Southern Spear and the Coast Guard’s Persistence Problem: Why the Case for a Coast Guard-Led Homeland Seas Just Caught Up With History

Bruce Stubbs published a commentary at the Center for International Maritime Security this month arguing something that would have sounded close to heretical a decade ago: the United States Coast Guard, not the Navy, should be designated the supported service for maritime security across the four “Homeland Seas”, the Arctic, the Caribbean, the Eastern Pacific, and the Western Atlantic. Everyone else, Navy included, would be supporting.

I read Stubbs’ piece with a particular kind of recognition, because it is the argument my own book, Always Ready, Persistently Under-Resourced: The Modern United States Coast Guard Story, has been assembling evidence for since 2002. Stubbs makes the 2026 case in the language of command architecture and force structure. My book makes the same case through two decades of visits to cutters, sectors, and headquarters, watching the same structural problem recur under different administrations, different threats, and different names. Southern Spear did not create the case for a Coast Guard-led Homeland Seas mission. It simply made the case impossible to keep deferring.

A Persistence Problem, Not a Warfighting Problem

Stubbs’ central analytical move is to split Western Hemisphere maritime threats into two categories: episodic external military threats from China and Russia, which the Navy is built to deter, and persistent maritime security threats — narcotics, illegal migration, illegal fishing, transnational crime — which recur every day whether or not a Russian submarine happens to be transiting the Caribbean that week. His argument is that the United States has been organizing its Homeland Seas posture around the wrong half of that split, reaching for carrier strike groups and destroyers to do a job that is fundamentally about presence, endurance, and legal authority rather than warfighting.

This is precisely the distinction I have been drawing in my own analytical work for years under a different label: chaos management versus crisis management. Crisis management assumes a discrete event that resolves and returns to equilibrium. Chaos management assumes persistent, overlapping complexity that never resolves and instead has to be continuously absorbed. My book argues that the Coast Guard’s operational journey since 9/11 charts exactly this transition, from an organization built to respond to episodic incidents toward one that has to sustain continuous presence against threats that never go away. Stubbs has essentially reconstructed that argument from the command-and-control side of the house. I built mine from the flight lines, sectors, and district commands. We have converged on the same conclusion by different roads, which is usually a good sign that the conclusion is right.

Southern Spear as Confirmation, Not Revelation

Stubbs uses Operation Southern Spear as his central case study, and it is a good one. At its peak the operation absorbed 38 percent of all Navy ships underway in the Caribbean, including a carrier strike group and an amphibious ready group, to prosecute a mission against cartel speedboats that Peter Singer estimated cost the United States something like seven times the cartels’ own annual revenue to execute. Mark Cancian and Chris Park’s cost comparison, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer at $2.5 billion and 360 crew against a National Security Cutter at $750 million and 150 crew, or an Offshore Patrol Cutter at $411 million and 125 crew, is about as clean a numerical statement of the mismatch as you will find anywhere in the open literature.

What struck me reading it is that this is not a new discovery. It is a decades-old pattern finally getting quantified. My book’s account of the Deepwater program, which I began following in the late 1990s and returned to in depth with Rear Admiral Ed Gilbert in 2011 and 2012, documents the Coast Guard’s own early recognition that connectivity and payloads mattered more than raw platform size for exactly this mission set. Deepwater was, whatever its acquisition troubles, an attempt to build a fleet fit for the persistence mission rather than a scaled-down warfighting fleet. It struggled for the same reason Stubbs’ recommended architecture will struggle if Congress does not commit to it: the Coast Guard has never been funded as a priority agency, and every administration since has redirected its mission emphasis without correspondingly resourcing it. Southern Spear did not reveal a new problem. It stress-tested an old one under wartime-adjacent conditions and produced a bill large enough that people in Washington finally read it.

The Legal Authority Point Deserves More Weight

One part of Stubbs’ argument I’d single out as underappreciated, even within his own commentary, is the legal-authority case. He notes that in a recent year, 59 percent of Coast Guard drug interdictions relied on bilateral agreements that Navy crews cannot invoke and Navy ships cannot execute and that the statutory power to board, search, seize, and arrest on the high seas belongs to the Coast Guard under 14 U.S.C. § 89, not the Navy, which is barred from exercising it by the Posse Comitatus Act. When a Navy warship conducts a counter-narcotics boarding, it does so only because a Coast Guard Law Enforcement Detachment is embarked and the boarding proceeds under Coast Guard command.

This is not a technicality. It is the structural reason no amount of additional destroyers or carrier strike groups can substitute for Coast Guard capacity in this mission, no matter how much money Congress appropriates for Navy shipbuilding. My book’s chapters on the National Security Cutter’s evolution from acquisition turbulence to operational success make a parallel point from the platform side: the Legend-class hull that eventually became the template for the Navy’s own next-generation frigate program, after the Constellation-class effectively priced itself out of the mission it was meant to fill, is a case study in the Navy’s own force-structure history proving Stubbs’ point for him. Secretary of the Navy John Phelan’s decision to cancel the Constellation-class frigate and pivot toward a Legend-class-derived hull is not a minor procurement footnote. It is an implicit institutional admission that the Navy, left to its own design instincts, keeps converting affordable presence platforms into expensive warfighting combatants — and that when it needs something built for persistence rather than power projection, it has to borrow the Coast Guard’s design philosophy to get there. My book documented that institutional pattern years before this most recent frigate decision made it a headline.

The Command Gap Stubbs Found Is the Same Gap the Book Traces From 2011

Stubbs’ second major argument is about command architecture: no single commander owns the Western Hemisphere maritime security mission continuously across routine operations, crisis response, and kinetic escalation. Coast Guard Atlantic Area and Pacific Area maintain the only continuous presence, but their boundaries do not align with Navy fleet geography. JIATF-South was built for detection and monitoring, not command of assigned forces. When Southern Spear escalated into kinetic strikes, the Pentagon had to stand up an entirely new headquarters, Joint Task Force Southern Spear, rather than assign the mission to an existing command which Stubbs correctly reads as an admission that no existing organization actually owned the mission.

This is not a new discovery either, though the stakes of getting it wrong are now higher. My book’s chapters on the Atlantic Area and Pacific Area commanders, drawn from visits in 2011, describe an organization already straining against boundaries that did not match its operational reality, command relationships built for a different era’s threat picture, coordination mechanisms standing in for actual command authority. What has changed between 2011 and 2026 is not the structural problem.

What has changed is that the mission has escalated from law enforcement interdiction into kinetic strikes against narco-terrorist vessels, which is exactly the kind of escalation that exposes a coordination architecture’s limits. Stubbs is right that Southern Spear revealed three deficiencies — assignment, authority, and command relationships — but readers of my book will recognize this as the latest and sharpest expression of a pattern that goes back to the Coast Guard’s absorption into the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11, when the service found itself competing for resources and institutional attention against TSA and CBP inside a department that, as I put it in the book, was “never coherently integrated.”

Force Design 2028: The Book’s Closing Argument Meets Stubbs’ Opening Premise

Where Stubbs’ commentary and my book converge most directly is on Force Design 2028. Stubbs cites the $24.6 billion reconciliation appropriation and the Coast Guard Authorization Act of 2025 as precedent-setting but insufficient on their own, a one-time investment rather than a sustained shipbuilding commitment, with the Offshore Patrol Cutter program still years late and billions over budget even after the money arrived. He is calling, in effect, for a modern Vinson-Trammell Act: continuous replacement schedules, year-to-year financing discipline, and a sequencing where requirements are set first and affordability is negotiated second, not the other way around.

My book’s final chapters track Force Design 2028 hihgllights recruiting shortfalls that left the service roughly 4,800 people short of its target strength. The consolidation of 23 small boat stations and the layup of three Medium Endurance Cutters in 2024. Acting Commandant Kevin Lunday’s description of “controlled parts exchange”, cannibalizing one cutter to keep another underway, as a downward death spiral. Then Secretary Noem’s blunt language in the Force Design 2028 executive report that the service could no longer reliably protect the American people. These are the same institutional facts Stubbs is drawing on.

What my book adds is the twenty-year arc behind them: this is not a crisis that appeared in 2024. It is the terminal stage of a resourcing pattern I was already documenting with Admiral Gilbert in 2011, and arguably one that traces back further still to the Coast Guard’s founding tension, a service that straddles defense, law enforcement, environmental protection, and economic security, and therefore never has a natural bureaucratic champion fighting for its budget the way the Navy or the Air Force does.

A record counter-narcotics year, nearly 510,000 pounds of cocaine seized in FY2025, more than three times the service’s annual average, alongside nearly 5,000 people rescued at sea and a documented six-to-one return on taxpayer investment. Six Arctic Security Cutters now under contract with Rauma Marine Constructions and Bollinger Shipyards, the Polar Security Cutter program’s lead ship now named and under construction as the USCGC Polar Sentinel. These are not abstractions.

They are the first material evidence that the Vinson-Trammell-style discipline Stubbs is calling for might actually be taking hold, at least on the shipbuilding and organizational side. What remains unresolved, and what Stubbs’ commentary is really pushing on, is the command architecture question and there Force Design 2028’s reforms, focused on internal Coast Guard reorganization, don’t yet reach the joint command problem Southern Spear exposed.

Where I’d Push Stubbs Further

I agree with essentially all of Stubbs’ argument, but two things in my own research suggest the case is even stronger than his commentary lets on.

First, the “away game” dimension. Stubbs’ commentary is explicitly framed around the Homeland Seas — the Arctic, Caribbean, Eastern Pacific, and Western Atlantic approaches to the continental United States. That framing is right for his argument about command architecture close to home, but it understates the case for Coast Guard centrality in the broader Indo-Pacific competition.

My book traces what I call the Coast Guard’s “away game”, its role in the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Middle East, well beyond coastal and inner waterway duties. China’s emphasis on gray-zone conflict, operations conducted below the threshold of conventional warfare, is a mission set the Coast Guard’s white-hulled cutters and law enforcement authorities are naturally built for in a way carrier strike groups are not.

The book notes that even when the Obama administration talked extensively about the pivot to the Pacific, no corresponding Coast Guard funding followed to build the Pacific fleet of National Security Cutters that pivot would have required. Stubbs’ argument about persistence and legal authority applies with at least as much force to the Indo-Pacific as it does to the Caribbean, and arguably the Coast Guard-as-supported-service logic should extend there too, not just to the four Homeland Seas he names.

Second, the Arctic dimension deserves more weight in Stubbs’ command architecture argument than his commentary gives it. He mentions Coast Guard icebreakers and Healy’s role monitoring foreign naval activity, but the Arctic is where the “supported service” logic is least contestable of all, because the Coast Guard is quite literally the only U.S. service that operates polar icebreakers. Russia operates 41 icebreakers, including nuclear-powered vessels. China has built three and calls itself a “near-Arctic state.” The United States currently has three, with six Arctic Security Cutters and the Polar Security Cutter now under contract.

My book’s chapters on the North Pacific Coast Guard Forum and the Coast Guard’s renaming of District 17 as the Arctic District under Force Design 2028 make the case that polar competition is not a subset of the Homeland Seas mission Stubbs describes. It may be the sharpest edge of it, and one where the Coast Guard’s institutional lead is uncontested by any other American service.

Why This Matters Beyond the Command-Architecture Debate

Stubbs closes his commentary with a set of vignettes: Coast Guard boarding teams enforcing sanctions on tankers are executing strategic policy, not conducting inspections; icebreakers in the Arctic are asserting sovereignty, not breaking ice; cutters patrolling the exclusive economic zone are defending sovereign resources, not protecting fish stocks. It is a well-turned rhetorical close, and it captures something my book has been arguing in less compressed form for over twenty years: the Coast Guard does not need a new mission. It needs its existing mission, maritime safety, maritime security, and maritime stewardship, in the framework I use in the book’s final chapters, to be recognized, resourced, and commanded as the strategic instrument it already is.

The recommendation Stubbs makes, reserve high-end naval combatants for warfighting and deterrence, sustain investment in Coast Guard capacity as a permanent commitment rather than episodic rescue funding, and establish continuous maritime command accountability under Coast Guard leadership, is exactly the recommendation my book’s twenty-year record of interviews, cutter visits, and program tracking would support.

Southern Spear did not invent this argument. It made the bill for ignoring it impossible to defer any longer. Congress and the executive branch heard part of that bill in the FY2025 reconciliation act and the Coast Guard Authorization Act of 2025. Whether they hear the rest of it, the command architecture half Stubbs is pressing, and the away-game and Arctic dimensions I would add to it, is the open question both his commentary and my book are, in their different ways, trying to answer.

Always Ready, Persistently Under-Resourced: The Modern United States Coast Guard Story is Book 12 in the Airpower and Maritime Force Modernization Series, dedicated to the late Rear Admiral Ed Gilbert, USCG (Ret.), and drawing on two decades of interviews with Coast Guard commandants, area and district commanders, and operational leaders from 2002 through the early implementation of Force Design 2028.

See the following:

Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance in the Western Hemisphere