It’s been a long time since July 31, 1992, when the Coast Guard Commandant Admiral John William Kime killed a legacy Coast Guard mission–Anti Submarine Warfare. Remember his statement?
The requirement to maintain the WHEC [Hamilton Class] ASW mission/capability, was reviewed by the Navy-Coast Guard Board (NAVGARD on 23 July 1992. The Board determined that ASW should be retained as a mission for WHECs, but in the absence of a global ASW threat, the requirement to maintain as ASW capability can be eliminated. The Navy has sufficient assets to respond to regional contingencies requiring ASW and there will be enough warning time to regenerate the WHEC capability if needed for future global scale conflicts.
The world had, of course, changed, so ASW weapons were removed, sensors retired, and their specialists retrained (At about the same time, the Hamilton Class lost their Harpoon missiles, too).
I don’t want to be a modern-day apologist for the pro-coastal-defense Coast Guard Commandant Paul Yost, but with drug runners taking to semi-submersibles, nations buying subs by the bushel-load and commercial subs proliferating aboard luxury ships, cruise liners and elsewhere, is the Coast Guard return to ASW inevitable? And if the Coast Guard moves to restart ASW initiatives, how might Coasties reconstitute those activities and rebuild a skill-set?
Does the global proliferation of sub technology make the old Hamilton Class SQS-36 sonar a useful item? Useful enough to reactivate that capability and keep those ships at sea? Do NSC Cutters have plans for employing ASW? Or is ASW a mission that is gone, never to return to the Coast Guard?
Photo: US Coast Guard
