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CG: Rotation would extend service life of fleet

With the vast majority of the Coast Guard’s surface vessels either at or nearing the end of their planned service lives, officials are borrowing practices from the aviation community to boost the operational life of the fleet.

Rear Adm. Tom Ostebo, assistant commandant for engineering and logistics, said the service will start rotating the home ports of some surface ships, based on weather conditions. Though it is not clear how many vessels will be moved or from what locations, Ostebo said some movement in the small-boat fleet could begin as early as this year.

“We need to be clear and honest regarding the task ahead. This is hard work, and it will require the efforts and patience of every member of our service to get this right. The alternative is to live and operate in the past,” wrote Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Thad Allen in his blog, iCommandant, referring to efforts to increase the life of the service’s aging fleet “This is a stewardship issue that we all own.”

Ostebo said the ships stationed in locations such as Guam and Puerto Rico likely will be part of the rotation cycle because they tend to have more corrosion than others in the fleet because of higher saline levels in the water and humidity in those areas. On the other hand, ships stationed off the coast of Alaska will be considered because the constant pounding of waves damages the hulls more quickly.

The goal is to have a constant supply of ships in the yard, he said. Once a ship is reconditioned, it will be moved to a location that has different fatigue issues from its previous home port. The idea is based on an aviation model that uses a planned depot maintenance line where, for example, four to five H-60s are always in the yard. Once one aircraft is reconditioned, it is moved to a new home and another aircraft is added to the back of the line.

“If you look at the life history of an airplane, it’s all over the place. The planes tend to age gracefully, predictably at the same rate. Now, we do see corrosion when they spend a lot of time in Hawaii, in Puerto Rico, but we can expect that during this next overhaul cycle, then move the planes somewhere else,” Ostebo said. “We want to take some of the lessons learned and try to apply them to the shipboard community.”

New maintenance methods

But before any of the vessels can be moved, another major transformation must first take place. The Coast Guard on Jan. 26 stood up the Surface Forces Logistics Center at the historic Coast Guard Yard in Baltimore. The center will put all maintenance responsibilities under one roof. Instead of having multiple contacts for various maintenance issues, a product line manager will oversee an entire class, allowing the service to identify trends, operate more efficiently and buy materials in bulk, saving taxpayers money.

Under the old system, if a ship had engine problems, the crew would go to its commander, who would then try to negotiate a deal with the manufacturer. Machinery Technician 1st Class Neil Huber, who oversees the maintenance at Coast Guard Station Curtis Bay, Md., said his job has changed dramatically since the SFLC concept was outlined in 2006.

Curtis Bay, like many other stations throughout the Coast Guard, has a 41-foot utility boat that’s roughly 30 years old and three smaller 25-foot boats. He said one of the biggest problems he had keeping the older boats operational was finding the correct parts.

“A lot of them have just become obsolete,” Huber said. To err on the side of caution, he said, at one time he had more than 600 parts stored at the station. Now he has none.

“The parts are still going to be outdated, but they are identifying those parts and finding a new manufacturer or a part that will meet the standard for what’s on the boats,” he said.

Since a test concept of the small-boat product line stood up Oct. 1, the Coast Guard has seen a significant difference, Ostebo said.

“We woke up one day and realized we had 11 percent of the Honda 225 outboard motor market [the motor used in Coast Guard small boats], which means that if Honda is not making a profit off the Coast Guard, they are not making a profit at all,” Ostebo said. “Now, if you consolidate your leverage as an organization and go to Honda and say the 225s are not lasting as long as we want, Honda jumps.”

Once all the product lines are stood up, each manager will be tasked with assessing the health of the fleet. After the analysis is complete, officials will decide which ships need to be moved, Ostebo said. A pilot 378-foot high endurance cutter product line will stand up later this month.

“We are seeing some early results in our small boat product line. We are noticing that our 47-footers off the coast of Oregon are aging from a structural perspective faster than the ones that are down in, say, the Gulf of Mexico, where they are not rolling around in the surf,” Ostebo said, adding that some small boats in Oregon may be moved to the Gulf of Mexico — and vice versa — early this year.

Product line managers will make sure the configuration of ships in each class is the same, so crews will not have to be retrained when a new ship arrives.

“Our focus is not to incur the additional costs of moving a whole bunch of crews around and disrupting peoples’ family lives for no reason. The crews will be subject to normal rotation cycles, and we will just move the assets around. It will be a good thing for the crews to have different assets to operate, with probably a different fatigue situation on it,” Ostebo said.

Beyond their limits?

The Coast Guard’s high-endurance cutters, icebreakers, medium-endurance cutters, inland construction and river tenders, and small harbor tugs are either at or near the end of their planned service lives. While plans are in the works to update many of the aging vessels that can not immediately be replaced, the Coast Guard’s constantly changing missions and long overseas deployments are taking a toll on the fleet.

Two of the most recent examples are the cutters Gallatin and Dallas, both of which are more than 40 years old and beyond their anticipated service lives.

Gallatin was removed from a patrol last July and sent back to its home port to “resolve multiple casualties.” An inspection revealed the cutter was highly corroded and suffering from structural deterioration, according to a recent message sent by Allen to service members.

Around the same time Gallatin was home-ported, the cutter Dallas returned from an extended deployment to the Black Sea, where it played a “crucial” role in delivering humanitarian supplies to the Republic of Georgia as part of Operation Assured Delivery following the South Ossetia conflict.

Though Dallas’ efforts were “lauded” by the Defense Department, its crew had to overcome many challenges while at sea, including several fires. According to Allen’s servicewide message, both Dallas and Gallatin have structural deterioration, “including excessive corrosion of the longitudinals and holes in the bulkheads behind insulation [that] has reduced the watertight integrity and structural strength of the vessels to the point where they need immediate repairs.”

In the message, Allen acknowledged that the Dallas crew’s hard work during deployment may have kept the ship going, but he said the problems are “symptomatic of the deteriorating condition of the entire WHEC fleet. … While operationally effective, we have known that the readiness of our WHEC fleet has been reflected in increasing maintenance costs and lost operational days. 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 and offshore patrol cutters come on-line.”

Ostebo maintains that despite documented problems with the service’s high endurance cutters, the Coast Guard is ready for what he calls “out-of-hemisphere” deployments if called upon, citing the West Coast-based cutter Boutwell that just deployed as part of the Navy’s Boxer Expeditionary Group.

During its six-month deployment, the Boutwell is expected to be assigned, at least for part of the time, to the newly formed Combined Task Force 151, set up specifically to battle pirates off the coast of Somalia and in the Gulf of Aden.

“Managing operations and maintenance of old ships is not something new to us; the creativity and can-do attitude of Coast Guard crews have allowed us to stay on the front lines securing the homeland, saving those in peril and protecting the marine environment despite the challenges of aging assets,” Allen wrote in a recent blog post.

An aging fleet

To cut maintenance costs and extend the service life of the Coast Guard’s surface ships, the service plans to rotate some of its vessels’ home ports, especially those in harsh climates. The fleet includes:

High-endurance cutters: Twelve 378-foot cutters entered the fleet in the 1960s, with the entire class undergoing a modernization from 1980 to 1992.

Medium-endurance cutters and 110-foot patrol boats: A mission effectiveness project to refurbish systems and boost quality of life for crews is underway for the cutters, which are at or near the end of their service lives

Buoy tenders: Mid-life availability projects are being considered for the fiscal 2011 budget for both the 225-foot buoy tenders commissioned between 1996 and 2004, and the 175-foot buoy tenders, which debuted in 1996.

Icebreaking tugs: A 2001 evaluation found the eight 140-foot tugs — commissioned between 1979 and 1988 — were in good condition, although some did not meet mission requirements. A request in the fiscal 2010 budget would address those shortfalls.

Inland construction and river tenders: The service received $4 million in the fiscal 2009 budget “to address maintenance challenges” of the 160-foot inland construction tenders and the 75-foot river tenders, built in the 1960s.

Small harbor tugs: The service is reassessing a 2002 analysis of the 11 small harbor tugs — built between 1961 and 1967 — that found the service life could be extended to 2008.

Source: Coast Guard