The Coast Guard is stretched to its operational limit, the service's top officer is warning.
Coast Guard cutters are only able to stop a tenth of the narcotics flowing into the U.S. by water and another crisis, like a migrant influx or major oil spill, would strain the Coast Guard's capacity to respond, the service's top officer warns. Under its current budget, the service is stretched to its operational limit.
"We're not keeping pace," in the budget, Commandant Adm. Paul Zukunft said, adding that the service is still funded below the sequestration-era levels that hamstrung military operations.
The Coast Guard, under Zukunft's two years, has its largest Two years into his tenture as commandant, Coast Guard Adm. Paul Zukunft is sitting on the service's largest acquisitions budget in years, with a second polar icebreaker in the works, an extra national security cutter on the horizon and a few months to go until the service awards its largest every acquisition contract in history.
But that's come at the expense of operational and maintenance funds.
The next hill to climb, Zukunft said Monday in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., is a shoestring operations and maintenance budget that hasn't grown since the sequestration debacle of 2013 and that leaves little room for the myriad crises the Coast Guard is expected to cover.
"You can usually do one of three things," Zukunft said Monday in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. "You can modernize, you can build or restore readiness or you can build force structure. Rarely do you get to do all three."
For the better part of a decade, the Coast Guard has been working on an unprecedented recapitlization program, starting with the national security cutter. Originally planned for eight ships, last year's budget awarded long-lead materials for a ninth.
And later this year, service will choose from among Bollinger Shipyards, Eastern Shipbuilding Group and Bath Iron Works to build 29 offshore patrol cutters, the service's biggest acquisition project ever, to replace two classes of medium endurance cutters that have been in the water for 25 to 50 years.
The Coast Guard has its modernization projects nearly locked up, so the next step is to take a look at operations and maintenance dollars.
The service has always had a plug-and-play approach, Zukunft said, taking its limited operational budget — this fiscal year, that was $6.8 billion — and spreading it out over its 11 mission areas.
Some of those are really stable, he said. For example, commercial fishing compliance is at about 95 percent. On the other hand, the service can only intercept about However, on the best of days, he added, the service can only target about 10 percent of the drugs coming into the U.S. by water, despite enough intelligence on about 80 percent of the flow.
Another disaster would strain the Coast Guard's response capacity.That's sustainable to point, Zukunft said. Going back to the 1988, there has been a major hurricane in the U.S. during every election year, he said. The service is ready for that, but if another disaster came around — a migrant crisis, or an oil spiell — the service would be hard-pressed to scrounge up enough assets to respond to both.
"Unfortunately, I don't have a ghost fleet tied up somewhere," he said.
Looking ahead
Zukunft's term has also been marked by major personnel strides. Within his first year, the service extended tour lengths for thousands of billets, cutting down on permanent change-of-station costs and allowing many Coasties to spend an extra year at their duty stations.
The service also unveiled is diversity and inclusion policy last year, an effort to recruit and retain more women and minorities into the service.
Zukunft touted the Coast Guard Academy's incoming Class of 2020, which is 40 percent female and 30 percent from underrepresented minorities.
But the challenge will be to keep those people in for the next 40 years, which is the goal with any class.
"When I look at 10 years, we lose roughly 50 percent of our female officers out of a given year-group," he said, and the same is true for minorities.
The diversity policy aims for more well-rounded recruiting numbers, as well as research on the reasons so many women and minorities leave and what the service could do to persuadeget them to stay.
The obvious answer, Zukunft said, is that women get out for family reasons.
"Can you be married, have a family, have those challenging positions and do it all?" he said.
It can be particularly challenging for Coast Guard women, he added, half of whom are married to other service members. In a bid to entice more women to stay, the service expanded its maternity leave to eight weeks earlier this year.
And this year, the service revamped its enlisted education pipeline, requiring formal, schoolhouse training for members to make E-4, E-6, E-7 and E-9.
"We're still catching up in that regard when it comes to officer leadership programs," Zukunft said.
There is interest in a similar overhaul, he added, but it's a question of capacity whether they have time and space to create new training.
Meghann Myers is the Pentagon bureau chief at Military Times. She covers operations, policy, personnel, leadership and other issues affecting service members.
