By Geoff Fein
As the Coast Guard begins to take delivery of new sea and air assets, some of which are being acquired under the Deepwater program, service officials recognize the need to recapitalize older assets to continue to execute missions, a senior Coast Guard official said.
But it is highly doubtful any further Coast Guard recapitalization efforts will take on the look and feel of Deepwater, Rear Adm. Gary Blore, assistant commandant for acquisition and the chief acquisition officer for the Coast Guard, told Defense Daily in an interview earlier this week.
The Coast Guard is currently doing a mission effectiveness program for the Island-class cutters and the Medium Endurance Cutters, Blore said. That should be followed by looking at the High Endurance Cutters, the buoy tender fleet, and the 140-foot ice breaking tugs, he added.
“The Coast Guard in today’s dollars probably needs about $2 billion, continuously for the next 30 to 40 years, to completely recapitalize itself,” Blore said. “We are not quite there yet. We recognize we are just getting started. At some point we need to build up to that level to keep the fleet going.”
Blore added he is 100 percent confident the service is now thinking of itself in terms of being a Coast Guard acquisition effort, and not as a Deepwater or as a general acquisition effort.
He added service officials are keeping an eye on assets, whether they be aircraft or command, control, computers, communication and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) components for the surface fleet, to avoid a repeat of realizing systems are wearing out all at once and then starting a new acquisition project.
“We do have a lot of things that are wearing out. We are watching them all. We are doing plots and graphs and trend lines–‘what are the next assets that are going to come off line,'” Blore said. “We do need some confidence and patience on the part of the public that if we get the right amounts of money we will maintain this Coast Guard and keep it viable and able to execute Coast Guard missions.”
Blore said the service is working better than he has ever seen as a Coast Guard organization. “We have our technical authorities and our sponsor, and we are watching every dollar and every asset as it is coming up to the end of its service life.”
“We are very focused on the 378-foot high endurance cutters, but we are not focused on the things in the news. We are focused on the things we hope you never see in the news…they are getting a little long in the tooth but we are putting the right funding into them right now so we can keep them operating,” he added.
As the Coast Guard begins recapitalizing the rest of its platforms, Blore doesn’t see the need to do another Deepwater-type acquisition.
“I think as long as we keep the system focus now, my immediate answer would be, no, because I don’t think we did this before…we weren’t doing this in the 90s,” he said.
The way Deepwater started, according to Blore, was that service officials recognized the need to find a replacement for the High Endurance Cutter.
“Then, as they started looking at the High Endurance Cutters, they recognized the helicopter was at the end of its service life…both of them. The C-130 was at the end of its service life, the patrol boats were at the end of their service, and oh, by the way, the Medium Endurance Cutters are coming up to the end of their service life,” Blore said.
Out of that was born the decision to go beyond recapitalizing the High Endurance Cutters to what eventually became known as Deepwater, he added.
In June 2002, the Coast Guard awarded the Deepwater contract to Integrated Coast Guard Systems (ICGS), a joint venture between Lockheed Martin [LMT] and Northrop Grumman [NOC].
Blore said service officials are now looking at every asset. We are not going to go back to the ’90s where maybe we took our eye off that focus a little bit.
“We are focusing on everything now, watching as it ages and matures. Sometimes things last longer than we gave them credit for to begin with, and we are factoring that in. Sometimes they don’t,” he added.
Blore noted there were a lot of issues with the original Deepwater concept that ended up causing it not to work as well as originally intended. One issue, in particular, he pointed out, was that Deepwater never became a Coast Guard system. It always [was] a Deepwater system,” he added.
That meant the effort to modernize a third of the service’s fleet of ships and aviation assets was about that system and optimizing that system, Blore said. “We are not about optimizing that system. We are about optimizing the Coast Guard. That’s what the taxpayer expects.”
The taxpayer wasn’t looking for some assets to be optimized leaving other Coast Guard assets unable to communicate with the new systems because they were not part of Deepwater, Blore added.
“The taxpayer is looking for the Coast Guard to operate as one seamless organization and that’s the way we look at the system now,” Blore said. “And that’s why I don’t think we are going to get to another spot where we are going to say ‘Oh my goodness there are six things we didn’t think about.’ We are thinking about them all now. We just need to keep progressing through them.”