Security

Coast Guard Cutters Rusting Away

In August, the Coast Guard cutter Dallas ran a gauntlet of Russian warships to deliver humanitarian aid to Georgia in the aftermath of that country’s devastating war with Moscow. It was the high point in a long, eventful cruise for the 41-year-old ship. Before Georgia, Dallas had sailed up the West African coast to train […]

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In August, the Coast Guard cutter Dallas ran a gauntlet of Russian warships to deliver humanitarian aid to Georgia in the aftermath of that country's devastating war with Moscow. It was the high point in a long, eventful cruise for the 41-year-old ship. Before Georgia, Dallas had sailed up the West African coast to train alongside African militaries.

But the cruise came close to disaster several times. Dallas suffered not one, but multiple fires while crossing the Atlantic, according to Captain Robert Wagner, the ship's skipper. And a post-cruise inspection revealed so much "deterioration," in the words of Commandant Thad Allen, that Dallas has been ordered tied to her pier in Charleston, S.C., until extensive repairs can be made.

Dallas' problems aren't isolated, Allen said in a recent public message. Rather, they are "symptomatic of the deteriorating condition of the entire WHEC [large cutter] fleet."

Since all of the WHECs are either over or close to 40 years old, we are reassessing the readiness of the entire class and developing a plan to keep these ships operational until the National Security Cutters (NSC)
and Offshore Patrol Cutters (OPC) come on-line.

But the NSCs -- the biggest part of the $24-billion Deepwater modernization scheme -- have been plagued by cost overruns, delays and questions about their technology. And the OPCs are still on the drawing board. The first in the NSC class, Bertholf, just recently reached her home port in San Diego to prepare for her first deployment. It'll be years before new ships fully replace Dallas
and her sisters. For the Coast Guard, that means an "infusion of additional funding" to keep old ships in working condition. But every dollar devoted to old ships is a dollar the Coast Guard can't spend on their replacements.

By the same token, money sunk into Deepwater isn't available to preserve the "legacy" Coast Guard ships. The poor condition of the
Coastie fleet is, in part, due to years of underfunding, poor planning and bad management in Deepwater, as I explained in a recent piece for The Washington Monthly. With Deepwater, the rescue service...

failed to put in place the necessary tools to make sure that such massive contracts would actually deliver what the government ordered. The result has been six years of incompetence and alleged fraud by private contractors and billions [of dollars in] squandered taxpayer money, much of it wasted on flawed boats that have since been scrapped. The Coast Guard, meanwhile, is still attempting to play a growing military role with ships that are old, unreliable, and a hazard to their crews.

But even with record budgets, the Coast Guard can build new ships only so fast. Indeed, the most recent attempt to buy new small cutters has been delayed by a legal protest from the shipyard that lost the contract.

"We owe it to the Coast Guard’s men and women who go out and take their lives in their hands to occasionally replace their equipment with something that is modern, up-to-date, and isn’t going to burst a seam," Homeland Security boss Michael Chertoff said.

Easier said than done.

[Photo: Coast Guard]

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