Keeping the Coast Guard Afloat.

AuthorGray, Colin S.

EVERYONE loves the U.S. Coast Guard. Its cutters, with their white-painted hulls and orange stripes, offer the world a kinder and gentler image of American military power. It rescues seafarers in distress, protects marine life, oversees safety in ports and coastal waters, and combats illegal immigration and drug trafficking, making for an exceedingly lengthy list of duties. The Coast Guard, which legally is an armed service, is the sole federal law enforcement agency at sea. It is at once humanitarian, policeman and fighting sailor.

But the U.S. Coast Guard, which is the envy of other coast guards (indeed of many navies) and which enjoys a hugely positive reputation with the public, has a problem. The difficulty lies both in its diverse portfolio and in a service culture that traditionally has emphasized a modest, quiet professionalism rather than noisy self-assertiveness. One might expect the Coast Guard to be generously endowed with politically powerful constituencies, but it is not. The service is tiny, with only 34,000 active personnel (uniformed and civilian), and is underfunded at $4 billion a year-slightly less than the cost of a single aircraft carrier.

A warm and fuzzy glow of public approval has not yielded reliable support for the Coast Guard when and where it matters most: among budgeteers in the executive branch--including the Department of Transportation, wherein the service is housed somewhat uneasily--and in the Congress. The Coast Guard may be the country's fifth armed service, performing vital work for national security, but in Transportation it competes with-- and routinely loses out to--big ticket projects with enormous domestic constituencies.

As is generally recognized, the Coast Guard matters critically when things go wrong. But to a large extent the service's real value lies concealed in the things that go right--the ships that move safely, the criminal operations that are deterred. Nonetheless, the service is rarely out of the local news around America's 300 ports, 95,000 miles of coastline and 25,000 miles of coastal waterways, and is not long out of the national media spotlight. The trouble politically is that people do not see the Coast Guard as a fifth armed service, but rather as a fisheries protector here, an enemy of criminals there, and a lifeguard somewhere else. The Coast Guard's dilemma has led to a condition that is simple to explain: the service is currently required to do too much with too little.

A Crisis at Sea

AS THE strength of the Coast Guard withers--between 1995 and 1999 the Clinton administration cut the size of the service by 12 percent and slashed $400 million off its annual budget--a crisis approaches for U.S. national maritime security. America's economy is critically dependent on the use of the high seas and its own coastal and internal waterways. Everywhere one looks one finds an increase in pressure on marine resources and...

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