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$9.3B request comes with tales of aging fleet

The Coast Guard sent Congress a record $9.3 billion budget request for fiscal 2009 on Feb. 4, and soon after, service officials set out to make their case for how much they need that money by unleashing a series of maritime horror stories — tales of hull cracks, broken gear and lost propellers.

More than a year after their first big embarrassments over waste and mismanagement in the Deepwater recapitalization program, Coast Guard officials have tried to emphasize the progress they’ve made in getting it back on track: standing up a separate acquisitions directorate, rejecting eight defective 123-foot patrol boats and emphasizing the builder’s trials of the first national security cutter, the Bertholf.

“We’re not out of the woods yet, but we’re cutting down some trees” has become a common saying of Adm. Thad Allen, the Coast Guard’s commandant, along with “What a difference a year makes.”

The Coast Guard also is trying to underscore that, despite Deepwater’s problems, it needs the program’s new assets because its ships are disintegrating after decades of hard use. In the days after unveiling their budget request, officials cited several recent problems:

* First was the case of the 64-year-old cutter Acushnet — the Coast Guard’s oldest ship and, as such, bearer of the informal title “Queen of the Fleet” — which lost its screw in December, spokesman Cmdr. Brendan McPherson said. The ship’s propeller separated completely from its shaft, a significant problem made worse because the ship’s age means it has no off-the-shelf spare parts, forcing engineers to custom-build a new propeller and all the other equipment needed to make the repair. In its budget request, the service announced that it hopes to decommission the Acushnet by 2009.

* Then came the story of the 378-foot cutter Dallas, which had to delay its deployment from Charleston, S.C., in late January because its equipment for making fresh water broke; the ship didn’t get out of sight of land before it had to request parts to make repairs, McPherson said. That, in turn, delayed the deployment of the Coast Guard’s first armed MH-65C Dolphin helicopter, carried in the Dallas’ hangar for use against drug smugglers in the Caribbean.

* And on Feb. 3, the 378-foot cutter Rush, one of the Dallas’ younger sister ships, turned back from a search-and-rescue mission off Alaska when water began seeping in through a corroded, 2-foot crack in its hull — “never a good thing on a ship,” McPherson said. The Rush docked Feb. 6 at Dutch Harbor; the cutter Jarvis, another 378-foot sister ship, was sent in its stead. Two other sister ships, the Morganthau and the Chase, have had similar hull corrosion failures since 2005.

The lifesaving service also announced Feb. 4 that the crew of the cutter Bear was celebrating the 25th year of the ship’s Coast Guard career, making it a comparatively spry vessel compared to the World War II-vintage Acushnet and the 1960s 378-foot cutters.

“I saw that, and that really hit me between the eyes,” said Lt. Rob Wyman, spokesman for the Coast Guard’s Atlantic Area command. The average age of a Coast Guard vessel is about 35 years, officials said.

Beyond repair?

The service has tried to be diligent about extending the lives of its cutters as much as possible, McPherson said, but, as demonstrated by the corrosion problems aboard the Rush, there is a point beyond which shipyards can do no more — “the law of diminishing returns,” he said.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff alluded to the Rush on Feb. 4, although not by name, when he unveiled his $50.5 billion fiscal 2009 Homeland Security budget request and urged Congress to fully fund the Coast Guard’s recapitalization plan.

“That cutter is 40 years old. How many Band-Aids are you going to put on top of it? I think we owe it to the Coast Guard’s men and women who go out and take their lives in their hands, performing rescues at sea or securing the country, to occasionally replace their equipment with something that is modern, up-to-date and isn’t going to burst a seam,” Chertoff said.

Long wait for replacements

For all the recent troubles, only one ship is expected to join the fleet soon: the Bertholf, scheduled for delivery to the Coast Guard in the spring and for commissioning sometime this summer.

The Bertholf and its seven follow-on ships will be phased in to replace the 378-foot high-endurance cutters. Shipbuilders at Northrop Grumman Ship Systems in Pascagoula, Miss., have said they can apply the “lessons learned” from the Bertholf to build subsequent copies quicker and cheaper, but it will be years before the remainder of the large new Deepwater vessels join the fleet.

The Coast Guard last year suspended work on its first try to design a new fast-response cutter, and even though its fiscal 2009 budget asks for money for three of the ships, the service isn’t expected to choose a design until March or April, McPherson said. Nor has the Coast Guard settled on a design for its offshore patrol cutter, a ship smaller than the Bertholf but bigger than the FRC; the budget request includes no money for the OPC.

The list did include $354 million for a fourth national security cutter, just over $100 million for upgrades to 30 HH-65 and MH-60 helicopters, and $87 million for two HC-144 Ocean Sentry patrol planes.

The Coast Guard also is asking for $64 million to buy 14 new 44-foot response boats to phase in as replacements for its 41-foot utility boats that mostly patrol harbors and coastal areas. And it wants $9 million for what it calls “emergency sustainment” for its inland patrol fleet — the 31 boats, some as much as 40 years old, that operate in inland lakes and waterways.

The inland fleet is often the only federal maritime presence for inland law enforcement and search-and-rescue missions. In the coming years, the Coast Guard will decide whether to upgrade or replace its inland boats, officials said, a process that could include buying more new boats of an existing variety or ordering an entirely new class of vessels.

The problem is that neither Coast Guardsmen inland nor at sea can stop taking missions because their gear is wearing out, McPherson said. The biggest challenge is keeping operational tempo while working the new ships and gear into the fleet.

“It’s a little like changing the tires on a car that’s going down the highway at 60 miles an hour,” he said.