Coast Guard chooses new patrol boat
Years after Congress urged the U.S. Coast Guard to speed up its patrol boat replacement program, the service finally picked a design and a shipbuilder for its new cutters; the winner: Bollinger Shipyards
What with the news about the growing menace of piracy on the high seas, and the growing sophistication of drug smugglers who now use mini-submarines to smuggle large shipments of drugs into the United States, it is good to see the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) moving, at last, to acquire new gear. Years after Congress urged the U.S. Coast Guard to speed up its patrol boat replacement program, the service finally picked a design and a shipbuilder for its new cutters. The winner: Bollinger Shipyards, with a proven design from Dutch shipbuilder and ship designer Damen. “It’s imperative that we get this program under way,” Adm. Thad Allen, commandant of the Coast Guard, told reporters gathered Monday at service headquarters in Washington.
The $88 million contract announced 26 September is for the design and construction of the first Sentinel-class patrol boat. The firm fixed-price contract includes six option periods which, if exercised, would add up to 34 new cutters at an ultimate price of $1.5 billion. The average unit price of the new ships, once the program kicks into production, should be $45 million to $50 million, said Rear Adm. Gary Blore, the Coast Guard’s top acquisition official.
The Navy Times’s Christopher Cavas writes that the service has a need for 58 new Fast Response Cutters (FRC) to replace the aging 110-foot Island class cutters that have reached the end of their service lives. The FRC is the smallest of three new cutter types envisioned under the Deepwater program to upgrade the Coast Guard’s ships, aircraft and systems.
The first of the largest new ships, the National Security Cutter, entered service in August, while construction of the medium-sized cutters has yet to begin. For budget reasons the service had wanted to put off buying new FRC patrol boats for some years and as a stopgap measure rebuild the Island class to become 123-footers, but the conversions failed and the modernization program was halted at eight ships.
Coast Guard engineers also balked at Northrop Grumman’s proposal to build a new class of patrol boats using composite construction techniques, and in the spring of 2007 the service announced it was “taking back” management of the patrol boat program to produce an “FRC-B” alternative to the original plan. The FRC-B would come from an existing patrol boat design, and the service began a worldwide search for an acceptable ship. “This marks a new era in how we do acquisitions,” Allen declared of the service’s effort to eliminate middlemen.” This is a cradle-to-grave Coast Guard program.”
Earlier this year, the service winnowed down proposals from six shipbuilders to a final list of three, from which “Bollinger had by far the best proposal,” Blore said.
