The Coast Guard’s ability to fully carry out its missions are being hurt by new manpower shortages coupled with long-standing resource constraints, Republican and Democrat lawmakers said last week.
In fiscal year 2022, the Coast Guard was able to interdict 5.4 percent known maritime drug flow, about half of the annual 10 percent target, Rep. Rick Larsen (D-Wash.), ranking member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said Nov. 14.
“While this shortfall is partially due to better intelligence giving us a more accurate understanding of the maritime drug flow, it is also the result of personnel constraints and decreased asset availability due to diversion to other missions,” Larsen said.
Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.), chairman of the panel’s Subcommittee on the Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation, highlighted that the service “can only act on a fraction of the intelligence receives” due to recent manpower shortages and the lack of “substantial, sustained” long-term investments in the Coast Guard.
Webster warned that the service’s manpower troubles will lead to worsening problems in 2024 because it will be “forced to lay up cutters that would otherwise be engaged in patrols because of a lack of Coast Guard Guardians to man them.”
The subcommittee hosted the hearing to review Coast Guard efforts in drug enforcement, illegal migration, and illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing.
The Coast Guard is known for a leadership culture that embraces doing more with less. However, Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Linda Fagan recently said that demands for the service to do more in the Indo-Pacific region will require more resources.
The service is in high-level discussions for additional resources so that it can expand its presence in the Indo-Pacific region with people and assets, she said in October.
With additional ships, attaches, and liaison officers having more Coast Guard in the Indo-Pacific “could” look like a Patrol Forces Indo-Pacific, but this is budget dependent, Fagan said. Fagan said she is making the case that with the right funding, “these are the types of things the U.S. Coast Guard could do with that.”
Heather MacLeod, director of Homeland Security and Justice and the Government Accountability Office, told the subcommittee that the Coast Guard’s manpower woes are at least a product of its own shortcomings. While the service has warned that its mission requirements are outpacing its available workforce, the Coast Guard has not done enough to asset its human capital needs, she said.
“Specifically, as of March 2023, the service reported that it has assessed needs for just 15 percent of its workforce, a process it began 20 years ago,” MacLeod said. “The Coast Guard estimates that it is short thousands of service members. Without workforce assessments, it does not know the true magnitude of the shortfall and which units or missions are most effective.”
The Coast Guard’s fiscal year 2024 budget request and the service’s unfunded priorities list include investments for the Coast Guard Academy and the training center in Cape May, N.J., to include a new training complex for recruits, Rear Adm. Jo-Ann Burdian, assistant commandant for response policy, told the panel.
“And so, if we say we’re going to invest in our people and we were provided those additional resources, that’s where they would go,” Burdian said. She added that with more funding the Coast Guard would also expand its recruiting workforce, highlighting that on average Coast Guard recruiters sign-up 12 recruits annually versus about nine for their counterparts in the Defense Department.
As for shifting resources to other missions, Burdian said that given the surge of illegal migration in the maritime environment centered near the Southeastern U.S. and the Mona Passage between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, the Coast Guard has had to cut back on other missions such as counter-drug operations and aircraft for the International Ice Patrol.
Improved information sharing, better intelligence data related to interdictions to inform policies, more use of unmanned aircraft and vessel systems, and more Coast Guard training for regional partners would enhance Coast Guard operations, Aaron Davenport, a RAND Corp. analyst and former Coast Guard officer, told the subcommittee.
“A RAND Homeland Security Operational Analysis study for Coast Guard aviation found that incorporating unmanned aircraft is particularly cost-effective for detection and monitoring activities and further recommended unmanned aircraft as a major element of the future aircraft fleet,” he said.
Unmanned vessels would be useful in monitoring vast maritime areas for long periods to stealthily monitor illegal activity and, if visible, to deter such activity, Davenport said.