The Coast Guard’s plans to cut 1,100 uniformed personnel in 2011 and reduce some of its missions at a time it must respond to an enormous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico certainly highlight the stark choices Coasties face over the next few years. Meanwhile, the Navy is moving into the littoral and increasing its focus on anti-drug and anti-piracy operations, raising questions about just what the Coastie’s future roles and missions will be. Robbin Laird, a defense consultant who has been working on Coast Guard issues, penned the following commentary about the Coast Guard and its future.

The declining security situation in Afghanistan has leveled off in many areas in the past three months, according to a Pentagon progress report to Congress. Still, overall violence is up sharply, with an 87 % increase over the seasonal average of the same period last year. The Taliban insurgency believes 2009 was their most successful year, the report says.

As the Army’s top buyer, Lt. Gen. Robert Lennox, deputy chief of staff for programs said he’s demanding a cost benefit analysis of all existing as well as new systems and what value they bring to soldiers. Weapons systems that are redundant or that fail to provide for soldiers fighting today’s wars will fast fall out of favor. Getting new technologies and gear to soldiers quickly has also moved up in importance.

With little concrete justification beyond an “overly aggressive initial program schedule,” the Marine Corps has pushed the first flight back two years to 2013 and slid the initial operating capability (IOC) back by three years to 2018. While stressing the program has not run into technical problems, the rationale for slowing the CH-53K program has, at best, been poorly articulated. Why slow the program? When delivered, the new fly-by-wire CH-53K will, in theory, transport 27,000 pounds of external cargo out to a range of 110 nautical miles, nearly tripling the thirty-year old CH-53E’s lift capability under similar environmental conditions–all while fitting under the same shipboard footprint.

1 in 5 Tankers Sit in Depots

The Air Force’s latest mobility study found the United States could not muster enough tankers to execute two of three likely scenarios, senior service officials told the House Armed Services air and land forces subcommittee today. One of the principal reasons for that is that the aging tanker fleet needs so much patchwork and loving care that almost 20 percent of the fleet is in a depot at any one time, Brig. Gen. Michelle Johnson testified.

Cruise missiles are highly accurate but they have to be fired from a distance and they take a fair amount of time to get where they are going. So they are great for fixed targets, but their limitations have left the Pentagon scratching its head for half a decade trying to find something that can be launched and hit its target anywhere in the world within an hour or so. The concept, pushed hard by vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Hoss Cartwright, is called Prompt Global Strike and the budget contains $240 million for development programs. But one of the more promising efforts, DARPA’s Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 (HTV-2), made it part way through a test and then vanished. A review board has been formed to find out just what went wrong.

UPDATED: Hill Worries “Manhood” Means Gates Won’t Listen; Pratt Calls It “Distraction”

Clearly responding to the persistent heat from the Pentagon and to wavering support on Capitol Hill, the General Electric and Rolls Royce F136 consortium today announced a fixed price deal they say will save $1 billion over the next five years and $20 billion over the life of the Joint Strike Fighter program.

A lawmaker who recently returned from Yemen is concerned that the NSA’s policy of, in effect, hanging up when they hear an American is on the phone may be hampering our ability to gather intelligence in what is now one of the hottest terrorist spots on Earth. But it’s not the policy alone that is worrisome. The fact that magnifies the concern is that there are an estimated 56,000 Yemenis who hold American passports or qualify as U.S. persons.

Adaptability is what the Pentagon’s chief buyer, Ash Carter, wants across the military from personnel to weapons systems, and he’s directed the Defense Science Board (DSB) to identify those traits that foster adaptability in large organizations, particularly in the private sector. Military adaptation has too often relied on the actions of a few innovative individuals creating work-arounds to bureaucratic obstacles, Carter wrote in an April 12 memo outlining marching orders to the DSB 2010 Summer Study; he wants adaptability adopted as a “key determinant” in how DOD operates across the board.

Can you say Haditha? There’s not much for me to say about this one, beyond the fact that the Navy is sure to feel some heat from some who thought the late Rep. Jack Murtha was wrong when he accused Marines of massacring people “in cold blood” in the Iraqi town. Here’s the official note, that was done in the best Washington tradition of hoping controversial things will go quietly into the night if you release them late on a Friday afternoon: “The secretary of the Navy (SECNAV) honored the legacy of the late U.S. Representative John Murtha by declaring April 23 that the Navy’s 10th San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock ship, LPD 26, will bear his name.”

The Pentagon is almost certain to kill the Non-Line of Sight Launch System, leaving little left of the once enormous Future Combat System and raising questions about how the Navy and Army will deliver highly accurate steel on distant targets. “This thing just costs too much,” said a source familiar with the decision. “It really has come down to affordability.”

The Army is confident it can field fully functional “capability packages” of sensors, robots and radios to its brigades even though recent tests, by their own admission, showed performance “shortfalls” and “reliability issues.” Army leaders say they can make the needed fixes and get the “Increment 1” production models ready for the field; tests scheduled for September will prove critical to the program’s future. We spoke to Paul Mehney, from the Army’s modernization office, on the status of the fixes and upcoming field tests.

The Navy made clear this week it’s the lead service when it comes to eco-friendly efforts. Today, the Navy flew the “Green Hornet,” an F/A-18 fueled by a mixture of bio-fuels and aviation fuels; the bio fuels come from camelina, a mustard plant. Green Hornets will form a green strike wing aboard a carrier that will be the center of the “Great Green Fleet,” a strike group to be deployed in 2016.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has thoroughly embraced the “indirect approach” to battling global terrorists networks. Its a strategy long favored by Mike Vickers, Mr. SOLIC; one of the few Bush administration DoD holdovers. Vickers was an advisor in El Salvador during the 1980s, and is a big proponent of that small footprint approach, providing advisors and money to boost foreign militaries rather than sending in large ground forces to pull constabulary duty. Efforts to build out Yemen’s special operations forces to battle al Qaeda is an example of Vickers’ indirect approach.

If the White House and Pentagon have figured out how to fix the interagency process that helped doom the first stab at a new presidential helicopter, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus didn’t make it crystal clear this morning. I asked Mabus who was in charge of the program and he said the Navy has the administrative program lead and Ash Carter coordinates the program for the Pentagon. I pressed him to find out who really has the program lead and about the role of the White House (aka Secret Service working with the WH Military Office) and he paused for a long time.

EADS North America will pursue the tanker bid on its own, acting as prime and bringing in some 200 suppliers when it bids on the tanker. With the North American company going it alone, this raises several basic questions. First, can they handle all the highly classified work that will be done on the plane. CEO Sean O’Keefe says the answer to that is yes.