By SCOTT C. TRUVER
Dr. Scott C. Truver is executive director at the Center for Security Strategies and Operations, Systems Engineering Group, Anteon Corporation in Arlington, Va.

Treading "Deep Water"?

"These are perplexing times for the Coast Guard," James Kitfield noted in "The Stepchild Steps Out" in the October 1999 issue of National Journal. In recent years, he pointed out, the Coast Guard has seen a dramatic increase in such missions as interdicting drug traffickers, enforcing fisheries legislation, and controlling alien migration at sea. Overseas, its cutters routinely operate alongside Navy vessels to enforce maritime embargoes. A heavy hurricane season last year highlighted the mission that most Americans identify with the Coast Guard--saving lives at sea. Yet, because the Coast Guard is an agency of the Department of Transportation (DOT) during peacetime, and because it remains an oft-neglected stepchild in terms of its significant law-enforcement and national-security roles, it finds itself under severe budget strain.

Nowhere is the strain felt more intensely than in the Coast Guard's "Deepwater" forces. The cutters and aircraft that conduct multimission operations "50 miles or more to sea," as the Coast Guard defines its Deepwater operational environment, are in need of significant modernization if not outright replacement. Many are approaching or are at the end of their service lives. To deal with the need to modernize and/or replace these assets, the Coast Guard's Integrated Deepwater Systems (IDS) Capabilities Replacement Project has mapped out an innovative approach and program-plan to address all of the Coast Guard's numerous roles, missions, and functions as well as the platforms, systems, and subsystems needed to carry out the service's multiple mandates within the framework of its core maritime-security mission.

Whether it will be successful in this quest remains to be seen, but the December 1999 report of the President's Interagency Task Force on U.S. Coast Guard roles and missions provides several good reasons for pressing ahead. Still, with an estimated cost of nearly $10 billion over 20 years, the Deepwater Project is the most ambitious research, development, and acquisition program ever undertaken by the smallest of America's armed services. Savvy card players already are starting to hedge their bets.

Operational SitRep

The Coast Guard is challenged, as it begins its third century of service to the nation, by a complex mosaic of maritime users, interests, and transnational dangers and problems--including pollution, the over-fishing of protected stocks, illegal migration, drug-smuggling, international terrorism, and weapons proliferation, to name but a few. To deal with these threats and problems, particularly in the Deep-water environment, the service must continue to carry out several fundamental tasks that have been among the few constants in the Coast Guard's long history:

• Provide a credible presence in and conduct surveillance of several maritime regions of critical importance to the United States;

• Detect, classify, and identify dangers to U.S. maritime interests worldwide; and

• Take whatever legal actions are required to counter those dangers.

The Coast Guard carries out most of its Deepwater tasks through routine patrols and time-critical sorties conducted by high- and medium-endurance cutters, patrol boats, and fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft. The success of these operations depend primarily on Coast Guard, joint-service, and national-level C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) systems. Unlike Coast Guard operations in coastal and inland waterways, Deepwater missions typically require a continuous long-term presence away from home port, sometimes for months on end, and the ability to operate independently in severe environments--from Arctic waters to tropical and equatorial climates--24 hours a day, every day, wherever the nation's maritime security demands a Coast Guard humanitarian, law enforcement, or military presence.

The service's Deepwater needs are, in a word, compelling, and require a multidimensional capability to simultaneously carry out numerous missions and tasks above, on, and sometimes even below the surface of the sea. It is not unusual, for example, for a cutter to be carrying out a search-and-rescue (SAR) mission while at the same time being engaged in counter-drug surveillance as well as fisheries enforcement and/or migration interdiction--often across vast areas of ocean, particularly in the Pacific.

Given that context, it becomes obvious that the Coast Guard's existing capabilities even to carry out all of its current--not to mention future--roles, missions, and tasks in support of America's maritime security in the Deep-water operating environment are increasingly in doubt. Existing Deepwater assets are nearing the end of their service lives. Performance is increasingly hampered and operational costs are increasing, even as the threats the service must counter are becoming both more sophisticated and more capable and the implications of poor mission performance more harmful to U.S. maritime security interests.

The Coast Guard has modernized its patrol boats and near-shore assets to some extent, but most of its longer-range equipment is obsolescent at best. In fact, of the world's 41 deepwater naval and coast guard fleets, the U.S. Coast Guard's oceangoing assets are the 39th oldest, and soon could be dead last. Other problems are a young and relatively inexperienced work force, and an unsustainable operational tempo--which in recent years has been significantly exacerbated by continuing budget constraints.

Life-or-Death Decisions

One of the most telling examples of the challenges facing the Coast Guard is the need to enhance the capabilities of its HC-130 long-range search aircraft. In a recent interview, Coast Guard Commandant James M. Loy noted that, "While we haven't added more aircraft to our current 42-plane inventory, our SAR requirements have not been reduced, and our OPTEMPO for drug interdiction has increased."

The Coast Guard also has lost "a full 25 percent" of its HC-130 mission availability "while piling on additional mission requirements," Loy continued. "HC-130 availability," he said, "has dropped from almost 80 percent several years ago to barely 60 percent today." The end result is that USCG aircraft are now flying 33 percent more hours per year than the C-130s of the other U.S. services, and there is a critical gap in the number of backup planes available for SAR missions. "This could end up costing lives that otherwise could be saved," Loy commented.

The same situation has depreciated the service's contributions to the nation's war against drug traffickers. In his 27 January testimony before the House Government Reform Committee's Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources, Rear Adm. Ray Riutta (assistant commandant for operations) discussed the need for more robust forces and increased readiness to meet today's and tomorrow's drug-interdiction needs. "Readiness is the foundation of all Coast Guard operations and is especially critical for drug-interdiction operations," he said, "since they require my most capable ships and aircraft and my most skilled people." Riutta underscored that the Coast Guard is addressing its "modernization concerns" through the innovative Deep-water Capability Replacement Project. "This project," he said, "is designed to ensure the timely acquisition of a system of assets that will leverage technology to meet the demanding future mission needs in the offshore environment, such as those required for drug-interdiction operations."

Gen. Barry McCaffrey, USA (Ret.), director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said much the same thing in a 12 October 1999 letter to the Interagency Task Force: "The continued improvement of Coast Guard counterdrug capabilities, particularly those that support agile deepwater operations, is critical to the future success of U.S. interdiction policy."

The compelling need to modernize and enhance the Coast Guard's Deepwater assets and capabilities has been summarized by Capt. Richard R. Kelly, the Coast Guard's Deepwater resource sponsor, as follows: "The bottom line is that without these improvements we are not going to meet our operational requirements.

"Ships and aircraft are getting old and tired," Kelly acknowledged. "We can make them work longer than we had originally planned, increasing their operational lives beyond what might otherwise be economically feasible. But we cannot make our people work any harder than they are now working. We are already experiencing problems retaining the right people for the jobs ahead."

Long-Range Acquisition Strategy

The Coast Guard's Integrated Deepwater System encompasses both the in-service "legacy" and the new-acquisition surface, air, shoreside, and C4ISR assets and logistics support systems required to meet all of the service's current and future maritime-security missions and tasks. Those platforms, systems, and shore assets must be able to support not only peacetime and civilian-emergency missions but also crisis-response and wartime operations, all in an affordable, efficient, and effective manner.

The Deepwater Project was initiated to address the need to upgrade, modernize, and replace the Coast Guard's aging fleet of cutters and aircraft--as well as its command-and-control infrastructure--with an integrated system of shoreside, afloat, aviation, and information-technology assets. The project is by far the largest acquisition project ever undertaken by the Coast Guard. It is also the first time that any federal agency--other than the Department of Defense--has approached an acquisition program from such an all-encompassing perspective. In planning the Deepwater Project the Coast Guard adopted an integrated "system-of-systems" approach that embraces today's and tomorrow's sensors, command-and-control systems, shoreside facilities, boats and cutters, aircraft, and people in an innovative "networked" concept of operations that includes all of the service's current core missions as well as several that may well be added in the foreseeable future.

"We are looking to recapitalize a large part of the Coast Guard, and to do that wisely we are buying the capabilities the Coast Guard will need for the next 20 to 40 years," said Lt. Cdr. Michael Anderson of the Deepwater Project Office. "Rather than buying a certain 'amount' of ships or aircraft, the Deepwater Project is asking industry to develop an integrated system--a 'system-of-systems' that will enhance our ability to carry out current roles and missions and allow us to take on new missions well into the next century."

Innovation and Flexibility

Key to the Deepwater Project's philosophy is the need to leverage commercial and military technologies and innovation to develop a completely integrated, multimission, and highly flexible Deepwater operating system at the lowest possible total ownership cost--including funds for research and development, design and engineering, acquisition, and life-cycle operations and support--to carry out the diverse and demanding roles, missions, and tasks that lie ahead. In developing the Deepwater concept, however, the Coast Guard broke with the traditional federal acquisition approach in favor of an innovative "mission-based performance" acquisition methodology. Rather than focusing on specific hardware--e.g., a specific class of cutter or aircraft--the Coast Guard has developed performance specifications that describe the fundamental capabilities the service needs to perform all of its maritime security missions in the Deepwater operational environment.

The principal benefit of using the mission-based performance acquisition approach is that it gives industry tremendous flexibility to leverage proven as well as leading-edge technologies and new processes to maximize the Coast Guard's Deepwater operational effectiveness at the minimum total ownership cost. The virtually all-encompassing scope of the project also gives industry consortia trade-off opportunities to develop the optimum type and mix of assets to fit their Deepwater proposals. As Capt. Craig Schnappinger, Deepwater project manager, expressed it, "Our approach is to look at what we really need to do and find the common thread among all our missions and the tasks that we must carry out."

"It is not in the Coast Guard's interest to go for a traditional paradigm of replacement based on current or past inventory," Loy commented in discussing the strategy. "We left the conceptual analysis to industry's competitive juices. And we don't want to rule out future hardware and get a greater inventory of legacy assets, and thereby pull the rug on a better idea. We don't want to shut out the prospects for new assets and technologies."

Slater Emphasizes National-Security Benefits

The Coast Guard's Deepwater acquisition approach has proven so innovative that in June 1999 it was designated a "Reinvention Laboratory" under the National Partnership for Reinventing Government. That designation is more than an honor; it also empowers the Coast Guard to test new ways of doing its job: "We have dramatically reformed the way we carry out the people's business," said Secretary of Transportation Rodney E. Slater. "The Deepwater Project will enhance America's national security by helping the Coast Guard perform its duties with maximum efficiency and savings to the taxpayer."

In Phase 1 of the Project, Conceptual Design, which began in August 1998 and continued throughout 1999, the Coast Guard awarded contracts to three industry teams, each led by a single prime contractor--Lockheed Martin of Moorestown, N.J.; Litton Avondale Industries of New Orleans; and Science Applications International Corporation of San Diego. During this phase of the project, the industry teams were asked to conceive and engineer their proposed IDS concepts to approximately 50 percent of a completed design. The results were submitted to the Coast Guard in December 1999. The Coast Guard has the option of continuing any or all of the participating teams into the Functional Design phase, during which the team or teams selected will essentially continue to evolve and refine the Deepwater concepts to approximately 80 percent design complete.

The beginning of Phase 2 marks another major competitive decision point. The final contract award is scheduled for January 2002 and is expected to give one team what will probably be the biggest contract in Coast Guard history.

"We want to maximize our operational effectiveness while minimizing total ownership cost," Anderson said. The industry teams have "great flexibility and latitude in picking components and technologies for the overall system," he said. That flexibility, he suggested, could extend to the use of unmanned aerial vehicles and satellites for surveillance and reconnaissance.

A Major Funding Challenge

In the Coast Guard's $4.2 billion FY 2000 budget, $350 million is allocated to the ACI (Acquisition, Construction, and Improvements) account--of that total, $44.2 million has been earmarked for the Deepwater project. The Coast Guard awarded $24.3 million to the three industry teams in FY 1999, and has set aside $15.3 million additional in FY 2000, bringing the total for each team to about $13.5 million for the two design phases of the project. "What we would like [for the remainder of the project] is $300 million in FY 2001 and roughly $500 million per year for the next 19 years," Anderson said, "The bulk of the spending will be in the outyears, which makes the total projected cost of the entire IDS project approximately $9.8 billion."

Deepwater funding needs are well over the approximately $350 million appropriated, on average, for the Coast Guard's annual ACI account in recent years. Obtaining such a major increase will therefore be a "challenge," Loy admitted. However, the ACI account has been significantly underfunded for many years, so a long "catch-up" program would be needed in any case. Moreover, the $300 million requested for Deepwater in FY 2001 dwarfs in comparison to some of the other programs in the Transportation Department's record $54.9 billion FY 2001 budget request--which also includes $30.4 billion for highways, roads, and bridges; $6.3 billion for mass transit systems; and $1.9 billion for expanded airport runway capacity, noise-reduction, and safety improvements. Seen in that context, the Coast Guard's $9.8 billion request for a project that runs over 20 years seems to be a relatively modest sum.

The Coast Guard is now at perhaps the most critical stage of the Deepwater Project. Essentially, the decisions made in the Conceptual and Functional Design phases will drive the project from here on and largely determine the numbers and types of platforms the Coast Guard will operate for the next 40 years, if not longer. It is primarily for that reason that the Coast Guard is seeking to take advantage, to the maximum extent feasible, of recent concept design and engineering studies made by the U.S. Navy, particularly those for the DD 21 Land-Attack Destroyer.

A Synergistic Focus On Affordability, Interoperability

An important development in this regard was the issuance of a Joint U.S. Navy-Coast Guard Policy Statement on the so-called "National Fleet." The statement, signed by Loy and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jay L. Johnson in September 1998, calls for the two services to synchronize their planning, procurement, training, and operations to provide the highest level of joint maritime capability possible for the nation's investment.

The goal, Loy said, is to ensure there is a "shared purpose and common effort" focused on tailored operational integration of the Navy's and Coast Guard's multimission surface platforms. "Our intention," he said, "is to create synergy among the Coast Guard's and the Navy's multimission platforms, improving capability, interoperability, and affordability so that the United States is well-served across the full breadth of our maritime security needs.

"Interoperability and common systems," he continued, "are elements that enable the two services to complement each other. This strategy can also help to drive unit prices down, as we both acquire--when it makes operational sense to do so--common technologies, systems, and platforms."

Loy's statement has strong backing at the highest levels of the Navy Department. In addition to Johnson's personal commitment, Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig promised, in his 12 October 1999 letter to the Interagency Task Force, that, "We will coordinate surface ship planning, research and development, and information systems integration. ... We will expand and synchronize concepts of operations, logistics, training, exercises, and deployments. ... This is, in essence, the foundation of our new National Fleet Policy."

To summarize: The Coast Guard has crafted the strategies needed to recapitalize its future, and to ensure that it retains and sustains the complex mix of capabilities required to meet the Deepwater demands it now faces as well as those likely to be thrust upon it in the foreseeable future. The service also has put in place a comprehensive and cost-effective program to assess future requirements and acquire the assets needed to ensure that it can continue to fulfill its role as a unique instrument of U.S. national security while at the same time providing the broad range of services expected by the American people. Ultimately, though, it is up to the executive and legislative branches of government to ensure that sufficient funds are provided to make the Coast Guard's Deepwater vision a reality. *

Notes: 
(1) This article has been adapted, in large part, from a report (America's Coast Guard: Safeguarding U.S. Maritime Safety and Security in the 21st Century) by Capt. Bruce Stubbs, USCG, and Dr. Truver that was re-leased in January 2000.

(2) For additional information on the Deepwater project, see the IDS Web page: www.uscg.mil/deepwater/.