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CG: Contrary to report, no delay for Bertholf

Top Coast Guard officials on Tuesday asked the Washington Times newspaper to retract a front-page story that reported “faulty radios” aboard the debut national security cutter, the Bertholf, delayed its “deployment” by “six months.”

Senior Coast Guardsmen complained that the article, “Coast Guard delays cutter over radios,” was rife with inaccuracies, from its essential premise about a delay in the ship’s deployment schedule — which they denied — to small details, including a reference to the “50,000-strong Coast Guard,” a number that adds more than 8,000 Coast Guardsmen to the lifesaving service’s listed strength.

Coast Guard spokesman Cmdr. Brendan McPherson said the story cited no sources for its key assertions and called it “a great deal of conjecture and speculation.”

The Washington Times’ managing editor, David Jones, said his reporters had been in touch with the Coast Guard officials, who “quibbled” over whether the system in question really qualified as a radio, he said, and that the newspaper planned to issue a correction over whether the “faulty radio” had delayed deployment of the Bertholf by six months or by between two and three months.

“We’re just trying to serve our readers and give them useful, reliable information,” Jones said. If Coast Guardsmen wrote a letter to the paper’s editor in response, Jones said he would recommend it be published.

The systems aboard the Bertholf had been the subject of rumors on the Internet and on Capitol Hill for weeks before a Feb. 25 blog post on the Coast Guard’s Web site conceded that the there was “some risk” of delays to the ship as it becomes certified to use its command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance suite, commonly known by the acronym C4ISR. But Coast Guardsmen across the service, as well as its contractors, said they were confident the ship would be delivered this spring and commissioned this summer, according to its schedule.

And, they stressed, they knew of no problems with its radios or six-month delays in the case of the Bertholf.

What service officials call the “challenges” with the ship’s C4ISR problems have to do with whether they met the official U.S. guidelines for emanation security, called TEMPEST, which they must satisfy before they can handle classified information. The Bertholf and its follow-on ships use consumer, off-the-shelf computer systems that must be properly installed and fully “shielded” by cabinets and bulkheads for the ship to be up to code. Inspections in late 2007, before many of those systems were fully installed, found the cutter did not yet comply with TEMPEST. The ship likely will not be fully compliant until after it is turned over to the Coast Guard later this year, when it will enter the fleet in “special commission status,” unable to take on missions until it passes all its inspections.

Tuesday afternoon, two top Coast Guard acquisitions officers, Rear Adm. Gary Blore and Rear Adm. Ronald Rabago, convened a conference call with reporters to “address inaccurate information recently published,” according to a spokeswoman.

Blore said he believed the details in the Washington Times story came from the Internet rumors that have surrounded the Bertholf in particular and Deepwater in general.

“We’re watching an interesting phenomenon in the blogosphere. If you asked me ... if you have any frustration with the Coast Guard coverage, what would it be, it’s less with ... print media, established media, traditional media, you pick the word. You all have standards,” he told reporters. “The blog is anything you want it to be; it may or may not have any standards, or fact checking. ... It could be anything.”