U.S. Coast Guard Outperformed During Guam’s Mawar Recovery. Will Washington DC Notice?

While Guam struggles to recover from Typhoon Mawar, the U.S. Coast Guard has performed particularly well. Thanks to Coast Guard’s comprehensive pre-storm preparation and diligent post-storm recovery efforts, Guam’s port opened far faster than Guam’s disaster planners expected, helping the Port Authority of Guam return to normal operations. Will either the Administration or Congress notice?

While the Coast Guard’s superior performance in supporting Guam won’t make many headlines or excite much interest in Washington DC, it should. The U.S. Coast Guard’s deliberate investments in practical, low-profile capabilities, when coupled with the Coast Guard’s longstanding “bias for action”, is a perfect recipe for getting things done in a pinch. That effective approach deserves far more funding.

The Coast Guard merits a bigger slice of the Department of Homeland Security budget, as the scantly-funded and oft-overlooked organization has, once again, punched far above its weight, cementing a growing—and strategically important—role as an independent and trusted partner throughout the deep Pacific.

How The Coast Guard Battled Typhoon Mawar:

The Coast Guard relied on three pillars to take on Typhoon Mawar. First, the organization recognized Guam’s meteorological and geographical challenges, making strategic—and relatively low cost—investments to position the Coast Guard for success in addressing a wide range of likely scenarios. Second, it relied on the organization’s bias—and freedom—for action, positioning assets early to address potential recovery challenges. And third, it got to work, completing disaster response missions an efficient, no-nonsense manner.

While the Coast Guard has known about Guam’s typhoon risks for decades, Typhoon-ready investments have been slow in coming. Only over the past three years, as the Coast Guard dispatched three new forward-deployed Fast Response Cutters to Guam, has the Coast Guard gotten funding to expand their typhoon-ready footprint on Guam. And those new Coast Guard base facilities, built to withstand life in “Typhoon Alley”, were immediately useful for local Coast Guard partners.

During Mawar, the Guam Fire Department relied on Coast Guard’s year-old Cmdr. Carlton S. Skinner Building. The strongly-built facility, constructed for the U.S. Coast Guard’s wide-ranging Maintenance and Weapons Augmentation teams, offered safe-haven for some of Guam’s mission-critical first-responder gear. In contrast, the main Coast Guard buildings on Guam, which the team has outgrown, date from the middle of the last century and upgrades or recapitalization efforts have been consistently pushed back due to operational Coast Guard commitments and limited construction funding.

To support Guam after Mawar, the Coast Guard team relied on their underappreciated organic air transport capabilities to move key personnel and critical gear into the region early. A Coast Guard HC-130J Hercules transport, with additional port assessment resources, left U.S. Coast Guard Air Station Barbers Point in Hawaii on May 24, and stood by on “nearby” Kwajalein, flying into Guam almost immediately after the typhoon passed, conducting assessment overflights.

A second Coast Guard HC-130J carrying repair and disaster assistance personnel arrived in the area shortly thereafter, and those planes were the first flights into both Guam’s hard-hit Andersen Air Force Base and the Antonio B. Won Pat International Airport. In total, the Coast Guard used three C-130’s in the response, offering quite a formidable capability demonstration from an agency that has only eight modern HC-130Js in the entire Pacific theatre.

On the ground, the Coast Guard didn’t wait. It prepared Guam’s port for heavy weather, and, within hours of the Typhoon’s passage, personnel from U.S. Coast Guard Forces Micronesia/Sector Guam and members of the Guam-based USCGC Sequoia (WLB 215) were in the field, assessing damage and making repairs. Coast Guard activities were publicly chronicled, presented in a stream of clear, detailed press releases.

Leaning into an active response paid off. Planning documents detailing Guam’s response to a catastrophic typhoon assume strong cyclones would close the island’s seaport—the heart of the island—for seven to ten days. Instead, the Coast Guard needed only about 72 hours, opening Guam’s port to military, commercial and cargo traffic on May 28.

Coast Guard cutters were the first vessels to enter Apra Harbor, and Coast Guard boats, crewed by Maritime Safety and Security Team Honolulu personnel who came in on a Coast Guard C-130, proudly escorted a Matson cargo ship carrying much-needed supplies to the stricken island.

The Service also leveraged their professional reputation and called on longstanding relationships with local Department of Defense elements to support reopening the port and clearing the facility. The U.S. Navy CTF-75 and their Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Unit Five worked on surveying and clearing underwater challenges, the U.S. Naval Mobile Construction Battalion One Detachment Guam’s crane crew handled buoys at the pier, the U.S. Marines Aviation Logistics Squadron 16 handled debris removal and, of course, the the Marines took on the ceremonial flagpole raising at the Coast Guard facility.

In the midst of all the recovery work, Guam’s Coast Guard team even handled a quick VIP visit by the low-profile Coast Guard Commandant, Admiral Linda Fagan—a visit that quietly signaled just how important complex disaster recovery missions are to the Coast Guard.

Will USCG Success Drive A Budget Boost?

For Federal agencies, efforts to support distant American territories is something of a thankless task. Territories like Guam lack strong, organic representation in Congress, and local disaster response efforts on U.S. territories are often compromised by long-standing inefficiencies, corruption or political challenges. But the Coast Guard doesn’t care about all that and took on the mission anyway.

It’s great to see. Unfortunately, many of the tools that made the Coast Guard so helpful during Guam’s recovery of Typhoon Mawar just aren’t getting funded. And that is a serious problem for strategically important outposts like Micronesia.

The typhoon demonstrated that the Coast Guard can make great use of their strategic investments in solid, storm-ready infrastructure. But, rather than race to fund additional storm-ready investments in Coast Guard’s remote, strategically important bases in the Pacific, the most recent Administration budget left the Coast guard wanting. The Coast Guard’s current Unfunded Priorities List includes a modest request for $200 million in Pacific-focused capital improvements—a congressional “ask” largely for cutter-oriented improvements that likely represents only a tiny fraction of the Coast Guard’s actual needs ashore.

At Guam, the Coast Guard’s freedom of action was on full display. While the deployment of much of America’s disaster-response assets and capabilities are informed by the host state or territory, the Coast Guard showed how it can, given the Service’s particular authorities, be proactive, moving resources around the globe with few bureaucratic constraints.

The Coast Guard’s response to Mawar highlighted the Coast Guard’s long-distance lift. With the Coast Guard maintaining a total fleet of 22 HC-130 Hercules transport aircraft in almost constant readiness, the Service is a vastly underappreciated contributor to government mobility.

Those Coast Guard airlifters did a lot. Coast Guard District 14, which oversees operations in Hawaii and across the Pacific Islands region, reported on Instagram that three aircraft, supported by 31 Coast Guard personnel out of Barbers Point, Hawaii, clocked 97.3 hours of flight time, transporting 396,231 pounds of cargo and 169 passengers. According to the Coast Guard, the team completed 19 “vital missions” across 33 sorties.

To contrast, the U.S. Air Force’s Air Base in Yokota, Japan, with some 14 C-130Js available, proudly announced it had shipped over 36,000 pounds of frozen and refrigerated perishable items some 1,500 miles to-and-from Guam. While the Coast Guard flew in from a far greater distance, dispatching their platforms from Hawaii, some 4,000 miles away, few in Washington have really unpacked and highlighted the Coast Guard’s strong performance in the air and on long-distance maritime patrols.

Rather than celebrate the Coast Guard’s long-range maritime patrol aircraft, the maritime service is regularly forced to beg for more aircraft. For at least the past three years, the Coast Guard used the Unfunded Priorities List to request $120-140 million to purchase a missionized HC-130J aircraft from Lockheed Martin
LMT
Corporation, filling out a planned fleet of 22 modern airlifters.

The Coast Guard deserves better treatment from the Administration, the Department of Homeland Security and Congress. Perhaps, if the organization was moved to become a part of an independent Maritime Administration, combining the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration, the Federal Maritime Commission, maritime elements of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Science Foundation research fleet, the Coast Guard could be unleashed to see what their no-frills competence might contribute if the Coast Guard and the American civilian maritime was, for once, fully funded.