Coast Guard adapts to larger homeland security mission.

• Author: Kennedy, Harold

The U.S. Coast Guard is stepping up efforts to improve its equipment and tactics in order to enhance its part in homeland security.

In recent weeks, the Coast Guard announced a series of contracts connected with its Deepwater modernization program, which is aimed at replacing the services aging offshore fleet.

The contracts included orders for the service's first new National Security Cutter, two medium-range maritime patrol aircraft and three medium response boats.

The Coast Guard's modernization program was the focus of an exposition held recently in Baltimore's Inner Harbor. At the expo, the service's commandant, Adm. Thomas H. Collins, warned that innovation and "reasonable" risk-taking would be required for the modernization effort to succeed.

"It is vitally important to encourage a culture willing to embrace innovation and accept a certain amount of risk," Collins said. "It is imperative that the Coast Guard resist that 'not-invented-here' syndrome."

Collins noted that the first successful steamboat--launched in 1807 by Robert Fulton--was widely derided as "Fulton's Folly." At first, spectators said, "You'll never get it started," Collins observed. "Then, when the engine finally rumbled to life, they said, 'You'll never get it stopped.'

"In a way, they were right," Collins said. "The steam engine did keep on running, and it changed the world."

Like Fulton, the Coast Guard must keep pushing for change, Collins said, if the service is to fulfill both its new homeland security missions and its traditional responsibilities, for maritime search and rescue, drug and illegal immigrant interdiction and fisheries enforcement.

To make that happen, Collins noted, the Coast Guard currently is embarked on two major modernization projects, the Integrated Deepwater System and Rescue 21.

Deepwater, launched in 1998, is the largest recapitalization effort in the service's 213-year history, said spokesperson Jolie Shifflet. It is designed to replace or upgrade the Coast Guard's entire fleet of cutters, patrol boats and aircraft over a 20-year period. To handle this job, the Coast Guard in 2002 awarded a multi-year contract worth as much as $17 billion to Integrated Coast Guard Systems, an equal partnership between Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.

National Security Cutter

Deepwater took some additional steps forward in recent weeks. In April, the Coast Guard awarded two contracts totaling $129 million to Northrop Grumman Corporation Ship Systems, of Pascagoula, Miss., for detailed design and long-lead procurement material for a key part of the program, the service's first new National Security Cutter.

The two contracts mark the first step in building a next-generation class of ships to replace the Coast Guard's decades-old cutters.

The NSC is envisioned as a 425...