Why the Coast Guard Lags When It Comes to Unmanned Systems.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew

It's 2006, and the scene is a nondescript office building near the Navy Yard in Southwest Washington, D.C.

The Coast Guard's Integrated Deepwater System was still a thing at the time. The two prime contractors partnering on the 25-year project to modernize Coast Guard platforms-Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman--had taken over a floor in the office building a few blocks south of the Capitol building and set up flashy looking displays to show members of Congress, their staffers and reporters like me about all the upgrades and new-build ships and aircraft in store for the service.

It was there I learned about the Eagle Eye, a tiltrotor unmanned aerial vehicle being developed by Bell Helicopter to fly off the yet to be built National Security Cutters.

The executive in charge of giving the tour explained how such a UAV could be a big advantage for the Coast Guard and its myriad missions. Coast Guard helicopters flying a search pattern could cover about 9,000 nautical square miles over a span of 24 hours as opposed to an Eagle Eye, which could extend that to S6,ooo nautical square miles and do so at a much lower operating cost.

The plan was to acquire 45 Eagle Eyes over the course of the 25-year program, but it was not to be.

The Northrop-Lockheed team got fired for performing poorly on the program--particularly on the fast response cutters--and the Coast Guard eventually took over management with all the ships and helicopter programs intact -but without the Deepwater name and without the Eagle Eye.

Although Bell had begun developing the aircraft at its own expense in the early 1990s before finding a customer at Deepwater, that was still five years of development and $113.7 million charged to the service. Flashforward some 17 years later to May 2023. The Coast Guard released an "Unmanned Systems Strategic Plan"--a forward-looking document that explains all the goodness that could come out of the service's increased use of uncrewed aerial, surface, subsurface and space systems.

Of that, there can be no doubt. Almost two decades after their widespread adoption in modern battlefields, the utility of robotic systems is well known and hardly needs to be repeated in the pages of this magazine.

Like most roadmaps, the document has a short "history" section--a chart called "Timeline of Research And Development And Capabilities" on page 12.

The first entry on the chart is 2007 when Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection began jointly flying a...