Future USCGC Pickering (Image: Austal USA)
A senior Coast Guard officer overseeing the Offshore Patrol Cutter program indicated he’d be open to working with either Austal or Eastern Shipbuilding Group for the third phase of the program, potentially setting up a rematch between the two companies with billions of dollars in work on the line.
For the first time, this report seems to reflect a sense of urgency on the part of the Coast Guard procurement team,
“All I want is ships as fast as I can get them,” said Rear Admiral Chad Jacoby when asked about maintaining two shipbuilders for the Offshore Patrol Cutter Program.
It’s about time. Replacement of the WMECs has been dragged out about two decades longer than it should have been.
The current situation is that Eastern was awarded a contract with options for up to nine Offshore Patrol Cutters in September 2016. That should have kept the company busy into at least 2026. Now it looks like they will not be finished with the first four before 2026. The program was seriously delayed at least partly due to a hurricane that hit the shipyard. Eastern asked for extraordinary relief and relief was granted in the form of higher prices and delayed delivery, but the Coast Guard decided they would only exercises options with Eastern for ships one through four. They embarked on a second competitive bid for up to eleven ships, 5 through 15 which was awarded to Austal in June 2022. That contract should keep Austal busy until 2032 with the last contract to be awarded (I believe) in 2029.
The Coast Guard now says the Offshore Patrol Cutter and Polar Security Cutter are the services highest priority programs, but it has taken too long for the OPC to become a priority. We should have been building them in parallel with the National Security Cutter, just as we built WHECs and WMECs in parallel in the 1960s. The National Security Cutters were funded at a rate averaging about one every two years, so there were several years after the first NSC was funded when no major cutter was funded. At the very least we should have at least been funding one in those years. We might have been able to fund two WMEC replacements in years when we were not funding NSCs. In fact, both programs should have been begun in the 1990s. Why didn’t we? Our operational analysis, contracting, and naval engineering staffs had been gutted and atrophied. We can’t let that happen again.
Phase 3? Are we talking about an award in the near future or perhaps as a follow on to Austal’s contract for OPCs #5 through 15, e.g. about 2030?
If phase 3 is in the near future, would Austal even be able to build additional ships while also completing phase 2? I don’t really think we are ready to award a contract for ten additional ships in the near future.
If phase 3 is to begin following the last Fiscal Year of funding for phase two (about 2030) then Eastern will no longer have a hot production line.
If it is not Eastern or Austal, in the two contracts so far, the contractor was expected to build do a detail design and then begin building one ship each year for the first three years and only then begin building two ships per year. I don’t think we want a third subclass. I don’t think we want to go back to funding a new detail design or funding only one ship per year. Other shipyards probably would not be competitive anyway since Eastern and Austal will have both gone through the learning curve and would have substantial advantages over competitors.
Take another look at Eastern’s Contract.
If as I believe, we will not be ready to contract for ten more ships in the near future, but we don’t want to wait until after OPC#15 when Eastern’s production line will be cold, to award phase 3, there may be another option.
If we are now confident that Eastern is competent and competitive, maybe we could revisit and renegotiate the original contract to provide at least two and potentially up to five additional OPCs.
Thanks to Lee for bringing this to my attention.