Ask about the fabrication of the ship."
Springbored is referring to Secure Compartmentalized Information Facilities, or SCIFs. These are special rooms, deep inside warships, set aside for top-secret communications systems -- and isolated from the ships' other systems. Large Navy vessels all have SCIFs. And if the Coast Guard is going to work with Navy on dangerous, overseas missions, it needs SCIFs, too.
Thing is, you either build a SCIF into your new ship from the outset, or you don't build one at all. It's not easy to rearrange the steel insides of a tightly packed warship after it's already been pieced together. But the Coast Guard has never had SCIFs before, and wasn't sure exactly how to design them. So the rescue service asked shipbuilder Northrop Grumman to set aside space inside the first National Security Cutter, Bertholf, so it could add a SCIF after Bertholf was commissioned in May.
"The spaces have been built out. The secure facility has been established. You know, it has the power and the other leads going into it but the equipment is just arriving and being installed," Rear Admiral Gary Blore, the Coast Guard's chief technologist, told Danger Room. "That had always been the plan, that we were going to basically deploy the cutter and add the SCIF after the fact."
There's a catch: Northrop Grumman has demonstrated in recent years that it has a hard time with anything involving cables -- and cables are key to any SCIF. There might be some nasty surprises in store for the Coast Guard as it brings Bertholf's SCIF on-line.
Don't worry, Blore said. "Since we haven't had SCIFs before, you know, for Coast Guard missions, is fully capable without a SCIF."
But for those overseas, Navy-style missions the Coast Guard has been eyeing, you've got to have that troublesome secret room.
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