‘Not Enough’: US Coast Guard’s new ops posture statement raises alarm on need for more money

WASHINGTON — Faced with an increasing number of missions, personnel and materiel readiness shortfalls, and “finite resources,” the US Coast Guard today published its first “Operational Posture” document [PDF], which a senior officer said is intended to convey to lawmakers and the public how stretched his service has become.

“What we’re finding is, as we are operating our current fleet to accomplish missions [and] … recapitalizing to make sure that we have readiness in the future to do our missions, we quite simply do not have enough funding to do all of that at the same time,” Vice Adm. Peter Gautier, the service’s deputy commandant for operations, told an audience today during an event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The new 11-page document largely serves as a list of the various missions the service is tasked with — ranging from marine safety to cybersecurity — and the regions around the world the service operates in.

Although Gautier explicitly said the statement is not “a pitch for money,” he also made it clear the USCG cannot continue on its current trajectory indefinitely without a budgetary boost — ideally to the tune of $6 billion annually.

“We only have funding to do maintenance on roughly half of what we need to do on the maintenance inventory to keep our cutters functional,” he said. “We have small boats that are aging out and … our aircraft fleet is getting old. Spare parts are no longer manufactured for some of these types [of aircraft].”

“We really, really do struggle, and our path is going to be really challenged unless we get the kind of budget support that we need to keep ourselves on a sustainable track,” he continued.

Earlier this year, the Coast Guard’s ship maintenance woes caught up with the service at an inconvenient and coincidental time. As Breaking Defense reported, while the leaders of the United States, Canada and Finland were preparing to meet in Washington, DC, to sign the new ICE Pact agreement, the USCG’s icebreakers were both sidelined from heading north to patrol Arctic waters — one of the service’s key missions.

RELATED: ICE Pact: Why the US had to recruit help in race with Russia, China for Arctic icebreakers

When asked about the message the Coast Guard wants lawmakers to take away from the new operational statement, Gautier emphasized that the maritime environment is “changing rapidly.”

“That’s just increasing the demand for Coast Guard services exponentially. We have the right people and the right workforce and the right missions and authorities to do wonderful things, but we need the support of our stakeholders in Congress in order to overcome the challenges that we have in sustaining readiness of our current capabilities, while we build the readiness of the future,” he said.