By JAMES HOLMES
NEWPORT, R.I. — Forget for a moment about the U.S. Navy and its “pivot to Asia.” Over the next few decades, the woefully underfunded and thoroughly unsexy U.S. Coast Guard will likely hover near the center of the action.
The reason, in three short words: the Arctic Ocean.
If and when that icy expanse opens regularly to shipping, the Arctic will need policing, just like any other marine thoroughfare. It might even become a theater for geopolitical competition, although the short time it will be ice-free each year, the uneven advance and retreat of the icecap, and the unpredictable location of the sea lanes will limit its potential for conflict relative to, say, the Western Pacific or the Persian Gulf.
But the potential is there, and up north, the Coast Guard’s aging fleet of cutters and small craft will be critical to upholding maritime security and hedging against maritime conflict.
Placing a law-enforcement and disaster-response agency in charge will give operations in northern reaches a complexion unlike those in more hospitable climes — where the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, services built to break things and kill people, are the chief bearers of American interests and aspirations.
How can the Coast Guard prepare itself for this new era?
Founded in 1790, the Coast Guard takes pride in being the United States’ oldest continuously functioning sea service. Composed of nearly 44,000 active-duty officers and enlisted sailors, who operate some 160 coastal and patrol combatants, 92 logistics and support craft, and 211 aircraft of various types, the service shoulders an imposing variety of missions: from safeguarding U.S. ports and harbors to rendering assistance following natural disasters.
So why would Washington assign the U.S. Coast Guard the lead for Arctic operations? It has experience, for one thing. It operates the United States’ modest flotilla of two icebreakers while performing the same police functions off North America’s northern shorelines that it executes in warmer zones.
Navy submarines prowled the Arctic depths during the Cold War. They will return if the polar region heats up, both figuratively and literally: U.S. Navy oceanographers estimate the ocean may be ice-free for a month each year by 2035.
But Navy surface and air forces seldom venture north of the Arctic Circle and thus are less accustomed to the frigid surroundings. None of which is to say that sending in the Coast Guard is a slam dunk.
It would probably be easier for the Navy and Marines to reinvent themselves as cold-weather expeditionary forces than for the quasi-police Coast Guard to reinvent itself as a battle force. But the main theaters for the more musclebound sea services lie far to the south, along the East and South Asian rimlands.
And there they will probably remain.
Suitably bulked up, and crewed by mariners who see themselves as warriors as well as the nation’s 9-1-1 force, the Coast Guard would represent the go-to guarantor of security off the United States’ northern ramparts. Heavy Navy and Marine forces would provide a backstop should serious conflict erupt. But Coast Guard commanders would have to hold their own against rival forces until reinforcements arrived.
So how’s that going to work?
Polar ventures may require the Coast Guard to square off against a serious military competitor, not just against lawbreakers and the elements. But pummeling enemy fleets, projecting power onto foreign shores, warding off ballistic missiles — business as usual for the Navy/Marine Corps team — are pursuits remote from the Coast Guard’s everyday duties.
It may even behoove the service to restore antisubmarine and surface-warfare capabilities dismantled at the Cold War’s end. The Coast Guard fleet need not be a U.S. Navy in miniature, built to rule the waves. But the long arm of U.S. strategy needs battle capacity — not just the light gunnery that now festoons American cutters.
Another task will be to remake the Coast Guard’s organizational culture, rediscovering the half-forgotten tradition of fighting for control of the sea.
Command of the sea means wresting control from rival fleets or deterring them through overwhelming firepower. Police duty is something nations do after winning command. Constabulary work like the Coast Guard’s thus differs sharply from combat. Battle demands a different mindset from scouring the sea for drug or weapons traffickers, or from rescuing seafarers in distress following a nor’easter.
For the Coast Guard, spearheading Arctic strategy means relearning combat skills last practiced during World War II, while retaining the service’s unique capabilities.
