Washington: Faced with an increasing number of missions, personnel and materiel readiness shortfalls, and “finite resources,” the US Coast Guard published its first “Operational Posture” document, which a senior officer said is intended to convey to lawmakers and the public how stretched his service has become.
“What we’re finding is, as we are operating our current fleet to accomplish missions [and] … recapitalising to make sure that we have readiness in the future to do our missions, we quite simply do not have enough funding to do all of that at the same time,” Vice Admiral Peter Gautier, the service’s deputy commandant for operations, said during an event at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
The new 11-page document largely serves as a list of the various missions the service is tasked with — ranging from marine safety to cybersecurity — and the regions around the world the service operates in.
Although Gautier explicitly said the statement is not “a pitch for money,” he also made it clear the USCG cannot continue on its current trajectory indefinitely without a budgetary boost — ideally to the tune of $6 billion annually.
“We only have funding to do maintenance on roughly half of what we need to do on the maintenance inventory to keep our cutters functional,” he said. “We have small boats that are aging out and … our aircraft fleet is getting old. Spare parts are no longer manufactured for some of these types [of aircraft].”
“We really, really do struggle, and our path is going to be really challenged unless we get the kind of budget support that we need to keep ourselves on a sustainable track,” he continued.
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