By Calvin Biesecker
The final estimated acquisition costs for the Coast Guard’s maritime 911 emergency radio system have increased 46 percent and the last installations won’t be completed until six-years later than planned due to harder than expected construction challenges in Alaska, new money for the prime contractor, plans to refresh already deployed technology, and inflation, the service’s top acquisition official told reporters during a teleconference on Friday.
The new program acquisition baseline cost for Rescue 21 is just under $1.1 billion, which is $336 million higher than the previous estimate, and final installations and operational capability won’t be until 2017 versus the planned 2011, Rear Adm. Gary Blore, assistant commandant for acquisition, said.
The cost overruns and schedule delays in Rescue 21 are not the fault of prime contractor General Dynamics [GD], Blore said. However, he said that the Coast Guard has decided to take over the Alaska installation because the service will be able to manage that segment of the program less expensively than GD.
Rescue 21 is a new radio communications system that dramatically upgrades the Coast Guard’s ability to rescue mariners in distress. The system is replacing the 1970s era National Distress and Response System, which was supposed to provide radio coverage out to between 10 and 20 nautical miles from the nation’s shore lines but fell short in areas and also left coverage gaps. Rescue 21 was developed to have a range of 20 nautical miles, fill the existing coverage gaps, and provide automatic direction finding to help Coast Guard sector commands easily know where a distress call is originating even if the caller provides the wrong coordinates.
So far, Rescue 21 deployments are exceeding requirements and expectations in terms of capabilities, Blore and other program officials said. In some cases the system has provided radio coverage out to 50 and even 80 nautical miles and its direction finding has borne fruit on many occasions since achieving initial operating capability in late 2005, they said.
The Coast Guard last week informed the leadership at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Congress of the expected cost overruns and schedule delays. Blore said the Rescue 21 program won’t begin to need the additional funding until FY ’11 but wanted to be transparent about the status of the program.
The main reason for the schedule delay is the work that will have to be done in Alaska. While the Coast Guard is expert in operating around Alaska, Blore said the challenge of deploying Rescue 21 towers there is greater than expected. The service doesn’t have enough money now to do the installations there concurrent with the continental United States (CONUS), for which the new mariner distress system will be fully operational in 2012.
In some cases tower installations in Alaska will require the construction of new roads and even helipads in more remote areas, for the building and servicing of the towers.
The largest chunk of the cost increase is related to additional funding for GD, $106.9 million, due to the fact that the Coast Guard and contractor have over two years of actual production cost data and for a one-year contract extension to complete the CONUS deployment, a service spokeswoman told Defense Daily. Just over $102 million of the higher costs are related to the challenges with deploying the system in Alaska.
Another $63.1 million is needed to accommodate new standards and communication protocols, such as DHS’ shift to a single network called OneNet, and $53.8 million is needed to run the program office for the duration of the project. The service is also seeking nearly $10 million for some related work on Coast Guard vessels and for Western rivers.
GD won the Rescue 21 contract in September 2002. The contract was restructured in 2005 due to difficulties the contractor was having with software development. Rescue 21 consists of a network of radio towers stationed along the nation’s coastlines and inland waterways as well as related communications systems.