By Robbin Laird
I came to the Coast Guard through an unusual door. In the late 1990s I was working with a maritime security company focused on port vulnerabilities, and the observation that shaped everything that followed was straightforward: bad actors could reach into the commercial technology market far more quickly than the Coast Guard could navigate its own acquisition processes. That asymmetry has never fully closed.
It runs like a thread through all the work I subsequently did with Admiral Ed Gilbert and the dozens of officers, commanders, and operators we interviewed from 2002 through 2016 and beyond — work that became the foundation of my new book, Always Ready, Persistently Under-Resourced: The Modern United States Coast Guard Story.
The book is primarily a work of contemporary history. It covers the period from roughly 2002 to 2016 in depth, bringing the story forward through recent developments in the NSC program, C4ISR modernization, and Force Design 2028. But the history is not merely backward-looking. The patterns I documented then remain stubbornly present today: expanding missions, constrained resources, persistent redirection by successive administrations, and an organization that compensates through professionalism what it cannot compensate through adequacy of means.
The story of what the Coast Guard became in the first two decades of this century is also, uncomfortably, the story of where it still finds itself.
What I want to do here is draw out one of the book’s central arguments that the Coast Guard is above all an away game force and connect it to the historical evidence that makes that argument more than rhetorical. The service’s name invites misreading. The word “coast” suggests proximity, a tethering to shoreline and harbor. The operational reality, as I found in conversations with Atlantic Area Commander Vice Admiral Parker, Pacific Area Commander Vice Admiral Brown, Commandant Thad Allen, and many others, is the opposite.
The Coast Guard operates across half the world. It is in the Arabian Gulf, off the coast of Africa, in the Eastern Pacific, throughout the Caribbean, in the Bering Sea, and increasingly in the waters of the Indo-Pacific. It arrives first and it stays. That is its fundamental character, and it is a character that budget debates and departmental politics have repeatedly failed to honor.
The analytical framework I have used for years to describe the environment the Coast Guard inhabits is the distinction between crisis management and chaos management. Crisis management assumes discrete, resolvable events — a hurricane, a drug seizure, a maritime accident. You respond, you restore, you return to equilibrium. That was the dominant conception of what the Coast Guard did for most of its history, and it was never entirely wrong. But it became increasingly insufficient as a guide to the strategic situation.
Chaos management acknowledges something different: that the threats confronting a maritime security service in the twenty-first century are not discrete and resolvable but persistent and overlapping. Drug trafficking networks are not crises to be solved; they are permanent features of the operational environment. Gray zone competition in the Western Pacific is not an event; it is a condition. Mass migration pressures, illegal fishing by foreign fleets, the opening of Arctic sea routes, the proliferation of semi-submersible drug carriers, the vulnerability of the global maritime trade system to supply chain disruption — none of these are emergencies that a well-organized response can put behind us. They require persistent presence, adaptable authorities, and genuine operational reach. They require, in other words, exactly what the Coast Guard provides, if adequately resourced.
September 11th accelerated this recognition in my own thinking. I was at the Pentagon that morning. I had arrived for a meeting about post-Soviet nuclear security matters and watched the world change. The shift that followed was not merely about terrorism; it was about the fundamental inadequacy of frameworks built around manageable crises. The Coast Guard was not designed to fight al-Qaeda.
But the Coast Guard was extraordinarily well-positioned for the world that emerged: a world of transnational threats that cross maritime borders, exploit commercial infrastructure, and evade the jurisdictional reach of any single agency or military branch acting alone.
What the book documents at length, through interviews with commandants and area commanders and district officers and sector commanders, is that the Coast Guard’s operational reach is inseparable from its legal architecture. When Admiral Zukunft described the service’s situation to me in November 2016, he was emphatic on this point: the Coast Guard is the only entity with the authorities to actually do anything about the security threats it prosecutes at sea. It is not merely present; it can act. It can board. It can seize. It can prosecute. This is Title 14 authority — the law enforcement side of the Coast Guard’s dual character — and it operates in spaces where a gray-fleet Navy destroyer would create diplomatic complications that no operational gain could justify.
The Ship Rider program is the clearest practical expression of this architecture. By embarking law enforcement officers from partner nations — six nations in the Pacific alone — the Coast Guard can enforce fisheries law, interdict drug trafficking, and conduct security operations deep in foreign Exclusive Economic Zones without the political friction that naval intervention would generate. Zukunft described an offensive border security strategy rather than a goal-line defense: meet threats on the open playing field, far from U.S. shores, at the point of origin or in transit, rather than waiting for them to arrive at port.
This was not merely rhetoric. By 2016 the Coast Guard had bilateral agreements worldwide that allowed it to intercept vessels at sea rather than wait for anomalies in cargo manifests to alert it at the dock. Zukunft put it plainly: you do not have to wait until a container ship arrives with a declared discrepancy. You can intercept at sea and conduct a security check. The geographic extension of U.S. legal authority — not military power but law enforcement authority — represents a strategic asset that Washington has consistently undervalued.
I should note what was already visible in 2016 and has become more pressing since: the drift toward a Department of War framing in American defense policy risks marginalizing precisely this kind of authority. When deterrence is conceived entirely in kinetic terms, the Coast Guard’s distinctive contribution, persistent presence, law enforcement reach, the ability to operate in the gray space between war and peace, becomes difficult to articulate in budget debates dominated by warfighting requirements. That is a strategic error.
The National Security Cutter is the away game’s principal instrument. I spent considerable time aboard the Bertholf and Waesche in 2010 and 2011, and the conversations with commanding officers, executive officers, and Admiral Currier that emerged from those visits form a substantial portion of the book’s treatment of the NSC program. What struck me then and what the subsequent decade confirmed was that the NSC was not merely a better cutter. It was a qualitatively different kind of ship.
Captain Lance Bardo described the NSC as a chaos management system, and I think that phrase captures its operational essence more precisely than any technical specification. The ship is a floating command post: it can track more than fifty aircraft at ranges exceeding two hundred miles, deploy three over-the-horizon small boats, sustain flight operations in sea states that would ground legacy cutters, process classified intelligence through its SCIF, and maintain a 360-degree C4ISR bubble that gives the commanding officer genuine domain awareness across air, surface, and subsurface dimensions. It can sprint at thirty knots when urgency demands, then loiter economically for ninety-day patrols without compromising fuel reserves. It can arrive in a disaster zone where all shore-based communications have collapsed and immediately become the command node for a unified response.
Vice Admiral Parker made the most vivid case for this capability when we discussed the Haiti response. When the earthquake struck in January 2010, the Coast Guard was first on scene precisely because it maintained persistent presence in Caribbean waters conducting routine anti-drug and law enforcement operations. But Parker was candid about the limits: the service could arrive, but it could not sustain command architecture in those critical first days. The radio communications were gone. The cell towers were gone. There was a cell phone with an aide to the deputy commander that lasted about thirty-six hours and then went dark. Had an NSC been present, Parker told me, the Coast Guard could have controlled the airspace, provided C4ISR for all the elements coming ashore, and managed the information environment that determines who gets help first. Distance is a weapon in the Pacific and a vulnerability in disaster response; the NSC addresses both.
The NSC program’s acquisition history is a case study in what the book documents repeatedly: the Coast Guard can achieve genuine operational excellence when given adequate resources and institutional stability, and it reliably loses ground when funding is disrupted. Admiral Currier’s 2011 congressional testimony described a program that had achieved cost stability and predictable production rhythms after the chaos of the early Deepwater years. Hull four was contracted at a fixed price. Hull five was coming in at nearly identical cost. The program was demonstrating what disciplined acquisition looks like. Currier’s warning about what funding instability would do to that stability proved entirely accurate. The tenth hull delivered; the eleventh was scrapped over a contract dispute. The program ended with ten ships rather than the eight originally planned or the eleven eventually funded, and the production line with its trained workforce, supplier relationships, and institutional knowledge was closed.
The denouement of the NSC program contains a particular irony that the book documents at length: the Navy, having spent two decades pursuing the Littoral Combat Ship and then the Constellation-class frigate with results ranging from disappointing to disastrous, has effectively come home to an NSC-derived design for its FF(X) frigate requirement. The hull that the Coast Guard built — with proven endurance, aviation facilities, and command architecture — is now recognized as the baseline for what the Navy needs. Essington Lewis, the Australian industrialist who spent years warning his country before World War II that time is more important than money in defense preparedness, understood what the Navy’s frigate saga illustrates: time lost cannot be recovered. The production line that could have provided both services with a common, proven design has been closed.
Restarting it will cost more and take longer than continuing it would have.
The book draws heavily on interviews with both the Atlantic and Pacific Area commanders from 2011 — Vice Admiral Parker and Vice Admiral Brown respectively — and the contrast between the two theaters illuminates the range of strategic problems the Coast Guard manages simultaneously.
Brown’s central point about the Pacific was one that Washington has been slow to internalize: 85 percent of U.S. exclusive economic zones are in the Pacific, most of them in the Central and Western Pacific. The fishing economies of twenty-two Oceania nations depend on a multi-billion dollar tuna fishery that is systematically threatened by illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing operations, many of them linked to foreign state actors. Brown was direct about the consequences of absence: if the Coast Guard is not physically present, someone else will be. The Chinese had already built large infrastructure in Tonga when Brown visited. The signal of American disengagement, communicated through the absence of cutters in a region that can only be covered by assets with genuine endurance, is read clearly by regional actors.
Brown’s second major point was about the tyranny of distance. Reaching American Samoa from Alameda requires more than ten days of transit. When you arrive, you carry everything you need with you because the infrastructure is not there. Piers, fuel, engineering support, food, the Pacific deployment demands a self-sufficient platform, which is precisely what the NSC provides and what the medium endurance cutters that constitute much of the Pacific fleet cannot. The program of record consistently fell short of what Pacific operations required. The Obama pivot to Asia was articulated as a strategic priority; it was never translated into the fleet expansion that would have given it operational content.
The Arctic presents a different version of the same problem. Brown described it as predictable surprises, a phrase that captures the specific quality of the Coast Guard’s Arctic dilemma. The ice is retreating. The shipping routes are opening. Human activity in the region is increasing. A cruise ship carrying a thousand passengers in the Bering Sea is not a hypothetical scenario; it is an operational planning requirement. And the Coast Guard’s actual icebreaking capacity — three ships nominally, one of them effectively non-operational at the time of Brown’s interview — was grotesquely inadequate to the sovereignty and safety responsibilities the United States has in those waters.
Russia operates more than forty icebreakers, including nuclear-powered vessels capable of year-round Arctic operations. China was building one at the time of our interviews and has since expanded its polar fleet while declaring itself a near-Arctic state. The United States, with its treaty obligations, its sovereign territory in Alaska, and its responsibility for search and rescue across Arctic waters, has been playing catch-up for decades. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed in July 2025 represented the largest single infusion of resources in the Coast Guard’s history — nearly twenty-five billion dollars, with roughly nine billion directed specifically at icebreaking recapitalization. Whether this represents a genuine reorientation of national priorities or another episode of funding that arrives too late and is not sustained long enough to close the capability gap remains to be seen.
One of the chapters I am most satisfied with in the book deals with the North Pacific Coast Guard Forum, which I think represents one of the Coast Guard’s least understood strategic assets. The Forum brings together the coast guard services of six Pacific nations — the United States, Russia, Japan, South Korea, China, and Canada — in a cooperative framework built around shared operational problems rather than aligned strategic interests.
Rear Admiral Bob Day walked me through its architecture and history in December 2010. The key to the Forum’s durability and it has now completed twenty-five years of operation, surviving COVID, the deterioration of U.S.-China relations, and Russia’s isolation following Ukraine is its relentless focus on operational necessity rather than strategic alignment. Illegal fishing vessels do not respect geopolitical rivalries. A major oil spill in the Bering Sea requires coordinated response regardless of what is happening in Taiwan Strait diplomacy. The Forum provides the communication channels, the combined operations manual, the information exchange systems, and the personal relationships that allow coast guard services to function together even when their governments are not aligned.
Day made a point that I have returned to many times in subsequent years: the Coast Guard has better access to China than almost any other U.S. government agency, precisely because it is perceived as a law enforcement and environmental organization rather than a military force. That access is a strategic asset. It is the kind of relationship that enables communication when other channels close, that builds the habits of operational coordination that matter when crises occur, and that keeps open practical cooperation on fisheries, search and rescue, and marine environmental protection even when the broader relationship is under strain.
The Forum’s 2025 resumption — full in-person meetings in Nanjing in April and Shanghai in September, the first such gatherings since 2019 — is an important data point. Operational pragmatism endures even in contested waters. The Coast Guard’s ability to maintain those channels is not incidental to American maritime strategy; it is one of its more valuable instruments.
The period covered in depth by the book — 2002 to 2016 — represented a fundamental transition in the Coast Guard’s character. The Deepwater program, whatever its execution problems, introduced a multi-domain acquisition logic that was genuinely innovative and that anticipated the systems-of-systems thinking that has since become standard in defense planning. The National Security Cutter program, after the reforms driven by Admiral Currier following the 2007 acquisition crisis, demonstrated that the Coast Guard could execute complex procurement when given the organizational capability and the institutional stability to do so. The C4ISR modernization effort transformed the service from one that found drug shipments by luck to one that can be directed to a specific vessel at a specific coordinate in real time.
But the structural problem identified in every interview I conducted — with commandants, area commanders, district commanders, sector commanders, and the officers who actually take the ships to sea — remained unchanged throughout this period and persists today. The Coast Guard’s mission set grows by accretion. Each administration brings new priorities and redirects the service’s emphasis, but without commensurate increases in resources. The result is a force that is always ready in the sense that its people will find a way to accomplish the mission, but persistently under-resourced in the sense that accomplishing that mission increasingly depends on institutional resilience rather than adequate capability.
Force Design 2028 represents the most systematic attempt since Deepwater to align the Coast Guard’s structure, technology, and resources with what its actual strategic role requires. The resources attached to it nearly twenty-five billion dollars from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act alone are historically unprecedented. Whether the organizational reforms, the acquisitions, and the workforce growth produce a genuinely transformed service, or whether this proves to be another wave of investment that crests and recedes without closing the fundamental capability gap, is the question the next decade will answer.
The history I have documented suggests the conditions for success: stable, predictable funding sustained over multiple years and multiple administrations; acquisition management that empowers program managers and integrates logistics from the outset; strategic clarity about what the white fleet is expected to do in an era of gray zone competition; and an honest reckoning with the infrastructure deficit that platform discussions have consistently overshadowed.
The Coast Guard that Ed Gilbert helped me understand is an organization of remarkable professional quality operating under conditions that no comparably important national security instrument should face. Its people compensate through competence and commitment for what its budget fails to provide. That is admirable; it is also unsustainable indefinitely. The Hatteras rescue in January 2010 — reconstructed in detail in the book through interviews with Lieutenant Commander Lacer Driver and Petty Officer Lee — illustrates both sides of this reality. The HC-130J and its integrated C4ISR systems made that rescue possible; the old HC-130H could not have done it. But the Coast Guard had to fight for years to replace the aging fleet, and even then received fewer aircraft than it needed. Success required that particular crew, in that particular aircraft, on that particular night, with equipment that worked. National security cannot be built on cases where everything happened to go right.
That is the central lesson of the history I have tried to document: the Coast Guard’s story is not primarily a story about budgets and platforms.
It is a story about the gap between what the nation asks of its maritime security service and what it is willing to provide.
Closing that gap is not a budgetary option. In an era of gray zone competition, contested Arctic waters, transnational criminal networks, and a maritime trade system that carries ninety-five percent of American international commerce, it is a national security requirement.