By Emelie Rutherford
Senators told the Coast Guard commandant nominee yesterday that if confirmed he must continue righting the Deepwater acquisition program and addressing homeland-security demands.
Vice Adm. Robert Papp, President Barack Obama’s pick to succeed Adm. Thad Allen as head of the Coast Guard, during his confirmation hearing lamented that “after eight years of unprecedented budget growth, the Coast Guard, unfortunately, is still plagued with much the same obsolete equipment” from years’ past. Citing the Coast Guard’s increased mission demands, he emphasized the need for more resources, including “the ships, the aircraft, the boats, the communication systems, and the shore infrastructure to keep up with the increasingly challenging missions in the maritime environment.”
Papp currently is the commander of Coast Guard Atlantic Area, which oversees the service’s missions in the eastern half of the world along with approximately two-thirds of its personnel and assets. His previous assignments include chief of Coast Guard congressional affairs and chief of staff under Allen.
Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), chair and ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee’s Coast Guard-focused subcommittee, kicked off the hearing by citing problems with Deepwater. The over-budget and behind-schedule Coast Guard modernization effort was previously overseen by a Northrop Grumman [NOC]-Lockheed Martin [LMT] lead-system integrator (LSI) called Integrated Coast Guard Systems (ICGS).
Cantwell said that the service “has taken some steps towards fixing the (Deepwater) failings of the past,” she is “nowhere close to satisfied with the Coast Guard’s progress on Deepwater” and her panel “will continue to have aggressive oversight.”
Papp cited his work on ongoing acquisition reforms, which were spurred by Deepwater problems, and said he is committed to ending the use of private-sector LSIs for Coast Guard.
He said the service is almost done with the process of phasing ICGS out as the Deepwater LSI, noting the contractual arrangements with ICGS will expire in about a year.
He pledged to follow the Coast Guard’s major systems acquisition manual (MSAM). Cantwell said Deepwater hiccups resulted in part from the service’s failure to adhere to good- government provisions in the manual.
Papp said the Coast Guard is correcting past “shortfalls” related to not following the manual for the Fast Response Cutter (FRC) acquisition.
“And our next major project being the Offshore Patrol Cutter, the OPC, we’re taking strict compliance with that,” he said. “And any projects we take on will…comply with the MSAM.”
Papp said he has taken a “personal interest” in ensuring the OPC acquisition proceeds smoothly, and has reviewed the operational requirements the service is going through now, to ensure the ship is affordable and designed and built in accord with the MSAM.
He said he is “tremendously concerned” with cost growth with the National Security Cutter (NSC), and cited ongoing negotiations with Northrop Grumman for a fixed-price contract for the fourth ship.
The Coast Guard is facing its first budget reduction, in Obama’s fiscal year 2011 budget proposal, since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. That means fewer ships, aircraft, port-security units, and personnel, Snowe noted.
“I’m hopeful that the FY ’11 budget is just a minor course-correction that will allow us to get back on track in the out-years,” Papp said. “I think right now we’ve made a reasonable trade-off in the budget to be able to continue to buy new ships (and) decommission some of the older ones that are getting very, very costly for us to maintain. And I think we will be able to continue to meet all our mission demands and goals in this particular year. But what we’ll be faced with is we won’t have that cushion, we won’t have that bench-strength to fall back on if there is some unplanned, unexpected event, or if for some reason we have major casualties on any of our ships or aircraft.”
He cautioned against decommissioning too many old ships, while buying a smaller number of new vessels, in the coming years. He spoke in favor of having a five-year plan for contractors and the service to plan out and adjust acquisitions, as well as stable and predictable acquisition funding.
Papp has caused a stir regarding his commitment to the Coast Guard’s enduring counterterrorism mission, which started after it became part of the new Department of Homeland Security in the wake of the 2001 attacks.
The Associated Press reported last month that Papp, in an internal draft memo last November, called for cutting funding for the service’s homeland-security plan, including patrols and training exercises, over the next five years because of budget constraints. In the memo, he reportedly expressed a preference for focusing on the Coast Guard’s traditional search-and-rescue and maritime-transportation duties.
Papp yesterday cited the Coast Guard’s “potential budget constraints, increase in mission demands, and strained resources.”
Cantwell told Papp if confirmed he “will constantly be asked to balance the demands of crucial and evolving homeland security missions while enduring your traditional missions and making sure that they are met.”