Eagle Eye UAS, part of the “Deep Water” Coast Guard recapitalization plan.
National Defense has a post that traces the Coast Guard’s two-decade effort to put unmanned aircraft on cutters.
But here is where I confess that this article is not really about the Eagle Eye. Sorry to say that it was all a bit of misdirection, because this article is really about one of the nation’s greatest but chronically underfunded assets: the United States Coast Guard.
National Defense since the Eagle Eye’s cancellation has written dozens of articles about the service’s effort to deploy UAVs. Over and over again, the only reason cited for the Coast Guard being the “have-not” of the services when it comes to drones was funding.
It is a good article, but I think the conclusion of the article is wrong. To paraphrase Jimmy Buffett (“wasting away in Margaritaville”) it’s our own damn fault.
Too long we seemed to glory in doing more with less. Too many years we went without bothering to submit an unfunded priorities list. We really haven’t changed our program of record since the rethink prompted by 9/11 more than two decades ago. We fired the Deepwater program contractors in 2012, but we are still working on their program. There have been changes around the edges, more NSCs, more FRCs, but those changes were not the result of a Coast Guard masterplan. They were ad hoc and frequently driven by Congressional interests.
Congress keeps telling us our planning is out of date. We have not done a fleet mix study since 2011 and even that one only considered the types of platforms already in the program of record without any consideration of alternative types.
Despite repeated Congressional calls for a new Fleet Mix Study, there is none.
Despite repeated Congressional calls for a 20- or 30-year ship building plan, there is none.
We still have not reached the number of medium range fixed wing search aircraft that were in the Program of Record and apparently have not plan to do so.
The Coast Guard has not been transparent in publicly reporting their measures of effectiveness. We don’t see reports like this one anymore. I have not been able to make reports like these (here, here, and here) since 2010.
We have failed to field any shore based maritime search UAS system, a capability that was included in the Deep Water program, while Japan, Thailand, India, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the UK have already done so. This in spite of the fact that we have been piddling around with CBP’s MQ-9 program for well over a decade.
Regional Maritime Domain Awareness programs are being implemented all over the world, but if we have such a program with Mexico and Canada no one seems to know about it.
Planning for the medium Icebreakers could have proceeded in parallel with planning for the heavy icebreakers. We know we need them, but I have seen no indication that we have started looking seriously at the possibilities.
We have not talked about the possibly devastating effects the delays in the OPC program are going to have, that would justify increasing the pace of construction to more than two per year.
We still have not adequately addressed the water borne terrorist threat to our ports. Since we never have its easy to continue to ignore.
Despite demands for reports from field units, for whatever reason, the “puzzle palace” is not making public the kind of analytics required to justify significant departures from what we did last year, so we keep stumbling along from one budget to the next.