The Coast Guard in Honolulu faces a dilemma with its two biggest ships, the aging 378-foot cutters Jarvis and Rush, which the service wants to retire but can’t because it has no replacements, officials said.
Amid conflicting demands for budget cuts and a greater emphasis on the region, the uncertainty leaves future coverage plans somewhat uncharted for vast swaths of the Pacific.
The two ships, which are the most capable and far-reaching in the Honolulu fleet, are nevertheless so old that the Coast Guard said in 2010 that it would retire four of the "high-endurance cutters" in 2011, Jarvis and Rush included, because a "disproportionate share" of the maintenance budget was being used to "sustain these aging assets."
The retirements also were envisioned as the Coast Guard brought on new replacement 418-foot national security cutters.
The Coast Guard went ahead with the decommissioning of cutters home-ported elsewhere, with the Hamilton going to the Philippines and the Chase to Nigeria.
But in Honolulu neither the decommissioning of the Jarvis or Rush, nor the arrival of a replacement national security cutter, ever materialized.
That’s left the Honolulu Coast Guard to patch up and repair — at increased cost — the ships that reach the farthest around the Pacific to conduct fisheries enforcement, search and rescue, and other law enforcement and national defense missions.
"We’re pretty proud of this ship. It’s 42 years old, and it’s still capable of going out and doing Coast Guard missions," said the Rush’s commander, Capt. James McCauley.
But McCauley also acknowledged that it’s harder to maintain a 378-foot cutter that’s 12 years past its intended life span of 30 years.
"We’re keeping the ship safe and able to conduct our operations, but it’s more and more costly," he said. "Every time the ship goes into a dry dock, you find new metal (corrosion)."
At a State of the Coast Guard address Thursday in Alameda, Calif., Commandant Adm. Robert Papp said, "Here at the edge of the Pacific Rim, we can see the future," in reference to the importance of the region.
"My most pressing concern is on the high seas, (where) vast oceans lie between overseas loading ports and our domestic ports of arrival. It is in this offshore region that I see the greatest risk," he said.
The old cutters are "failing" after serving for more than 40 years — in combat in Vietnam, in coalition operations in Iraq, protecting fisheries, interdicting drugs and saving lives, he said.
"The decommissioning of (old) high-endurance cutters and patrol boats and the tightening of staffs in the 2013 budget will reduce our personnel strength by over 1,000 people," cuts that are necessary to bring on new assets, Papp said. "On our current track line, we will likely see the Coast Guard get smaller," he said.
There are about 42,000 active-duty members of the Coast Guard, with about 1,400 in District 14, which includes Hawaii.
The Coast Guard is making progress rebuilding its fleet of cutters, aircraft and boats, and Papp recently said he was "comfortable" with progress on close-in forces, including patrol boats.
But he issued a plea for eight of the large new cutters (five are built or under contract, with full funding being sought for a sixth). Whether any more will be completed is unclear.
The Coast Guard’s 2013 budget requests the decommissioning of two of the service’s 10 remaining 378-foot cutters that are in service, but does not specify which two.
Senior Chief Petty Officer Mike O’Berry, a Coast Guard spokesman in Washington, D.C., said the Coast Guard is conducting an engineering assessment on the in-service high-endurance cutters to determine which hulls will go.
The Coast Guard might shift remaining high-endurance cutters to other home ports "to best address operational needs," he said.
Lt. Gene Maestas, a spokesman for the 14th District in Honolulu, said "there are no plans for National Security Cutters to come to the 14th District, but we would definitely like two national security cutters out here."
"We have such a very large area of response," he said. "We’ve got 12.2 million square nautical miles of ocean that we’re responsible for. And those assets (national security cutters) would be excellent assets for this area."
Patrols by the Rush and Jarvis can cover more than 12,000 nautical miles and range from the South Pacific to the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea, from the Western Pacific to work with Japan, China or South Korea, to the coasts of Central or South America for counterdrug operations, officials said.
Among the Coast Guard’s missions is monitoring illegal fishing in U.S. "exclusive economic zones" around the Pacific.
"They are rich in resources, and there are people that want those resources," said Cmdr. Jay Caputo, executive officer on the Rush. "So if you are talking about money, they are taking away money from the United States, and they are violating our sovereignty."
The Jarvis, commissioned in Honolulu in 1972, currently is in the South Pacific on a fisheries patrol, Maestas said.
Two 225-foot buoy tenders based in Honolulu, the Kukui and Walnut, also can conduct long-distance patrols, but have a much smaller crew and less mission capability compared with the high-endurance cutters, officials said.
Three new national security cutters, at a cost of more than $650 million apiece, are based in Alameda.
The Rush and its crew of 163 recently returned from two months in Alaska waters showing some of the rust on the main deck and railings that reappears after a patrol.
Corrosion in a "sea chest" on the bottom of the ship that takes in seawater was one of the costly repairs made before the deployment.
"That sea chest is the only thing between us and the Pacific Ocean, and we found that there was excessive corrosion there to the point where we had to repair it before we sailed again," said McCauley, the ship’s commander.
The Rush, which was launched in 1968 and saw combat in Vietnam, runs on a combination of gas turbines and 24-piston, 12-cylinder diesel engines that were manufactured in the 1960s, but of a design that dated to World War II submarine use, officials said.
"They’ll keep running the ships until they can no longer run," said Maestas, the District 14 spokesman. "Bottom line, we need them out here. They are essential to the mission in the Pacific."
