Strife

The Academic Blog of the Department of War Studies, King's College London

You are here: Home / Archives for united states coast guard

united states coast guard

Arm the Coast Guard with More Drones in the Caribbean

by

A crewmember from the US Coast Guard Cutter Stratton launches a Scan Eagle UAS during testing. Source: Defense Visual Information Distribution Service

This article is a part of our 2021 Series on Caribbean Maritime Security. Read the Series Introduction at this link.

In February, a P-3 ‘Orion’ maritime surveillance aircraft identified and tracked a suspicious vessel suspected of trafficking cocaine and vectored in a US Coast Guard cutter to make the interdiction. The Coast Guard seized the vessel and found more than 3,300 pounds of cocaine aboard. US Customs and Border Protection, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security, operates P-3s and other aircraft from Naval Air Stations in Corpus Christi, Texas and Jacksonville, Florida. From these bases they help provide domain awareness over the maritime approaches to the United States in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific. Operations, like the one in February, are often lauded as interagency triumphs – with multiple agencies working together to secure America’s borders. However, they also highlight the lack of maritime surveillance assets within the US Coast Guard itself, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the Caribbean where the Coast Guard is forced to rely on interagency cooperation for aerial maritime surveillance. The Coast Guard urgently needs to invest in its own family of unmanned systems that can provide it with the maritime domain awareness that it relies on other agencies for.

The US Coast Guard is responsible for law enforcement and policing in the territorial waters and exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of the United States, this encompasses eleven specific missions. The Coast Guard also routinely deploys forces globally in support of the Department of Defense and other national priorities like ‘freedom of navigation’ exercises, including to the Strait of Taiwan or its long-standing patrol force in the Persian Gulf. But within the Western Hemisphere alone, the Coast Guard is responsible for policing over 4.2 million square miles of water and nearly a hundred-thousand miles of coastline. In this vast expanse, by far the most vulnerable points are the Caribbean and East Pacific approaches to the United States. The US government’s Drug Enforcement Agency estimates that as much as 80% of the cocaine leaving the Andean region in South America travels by maritime means, with approximately 90% of it eventually landing in Central America before crossing over the US-Mexico border on its way to US consumers. Illicit narcotics, however, are not the only issue the Coast Guard needs to address, US partners in the region are increasingly concerned about illegal, unregulated and unreported (IUU) fishing. This has lead the Coast Guard to deploy cutters to support operations across Latin America from Ecuador to Argentina, to deal with the threat. Of all the regions where it operates, the Coast Guard is perhaps most important in the Caribbean where it works with dozens of smaller partners to address trans-national issues like narcotics trafficking, providing the maritime capacity that oftentimes smaller nations lack.

US Law enforcement agencies have long identified the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific, often referred to as the “transit zone,” as ideal for interdicting illegal shipments, whether the cargo is drugs, weapons or trafficked humans. Maritime narcotics shipments are almost always made in bulk, and the further they travel from their point of origin, the more valuable they become, making seizure in the transit zone much more costly to traffickers than seizures in South America. Additionally, ocean interception represents a low-risk area for interdiction – that is to say that once assets are detailed for interdiction traffickers are not likely to resist capture. But before shipments can be interdicted in the transit zone they need to be found – and searching for go-fast boats and semi-submersibles with surface vessels is nearly impossible, primarily because the vessels are difficult to see. Radars mounted on law enforcement vessels are limited to the horizon by the curvature of the earth. Also critical is loiter time – manned platforms are limited by fuel constraints and eventually by the limits of human endurance. If you want to monitor large areas of the ocean you need to be up in the sky or using a fleet of networked sensors.

Analysts often lament how poorly resourced the US Coast Guard is compared to the other military services. Though considered an ‘armed service’ the Coast Guard is not part of the military, instead, since reforms following 9/11 it has resided in the Department of Homeland Security. It has just over 40,000 active-duty guardsman and a fleet of cutters and aircraft. In part because of this small size the Coast Guard relies on surveillance and detection from other agencies like Customs and Border Protection (CBP) aircraft, a barrage of high-altitude balloons or US military assets including high-end weapon systems like B-1 ‘Lancer’ bombers and Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. While certainly effective, these platforms were designed to fight the Soviet Union and are far more expensive than what is required to track smugglers, the B-1 costs over $60,000 an hour to operate and the destroyers cost nearly a billion dollars per vessel. CBP operates a fleet of maritime patrol aircraft and large unmanned platforms that are much more cost effective. However, these assets are all based in the continental United States and the Coast Guard operates globally. The Coast Guard needs in-house assets that are effective at maritime surveillance and detection, and that can operate wherever the Coast Guard is deployed.

Thankfully, putting unmanned aerial assets on every medium and large cutter is a goal of the current Commandant, Admiral Karl Schultz, and investing in unmanned systems is a part of the service’s strategic plan. Such a move will significantly improve the maritime domain awareness of Coast Guard units at sea and help mitigate their dependence on assets and support loaned from the military and other agencies. But the current Coast Guard program for ship-based UAS is contractor owned and operated while the Coast Guard looks for a permanent solution and experimentation is ongoing. Two new types of UAS look particularly promising for the Coast Guard – vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) UAS, and unmanned surface vessels (USVs). Both of these technologies were successfully demonstrated last year, VTOL UAS was operated from a cutter during a deployment as were two different unmanned surface vessels, each with a mission endurance as long as 30 days.

Ultimately, what is needed is a family of systems that can provide the Coast Guard with an organic and layered maritime surveillance network. Realizing this for the Coast Guard will free up CBP and military assets for other missions more in line with their respective institutional priorities and further empower the Coast Guard. These platforms are desperately needed in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific where the Coast Guard is the lead agency in intercepting illicit narcotics traffickers but also in the fighting against IUU fishing and maritime crime. In setting acquisition priorities for the Coast Guard it would be wise to remember Roger Barnett’s assertion in his book Navy Strategic Culture that “…the most difficult problem in naval warfare is finding the adversary.” Investments in unmanned systems will help support Coast Guard missions not just in counter narcotics but across their 11 statutory missions around the globe, it all starts with domain awareness.

The Caribbean Test Case for the Coast Guard’s Tri-Service Commitment

by

Caption: United States Coast Guard Cutter Stone heads toward the South Atlantic for its maiden patrol.
Source: DVIDS

This article is a part of our 2021 Series on Caribbean Maritime Security. Read the Series Introduction at this link.

In December 2020, the three US sea services—the Navy, the Marine Corps, and the Coast Guard—released a new tri-service maritime strategy, Advantage at Sea: Prevailing with Integrated All-Domain Naval Power. The document leaves no doubt that competition with China and Russia are the primary focus of the strategy and, ostensibly, all three of the services that drafted it. Yet the strategy leaves unanswered questions about one of the Coast Guard’s largest missions in some of its most frequented waters: counter-narcotics in the Caribbean.

How the Coast Guard aligns with the strategic priorities of a tri-service strategy might not seem like new territory. The three sea services coalesced around a shared strategy less than 15 years ago in 2007’s A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower (and later its shorter-lived refresh). It is best understood as roughly split between two visions of the sea services’ raison d’etre. As described by Peter Haynes in his 2015 book, Toward a New Maritime Strategy, part of the strategy reflects the conventional blue water Navy approach to questions of seapower, a traditionalist perspective guided by the intellectual history of Mahan (and Corbett). The other half is dedicated to a much different vision of what sea services do—a view Geoffrey Till has described as post-modernism. Naval post-modernism emphasizes shared responsibilities to protect collective benefits from the maritime commons, leveraging sea control in support of humanitarian missions, diplomacy, and the promotion of good order at sea. It was a high water mark for the role of maritime security in US maritime strategy.

Intellectually, A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower was a boon for the Coast Guard, situating maritime stewardship as a core strategic issue for the sea services. Which meant that implementing the strategy in practice augured relatively few hard questions for the Coast Guard, full as it was with maritime law enforcement responsibilities after 9/11.

Advantage at Sea forces a deeper reckoning for the Coast Guard. The document moves the three services closer to the traditionalist camp, something the Navy’s and Marine Corps’ individual concepts and strategies tend to reinforce. And in its own recent writings, the Coast Guard has shown greatest energy on emerging regions and issues that are driven by strategic competition, such as the Arctic and illegal, unreported, unregulated (IUU) fishing. Indeed, the novel deployment of a USCG cutter to the South Atlantic this winter came about, not because of an interest in narcotics trafficking, but because of the growing concern over Chinese distant-water fishing activities. Word counts are a crude measure of importance, but the impression from a quick review is also instructive. Compared to 33 mentions of China, 16 of Russia, 5 of the Arctic, or 4 of the (Indo-) Pacific, the Caribbean is mentioned only once in the new tri-service strategy, and it’s a photo caption at that. The document nods to other threats—Iran, North Korea, terrorism, transnational crime—and offers an offhand reference to narcotics. Yet the balance of the strategy tilts far from the Caribbean and far from an interest in non-state actors, drug traffickers lower still.

Meanwhile, the domestic political context that has historically promoted a focus on narcotics is also in flux. The war on drugs is at a 40 year trough, given the greater public interest on rehabilitation and criminal justice reform. The result may be that not only is narcotics trafficking no longer seen as a strategic issue for the Coast Guard’s national security mission set, it may also be losing salience as a core strategic law enforcement function for the service.

Despite the move from A Cooperative Strategy’s non-state focus, Advantage at Sea’s discussion of day-to-day competition opens the door for the Coast Guard to play a critical role in great power competition. The strategy describes competition as a contest over the international order, and so we can think about threats to the order as on a continuum. At the high end, rival great powers have the capacity to upend the system in an acute effort to overthrow it—major power war. This is the domain of the Navy and the Marine Corps. But at the low end, even some non-state threats, such as pirates and terrorists, can undermine the system’s benefits when they rise to a level that threaten its core tenets—including the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence and the free flow of maritime commerce. Constabulary and maritime security missions, and therefore the Coast Guard, are thus instrumental to a type of competition with China and Russia that is focused on the health of the international system. The questions for the Coast Guard then become how strictly the service chooses to align with the vision of the new tri-service strategy, and how integral narcotics trafficking in the Caribbean is to the overall health of the international order.

To be clear, the Coast Guard will never fully abandon the Caribbean counter-narcotics mission. Doing so runs afoul of the Coast Guard’s law enforcement responsibilities to the American public, and US political conditions are unlikely to change so much that ending interdiction at or beyond the US border becomes politically desirable. Just as police can deprioritize narcotics arrests without abandoning them entirely, so might be the Coast Guard’s trajectory. Moreover, maritime insecurity is an intersectional problem, with actors and crimes moving across categories and space with ease. Indeed, even the narrative on the recent USCG cutter deployment to the South Atlantic is muddier than it first appears. While on its way south to counter IUU fishing, the ship made news interdicting a suspected drug runner near the Dominican Republic.

Strategy is about hard choices—the missions, capabilities, or regions from which a service must divest in order to focus finite resources on the missions, capabilities, or regions it finds strategically important. Advantage at Sea augurs questions for the Coast Guard that A Cooperative Strategy did not. How important does it weigh its strategic commitments, as outlined in the tri-service strategy, against its regular constabulary responsibilities? And among those constabulary commitments, how have changes in domestic politics shaped the relative importance of the drug mission compared to other constabulary functions, like countering illegal fishing or conducting search and rescue?

The question here is one of overall balance of effort. The question is whether the Caribbean drug mission is still fundamentally strategic in its level of importance for the United States and, if not, whether the Coast Guard should consider options for downsizing its Caribbean counter-narcotics footprint in favor of servicing other, more strategically important missions. If the Coast Guard takes the shift to great power competition as its guiding principle, then it seems like such a reprioritization is in order. The result is a Caribbean test case for the Coast Guard’s commitment to the tri-service strategy.