USCG Calls for $20B Budget to Sustain and Replace Aging Assets
The U.S. Coast Guard's frontline assets are aging out faster than policymakers might understand, Vice Adm. Peter Gautier told a forum at the Center for Strategic and International Studies last week. A combination of a high operational tempo, lightweight funding and manning challenges mean that the service has come to a "strategic inflection point" - and is having to adapt by reducing its reach.
"Current shortfalls in personnel and material readiness create an imperative for action to adjust force structure and posture and operate differently," the Coast Guard said in a new first-of-a-kind annual report on its operational status. Gautier explained that with current recruiting and retention trends, the service is short on enlisted servicemembers by about 10 percent, though the service has invested heavily in new recruiting capacity and is making up ground.
The Coast Guard's aging equipment is also in need of attention and increased funding, he said.
"I think we need to be honest in terms of the constraints and the challenges the Coast Guard faces," he said. "We find ourselves in the middle of a historic recapitalization of all of our asset types."
A generational project to replace older cutters is under way, but in several key areas (the offshore patrol cutter and the polar security cutter) it is seriously delayed. The number of mission-capable cutters is now at its lowest point in decades, and the service only has half the budget it needs to fully keep up with maintenance on the remaining vessels, he said. The aging fleet of aircraft is also in need of updating, especially since the service flies its airframes up to three times as many hours as any of the other service branches. "We quite simply do not have enough funding" to replace aircraft and maintain current aircraft at the same time, he said.
"We really need to become a $20 billion [per year] coast guard by 2033," Gautier said, up from current appropriations of about $14 billion annually. "Our capital investment budget is about $1.4 billion, and we need to have that immediately bumped up to $3 billion to keep us on a sustainable path."
Gautier noted that the service has a built-in can-do attitude - Semper Paratus, "always ready" - but it is "not so good at telling folks where we're getting stretched, where we're getting brittle in our readiness." The intent with its new messaging is not to ask for money per se, but to inform Congress that coastguardsmen need budgetary support soon or will have to start prioritizing among the service's many mission sets.