Bean: Do we have any more thoughts on the matter of the Coast Guard? I know we got cut short last time, but we need to figure it out sooner rather than later.
Davy Jones: Taking your idea one step further, would there be any advantage to contracting out all of the boat maintenance and operation to the private sector and only having the law enforcement officers be government employees?
Bean: That's an interesting idea. Anything that can and should be done pierside will be contracted out. There's been a lot of progress in reducing manning and even things like painting are usually done by contractors these days. But I'm not sure it works for the total package.
First, it might not reduce cost at all, because it's going to drive up manpower requirements. This is sort of like suggesting that we outsource driving police cars, and just let the officer do arrests and the like. Particularly in the bigger ships, the boarding party is definitely a part-time job. There's maybe one or two ships a day it gets sent to, for a total time of a couple hours. It would be nice to be able to get use out of the rest of the time those people have. On a smaller boat, it's more in ability to trade off duties. The USCG has a 4-man crew on a 25' boat. How many would we need to replace them? It's very possible that 3 people who know how to run the boat are required on an 8-hour shift, and boarding takes 3 LEOs and a guy to mind the boat. If we insist on rigid separation of duties, we now need 6 people to do what previously took 4.
My other concern is from a group dynamics perspective. This seems likely to develop a really bad rivalry between the two sides. "Oh, you're just a taxi driver to haul us around." "We do all the work, and you guys just sit around until it's time to go play with your guns." Having everyone under the same roof, and encouraging people to work on both sides, seems a lot less likely to develop this problem. There's also the question of working together and making sure everyone has the right skills in cases like lifesaving. Whose job is it to dive into the water to rescue that swimmer? This also blurs the chain of command. I'd like the guy calling the shots to be someone who understands the nautical end as well as the law enforcement end, and not just someone who has spent his career riding around looking down at the contractors running the boat.
More minor issues are on the legal front. A lot of these ships are going to spend time outside our territorial waters, and I have no idea what international law thinks of that. I really, really don't want to get into an international incident over whether the boarding and seizure of a vessel engaged in illegal fishing was actually privateering because we had a contractor do it. Or anything of that nature.
Tony Zbaraschuk: I tend to agree that law enforcement and military need to be separate functions.
Also, the Coast Guard type doesn't really need power-projection or deep-sea abilities. Different mission. Plus anti-boat weapons are different than anti-ship ones. I see every reason to keep up the separation.
Bean: The bigger ships do need deep-sea abilities. A 200' OPV is essentially a light frigate or a corvette with less armament. While I don't expect us to have the exact situation, I wouldn't rule out something in the vein of the Cod Wars happening to us. And if it does, I'd like the Coast Guard to be able to respond, because that's not really what the Navy is for.
Davy Jones: Since we're going to have to deal with a multitude of threats, we could use simulations to validate the number of ships that we'll need.
Bean: I'm of two minds about such things. In theory, they have the potential to be incredibly useful. In practice, such things don't have a particularly happy history. The mess that Robert McNamara's various numerical methods made out of Vietnam and US defense in general in the 60s springs rather forcefully to mind. Of course, his analytical methods were almost deliberately chosen to exclude all real facts from the results. I'm sure that models will be used, maybe even quite extensively, but I intend to be careful as to how we go about it. I'd be happy to keep you informed as we do so. But this isn't really the right venue to address this, so I'm going to table it and move on.
Davy Jones: I have friends in the UK who volunteer for search and rescue missions at sea. Would we have a volunteer segment to our coast guard or would we allow NGOs to provide support?
Bean: I assume you're referring to the RNLI. There's definite value to be gained by working with volunteers, and I'd prefer to have them as a civilian auxiliary rather than as affiliates. That's a good idea, although they'll obviously be focused on the lifesaving side, not the law enforcement side.
Davy Jones: You mentioned air support in one of your previous responses. Will we want our coast guard to handle any of that? The 200' ships have a hangar and a helipad, so would they borrow the aircraft and their pilots from the air force or train their own?
Bean: Well, you're assuming we have an air force independent of the Navy. But I think it's definitely a good idea for the Navy to have its own aviation units under its direct control. I'll go into more detail on this later. That said, I think it would probably be better for the Coast Guard to have their own aircraft for several reasons. First, they don't do quite the same thing as any of the other services. Second, there are the same drivers as there are in making the Coast Guard independent and mostly non-uniformed. Someone wants to fly helicopters in bad conditions long-term? Let him.
Davy Jones: Why don't we roll the Coast Guard into the police force? Since that's really what they are - police on boats...
Bean: They're not just the police. They're also the nautical counterpart to both the fire department and the building inspector. Making them part of the police emphasizes that mission over the others. I suppose if we unify all of our national police and make different departments, instead of going with the US model of having a dozen different law enforcement organizations, they'd make sense, but only under a very broad umbrella.
Alexander: It seems unlikely you'd give the Coast Guard responsibility for areas too far from your coast, but quite a few things we might want our navy to do would be coast guard type missions near the coast of other countries. Counter piracy, embargoes, force protection, any kind of low level security presence etc. I'd like to keep the coastguard operating closely with the (rest of the?) navy, though the idea of making them civilian auxiliaries is appealing. This is keeping in mind the idea that we might want to operate some small coastal craft, something like the Strb 90 or Ctruk Thor11, from the well deck of an amphibious warfare ship, maybe even out of something as small as a frigate like the Absalon class.
Bean: Define "too far from the coast". The basic difference between the Coast Guard and the Navy is in ConOps. The Coast Guard's job is to do predictable day-to-day tasks. Driving a 25' patrol boat to make sure no nefarious characters are running around a port isn't that different from sailing a 200' OPV 150 miles offshore to protect our waters from fishing vessels that don't belong there in terms of how you structure your force.
You make a valid point about Coast Guard missions near other people's coasts, and the US uses their Coast Guard that way a lot. I'm not sure that's a good idea for us. We may have to pick up littoral forces for use on other people's coasts at a later time. I'm personally very cautious about making sure we don't lose sight of our hot war roles in that kind of stuff.
Davy Jones: In what respect are the Coast Guard the equivalent of building inspectors? That's a very interesting idea!
Bean: At least in the US, the Coast Guard is responsible for enforcing maritime regulations. And I don't mean regulations like "don't carry drugs" or even "don't dump sewage into protected coastal areas", although they are responsible for those, too. I mean regulations like "make sure your boat is seaworthy" and "have adequate safety gear". There's no jumping out and wrestling bad guys in that. We could use a different agency for those tasks, but it seems easier to teach one guy on an existing boat how to inspect for those violations, instead of building and crewing a second boat just for that job.
Davy Jones: Since you've floated the idea, couldn't we come up with a broader system for protecting the public than having a bunch of different agencies? I appreciate that a lot of agencies tend to accumulate responsibilities and one ends up with duplication, but if the Coast Guard can handle everything on the seas, then maybe we should be making them the basis for our land agencies and make the Coast Guard a part of that! Since we're creating everything from scratch, we can tackle the difficult questions!
Bean: This is the committee on naval matters, not the general government organization committee. That said, this strikes me as, at best, essentially creating one department labeled "Public Protection" and just moving all of the existing agencies under it. I'll grant you that the US system of setting up a new organization every time some threat becomes really high-profile (the DEA and ATF are the most prominent examples of this) is rather silly, but even if they were to roll every federal law-enforcement agency into the FBI, how much of a difference would it make? You'd still have divisions specializing in drugs, firearms, alcohol, border control, bank robberies, etc, and people would usually make their career in one of them.
At worst, you get more serious organizational problems. Say that the general opinion in the higher echelons of Public Protection is that the Maritime Division is a waste, and more emphasis should be put into solving proper terrestrial crime. They're slowly starved at the budget table, because almost everyone testifying before the legislature is in favor of focusing more money elsewhere. The worst recruits get sent there, because nobody else wants them, and Maritime doesn't have the pull to not get them. Or if not Maritime, then borders, or alcohol, or goodness knows what else.
Comments
On the subject of military organization and service independence, there's a great book called When Failure Thrives. Whether or not you agree with the book's conclusion, it has an excellent short analysis of nature organizational autonomy in military services. He contrasts airborne forces in three countries. In Russia airborne forces were effectively an independent military service, in the US they were an independent branch within the army, and in the UK there were airborne divisions, but no broader organizational autonomy.
So who had it right? Well that depends on what you're trying to accomplish. Making organizations independent tends to give them better ability to defend their budget, a more coherent organizational identity and culture, and makes them less susceptible to pressure from other parts of the organization. None of those things is intrinsically good or bad, but can be good or bad depending on circumstances and what you're trying to achieve. In the long run making institutions more independent lead to them getting more money and more distinction from other services. The question you have to ask is if you think that independence is worth the price that will come with it: money spent on that force that won't be spent on other things, an institution with its own sense of priorities different than the rest of the military, and reduced integration with the rest of the military.
https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/combat-studies-institute/csi-books/WhenFailureThrives.pdf
That looks interesting. I'll have to at least glance through it at some point. Thanks.
I can't help thinking that support for having a Coast Guard separate from the Navy comes more from most of the people here (and even if not bean is the one who matters the most) being USians and the US doing things that way because it doesn't seem that countries which have the functions the US Coast Guard does done by the Navy, the water division of the police force and possibly a separate agency for safety (how often do ships need to be inspected at sea for safety?) don't seem to be having any problems with different arrangements.
Though many of them do have a civilian coast guard dedicated to search and rescue.
Of course what I said applies to pretty much everything about any new country, not just details of which military branches to have.
Interestingly the US coast guard was the home of the pioneers of codebreaking in the military thanks to smugglers during prohibition.
One question I have is about splitting rescue from enforcement from inspection. Are their countries that do tthis?
@Anonymous
I'll grant that the US model was influential in my thinking, and probably that of the others involved. But I do think we've made a strong case for it. Yes, it's possible to split out various roles, but they combine much better at sea than on land. Otherwise you're multiplying the boats you need with no good reason. The British in particular have a rather bizarre structure, with about a dozen different agencies doing different things. I don't think it's one we need to copy.
@wubbles
Interesting. I'd never heard that, but it makes sense. That said, they certainly weren't the first to do codebreaking, or even the first to use it at sea on a large scale. The British had major codebreaking capability in WWI. It might have been the only operational US cryptanalysis unit after the Black Chamber closed down, which does make it important in the history of US codebreaking.
wubbles:
Code breaking predates even the US Army.
wubbles: One question I have is about splitting rescue from enforcement from inspection. Are their countries that do tthis?
It's not that uncommon in non-US countries for the coast guard to be solely a search and rescue organization with most of the law enforcement duties the US Coast Guard performs done by the Navy or civilian water police if it's really close in. Of course the Navy and Police still do some search and rescue, especially if they're the closest unit.
In countries with volunteer coast guards the military is likely to handle longer range search and rescue.
So give the Navy and the water Police the necessary enforcement powers rather than having the duplication of a coast guard.
The book cassander linked to is well worth reading and it certainly has convinced me not to have paratroopers (at least not outside specops) though I'll admit to having been previously skeptical of them.
I suspect trying to keep the Air Force subservient to the Navy is going to cause it to be neglected, especially if you make it impossible for anyone who hasn't flown off carrier to get a high rank in it.
I think you're missing that the Coast Guard are the water police, particularly as I've outlined a structure that's decidedly less military than the USCG. And I'm sure that there would be dedicated SAR units within the Coast Guard, just as there are in the USCG. I haven't talked about them much because they're a bit out of the scope of security, which is what I really care about, but they're definitely a thing that will exist.
That's kind of the point. A land-based air force requires permanent bases to deploy. Those take diplomatic commitments in a way that carriers don't. I think we'd be better off not making those commitments, and not having the capability to do so. That way, when the US next asks us to help invade someone, we offer to park a carrier offshore and protest we can't help with the occupation because we aren't set up for it.
How much time does the coast guard spend traveling between inspections? If they don't need to operate outside of the EEZ, would substituting most ships for much faster seaplanes be more efficient? Assuming that AW609s could be modified to take floats, maybe that would allow consolidation with the SAR force too.
Would that be too weak for a hypothetical Cod War? Is a door or belly mounted minigun threatening enough to get ships to stop?
bean:
OK, so not really a military.
bean:
You don't have to send them to other peoples' bases.
bean:
If the government later decides it wants to make those commitments they'll find a way to make them.
bean:
The real way to get out of occupation is to not have a Marine Corps or Army, not lack an Air Force.
IsANobody:
Seaplanes can go a lot further than the EEZ (the ShinMaywa US-2 can go more than ten times as far assuming you don't need it to return and that looks to be the seaplane to buy), even helicopters have the range (though possibly insufficient loiter time).
Seaplanes may not be able to operate in the worst weather, though you probably wouldn't be wanting to board ships in bad weather anyway.
I suspect you'll still need ships but if it were an absolute requirement that you not have any seaplanes do seem like the best bet and they might be able to substitute for ships in a lot of cases.
IsANobody:
Can't see why it couldn't be modified to have them, though you will cut down on speed and range and it might be a bit small for a lot of missions (maybe use V22s instead? being designed for military use means it should be better able to take small-arms fire if someone is stupid enough to resist).
IsANobody:
Even the Royal Navy lost that.
IsANobody:
Should be, some anti-shipping missiles or guided bombs hanging off pylons should also help in the appearing threatening department.
@IsANobody
Unlikely. Seaplanes are very dependent on sea conditions. They work great when you’re operating in good weather or from a sheltered stretch of water, but they’re not a good replacement for an OPV.
In terms of the larger question, I suspect that there isn’t a lot more room to squeeze out ships and replace them with aircraft. If you just need to watch large areas of the sea, then airplanes are great, and that’s how we plan to use them. (In fact, this might be a good way to use drones.) But in terms of actually doing things, a ship is better. A helicopter has only limited endurance and payload, while a ship has a lot more of both. And the response time difference is less than you’d think, as the helicopter takes longer to prep and send out, and is a lot further away. Assuming, of course, we don’t put the helicopter on the ship. Which might not be the worst idea ever.
The problem with the Cod War is that it’s the kind of war where firing the gun is an unacceptable escalation. Trading paint with the other guy is fine, but if you actually shoot at/near him, it’s basically an act of war. And helicopters are useless there.
@Anonymous
So you’re talking about the ANG now? My plan is to make them hard to starve by tying them explicitly to geographic locations. This harnesses the natural pork-barreling tendency of Homo Governus to keep them funded.
Options shape policy, too. If the traditional foreign policy is to not make those commitments, and they can’t do it easily, they probably won’t.
The Air Force and the Army are complimentary, just as the Navy and Marine Corps are. The Marines can be set up to be unsuitable for long-duration deployment away from the ships, which should make them safe enough.
Follow up on the seaplane stuff:
Is foregoing inspections during bad weather so bad? How rough is the weather around Paperclip-topia?
For remote sensing, will we be able to piggyback on a naval surveillance system? That might not save much overall cash, but would move it out of the Coast Guard budget.
How dense do you expect SAR stations to be? UK lifeboat stations seem to vary a lot from around 2hr of (Tamar-class) travel between them to much less in the Channel. Aircraft scramble times might be crippling for the denser end of that but should permit a lot of consolidation at the sparse side. Deployed ships provide even less dense coverage than that, right?
Given the rarity of Cod Wars situations, do we even need continuous preparation for that? It might make more sense to pay ships to act as an auxiliary if the need arises.
bean:
The US-2 is claimed to be able to operate in 3 m waves (in fact it's claimed they've landed in even worse doing SAR) which is 5 on the Beaufort scale, is a ship really going to be able to do much of anything in stronger weather?
bean:
The requires the ship to already be there. If you have to cover a large area that may be a problem.
bean:
If the ship is big enough that works very well.
bean:
It'll probably be sufficient to keep them from being disbanded, but they may still be underfunded (kind of like how the USMC so often has the oldest equipment).
bean:
True to a point, but if the resources are perceived to exist to support the options they may just be created.
bean:
Right up until the politicians decide they need to be able to send the Marines on long deployments away from the ships.
IsANobody:
Probably end up based on how dense traffic is.
IsANobody:
More traffic across the Channel.
@IsANobody
It could be. I'm not going to give numbers, but I'm really reluctant to just accept aircraft as a replacement for ships. Sometimes, you need continuous presence, which is easy for a ship, but hard for aircraft. And a helicopter loaded with a boarding party can't easily switch to SAR, particularly if the SAR involves saving the passengers from a sinking cruise ship. Nor can it do other jobs.
Are we talking about space surveillance, or about flying airplanes around? For the latter, the basic answer is that they do somewhat different types of flying. The Coast Guard isn't looking for submarines, and doesn't need planes fitted for that. We could do "fitted for but not with", but I suspect one side or the other would be getting a rather suboptimal plane.
I'd be skeptical of assuming that the current people doing these jobs are blinded by conservatism into using boats when aircraft are totally capable of doing the job. I'm not an expert in civilian SAR/lifesaving, but the people who are seem to consider boats important.
Correct. But deployed ships do a lot of different missions, and can swap between them quickly.
What kind of ships are you going to be paying? A key need in those situations is maneuverability and speed. That's not a lot in demand civilian-side, unless you get into silly yachts. And those are generally fragile, expensive to charter, and probably not capable of staying at sea like we'd need.
@Anonymous
Yes. I'm a bit skeptical of said claims, and even then, it's SAR. They take risks nobody else will. Given the wholesale abandonment of seaplanes for helicopters, I suspect that operational limitations are worse than they let on.
Which is why you use both. I'm mostly pointing out that saying "this one is much faster than that one" is a bit misleading.
Why is it a bad thing that the guys flying strike missions off the carriers have better equipment than the guys practicing air defense? Someone is always going to have the oldest equipment, and I'd rather it was the ANG.
I'm not pretending this is a permanent 100% solution. It's very possible that someone could undo the system I'm building. But it's better to build that system than to say "Somebody might build a proper army at some point, so I might as well do it now."
That will take time. Again, it's quite possible that someone could undo these decisions. But what they can't do is undo them impulsively or overnight. "I'm sorry, sir. We can't deploy to Baghdad in three weeks. Our heavy logistics is on the ships." "How long will it take you to get it ashore?" "It'll take a couple months, minimum, to spin up the units, and we'll need more money and manpower."
bean:
They claim to operate in worse than that, I believe the 3 m figure is what it's cretified for.
The big flying boats seem to be for SAR beyond helicopter range.
bean:
Yes, but does that mean a bit old but still competitive or completely outclassed?
I suspect there's more going on than a simple number would tell us, and I really don't want to be the one who has to take the sort of boat that will fit on a seaplane over to a ship to inspect it, particularly in those seas.
Old but still competitive. I have no desire to leave the homeland undefended, but it doesn't make sense to have a completely separate service that may start getting ideas about deployment.
bean:
Could you even do the boarding in those seas with acceptable risk for non-SAR activities?
bean:
The risk is that in the future the people running things might not bother with the still competitive requirement and with old fighter aircraft there will be a lot of argument over whether it actually can compete with what the nearest threat power has.
I understand that, but that's the sort of risk which just can't be controlled. I suspect they'd get planes the Navy was done with, as the reserves do today, which is going to ensure a fairly steady turnover.
bean:
That would require the Navy to be buying new aircraft for the carriers before the old ones are actually obsolete, the US may not have much of an issue with replacing military equipment that still has useful life left in it but doing so also provides more government contracts to US companies (i.e. it's corporate welfare, plain and simple).
In the beginning at least there won't be any secondhand aircraft from the Navy to equip the Air Force with.
There's a definite alignment between the interests of the ANG and Navy on this. The ANG wants newer planes, as does the Navy. SO the Navy gets new planes, and the ANG gets hand-me-downs from them.
Find someone who's replacing their fighters, and buy them. Bonus points if it's the same or a similar type. If we do go Gripen, buy retired Swedish models for the ANG. Or old Hornets. Not so sure what to do if we chose the Rafale.
Yes, but you've still got the risk of the politicians deciding that if the Navy's planes aren't obsolete there's no need to replace them.
I wouldn't say bonus if a similar type, diversity has it's advantages and if you're buying second hand you do end up with less choice.
But how many countries actually sell non-obsolete fighter jets on the open market?
True, but it seems silly to control for that risk by instead insisting on a separate Air Force.
There are definitely countries who seem to have at least a few Gripens and Legacy Hornets that they might be willing to unload. Sweden seems to have some of the former in storage (they've sold old ones to Hungary and someone else), and I believe Canada and Switzerland are both looking to replace the latter.
Define "non-obsolete". Obviously, a MiG-21 would fail. But what block of Legacy Hornet is obsolete?
bean:
As I understand it most of the time fighter aircraft are replaced it's due to them either being obsolete or approaching the end of the fatigue life.
Countries that make their own seem to be the exception and in that case it's as much corporate welfare as anything else.
bean:
What is it likely to fight? Against some third world air forces even an original MiG-21 might be enough, against the US you might need Raptors but won't be able to get them.