Always Ready: Persistently Under-Resourced: The Modern USCG Story
Next year, I am publishing my book on the USCG, appropriately entitled: Always Ready: Persistently Under-Resourced. It is based on my extensive work with the USCG from Deepwater through to 2012 with updates since then as well.
The book presents a blunt commentary of the way the United States treats one of its most essential security institutions: a Coast Guard that is always ready, but structurally, politically, and financially condemned to remain persistently under-resourced. It argues that the modern Coast Guard story from 9/11 through the Deepwater era to 2025 is not a tale of organizational failure, but of a system that loads the Service with expanding missions while denying it the platforms, people, and infrastructure required to match those demands.
The narrative is anchored in lived experience, beginning with my personal account of being at the Pentagon on 9/11 and watching the post–Cold War security paradigm shatter in real time. From that moment, the book tracks how the U.S. shifted from managing discrete crises to navigating chronic strategic chaos, and how the Coast Guard, more than any other service, was thrust into the center of that new environment without receiving the recognition or resources the shift required.
The Coast Guard’s broad mission set, search and rescue, maritime safety, law enforcement, environmental protection, port security, Arctic presence, Indo-Pacific engagement, and contributions to national defense, has grown more complex and more critical at precisely the moment when its relative funding position has eroded and its infrastructure has decayed. This is not a bureaucratic mishap, but a structural consequence of how Washington conceives “national security,” relegating the white hulls to the margins while rhetorically praising their heroism.
Part I of the book and the senior-level interviews set the tone: commandants and area commanders describe a force living with a growing gap between operational demand and available resources, where improvisation and professional ethos are expected to mask material shortfalls. Leaders acknowledge that the Service’s culture of “making do” becomes a political liability, because it allows policymakers to demand more output without paying the real bill in capital investment, manpower, and maintenance.
These chapters show a leadership corps fighting a two-front war. Outwardly, they must reassure political masters and the American public that the Coast Guard will “always be there,” from hurricanes to mass migration to distant Pacific deployments. Inwardly, they confront the reality that aging cutters, deferred shore maintenance, and aviation shortfalls are pushing the limits of what can safely be promised, and that every additional mission emphasis (from Arctic presence to border security) comes without a meaningful funding plus-up.
Part II moves from the flag-level view to the districts, exposing in granular detail how systemic under-resourcing plays out in distinct maritime regions. These interviews were conducted in 2010-2011, The Great Lakes interview with Rear Admiral Peter Neffenger is a case study in regulatory chaos and federal abdication: a core national economic artery is governed by overlapping state laws, binational arrangements, and an EPA-driven regulatory overlay that the Coast Guard is expected to adjudicate and enforce—without new authorities, manpower, or money.
The ballast water and invasive species problem crystallizes this. New York’s unilateral decision to impose ballast standards orders of magnitude stricter than international norms effectively gives one state veto power over the entire Great Lakes system and even over purely Canadian trade, forcing the Coast Guard into the role of reluctant arbiter. The book uses this to show that “under-resourced” is not just about hull counts; it is about legal, regulatory, and political burdens that are piled on to a Service with finite bandwidth, in a domain where eight U.S. states, two Canadian provinces, and two federal governments all claim a piece of the action.
Other district perspectives, from the Gulf Coast to Air Station Miami and San Francisco, underscore a common pattern. Commanders juggle port security, fisheries enforcement, migrant interdiction, pollution response, and search and rescue with platforms that are too old, shore facilities that are crumbling, and personnel pipelines under stress. Each vignette reinforces the core theme: the Coast Guard is the nation’s maritime shock absorber, but its own foundation is increasingly brittle.
Part III tackles the Deepwater era head-on, rejecting both simplistic praise and simplistic condemnation. Their are the well-documented management failures, contractual pathologies, and oversight breakdowns that turned “Deepwater” into a Capitol Hill punching bag. But the political narrative of failure obscures a more important truth: the Deepwater wave, however battered, delivered a generational recapitalization that fundamentally changed what the Coast Guard can do.
Chapters on the Deepwater concept and its demise, Admiral John Currier’s role in acquisition reform, and the later emergence of Force Design 2028 connect these periods into a single continuum of attempted modernization. Deepwater’s multi-domain logic, treating cutters, aircraft, C4ISR, and unmanned systems as an integrated system-of-systems built around payloads and connectivity rather than platform vanity, was ahead of its time and remains the intellectual foundation for current force design debates.
At the same time, budget turbulence, political micromanagement, and episodic oversight nearly wrecked the effort. The abandonment of Deepwater as a branded program did not stop the underlying recapitalization, but it left scars: stretched schedules, broken industrial relationships, and a lingering reluctance in Congress to invest at the scale required. The force that emerges is better equipped, but still structurally short of what its missions demand.
Part IV’s deep treatment of the National Security Cutter (NSC) is the most vivid illustration of the book’s “always ready, under-resourced” thesis. Through interviews aboard Bertholf and Waesche, the NSC is portrayed not as a hull-for-hull replacement for Hamilton-class cutters, but as a floating command post, a “chaos management system” able to operate as a mobile joint operations center across domains.
The NSC’s integrated C4ISR suite, three-dimensional air search radar, and communications architecture allow a commanding officer to run complex interdictions, SAR cases, and multi-agency operations from the bridge with levels of situational awareness that were previously impossible. Examples such as nighttime drug chases off Panama and high-end exercises like Northern Edge off Alaska demonstrate how the NSC can track dozens of aircraft, control small boats and aircraft, ingest national intelligence, and manage a layered operational bubble of surveillance and response.
Endurance and seakeeping are not treated as mere technical virtues but as strategic enablers. NSCs can sprint 1,500 nautical miles in two days and then remain on station for weeks, maintaining aviation and small-boat operations in seas that would shut down legacy cutters. The expanded flight deck, hangar, and fuel capacity make it a true mothership for helicopters and, increasingly, unmanned systems, turning the ship into a persistent node in a distributed maritime network rather than a stand-alone platform.
While the NSC is a leap in capability, the fleet is too small, the follow-on Offshore Patrol Cutter is delayed and at risk, and shore infrastructure to support this high-end asset base is falling apart. The NSC becomes the symbol of a strategic paradox: the United States has proven it can build world-class maritime security assets but refuses to fund enough of them or sustain the ecosystem they require.
A major analytical through-line is the Coast Guard’s “away game” role, its overseas and forward presence that contradicts the popular image of a force confined to coastal waters. Interviews with Pacific Area leadership make clear that fisheries protection, illegal fishing enforcement, ship-rider agreements, and multilateral fora like the North Pacific Coast Guard Forum are not peripheral add-ons, but central instruments of American power and influence in an era of great-power competition.
The book sharply criticizes the gap between rhetorical “pivots” and hard presence. It notes that even as strategy documents and speeches highlighted the Indo-Pacific and gray-zone challenges posed by China, there was no serious attempt to build the NSC numbers and supporting logistics needed to underwrite a credible white-hull presence across the Central and Western Pacific. The result is a vacuum increasingly filled by others, whether illegal fishing fleets or rival state actors using economic leverage, infrastructure projects, and their own coast guard-like forces to reshape the maritime environment.
The Arctic chapters are even more severe in tone. The opening of Arctic waters, growing Russian and Chinese activity, and cruise traffic create predictable “black swan” scenarios: a mass-casualty cruise ship incident in the Bering Sea, a major spill, or a sovereignty crisis in poorly governed waters. The book highlights that once ice becomes water, the Coast Guard has the legal authority but not the hulls, infrastructure, or trained icebreaking sailors to exercise it. Canada and Russia are depicted as being at least a decade ahead in building Arctic infrastructure and planning, while the U.S. drifts, hoping the worst does not happen before capability is built.
The Katrina and Deepwater Horizon case studies in Part V reinforce the theme that when things go badly wrong in the maritime domain, the Coast Guard is the default integrator of messy interagency responses. The Service’s ability to combine law enforcement authority, regulatory roles, emergency response expertise, and military command-and-control in a single uniformed structure is depicted as unique and non-fungible.
These chapters are not hagiography. They acknowledge flaws and friction, but they use these crises to demonstrate why the Coast Guard’s blend of authorities and culture is vital in an age where the line between homeland security and expeditionary operations is blurred. They also show how episodic surges in political attention after disasters rarely translate into sustained investment; once the immediate crisis fades, budget priorities swing back to more visible programs and services.
The final sections step back and compare the Coast Guard of the Deepwater era to the Coast Guard of 2025. Despite the delivery of Fast Response Cutters, NSCs, and some aviation modernization, the underlying pattern remains: mission creep, infrastructure decay, acquisition turbulence, and a chronic mismatch between statutory responsibilities and annual appropriations.
Shore infrastructure shortfalls now exceed seven billion dollars, with a maintenance backlog that has tripled in five years. The Offshore Patrol Cutter program shows familiar signs of concurrency and risk that echo the worst of early Deepwater. The Polar Security Cutter effort has suffered massive delays and cost growth, even as the Arctic strategic environment has become more competitive. The workforce is under acute strain, with historic shortages across active, reserve, and civilian ranks even as new mission demands, Indo-Pacific presence, expanded border support, Arctic operations, pile on.
Budget politics are central to the critique. The Service is fighting to get from roughly 13–14 billion dollars annually toward the roughly 20 billion that senior leaders have indicated would be commensurate with its mission load, but remains billions short even in optimistic scenarios. Within the Department of Homeland Security, the Coast Guard loses out to higher-visibility or more politically salient entities such as TSA, CBP, or FEMA, as shown by episodes where leadership proposed slashing shore infrastructure funding while seeking prestige aircraft for departmental use.
The conclusion is unapologetically hard-hitting: unless Congress and the Executive Branch accept that the Coast Guard is not a discretionary “nice to have,” but an indispensable pillar of national defense, economic security, and maritime governance, the United States will continue to mortgage its safety and strategic position at sea. The book warns that without a deliberate break in the cycle of underinvestment, the same arguments will be repeated a decade from now under even more dangerous conditions, with fewer excuses available and higher costs for failure.
My book documents, with detail and first-hand testimony, how the Coast Guard has adapted, innovated, and modernized under constant constraint, turning flawed programs like Deepwater into real capability and leveraging platforms like the NSC to create a new model of maritime command and control. At the same time, heroism and ingenuity should not be used to justify chronic neglect.
There is a clear need for:
- A sustained, predictable funding path that closes the gap between missions and resources instead of widening it.
- Acquisition discipline that locks in mature designs, realistic schedules, and fully funded life-cycle support before steel is cut.
- A serious national commitment to shore infrastructure, Arctic capability, and Indo-Pacific presence commensurate with stated strategy.
- Stronger advocacy for the Coast Guard within DHS and on Capitol Hill, recognizing that white hulls are front-line instruments of American power and resilience, not peripheral extras.
In doing so, I try in “Always Ready, Persistently Under-Resourced” to encourage readers, especially policymakers, defense professionals, and maritime strategists, to confront a simple question: how long can a nation rely on a force that is structurally denied the tools it needs to do the job everyone assumes it will do?
The Coast Guard’s story, as told in my book, is ultimately a mirror held up to American security policy in the twenty-first century: expansive in ambition, constrained in resources, and running out of time to reconcile the two.