U.S. President Joe Biden announced Wednesday (May 19) that the U.S. Coast Guard will play a greater role in ensuring that “every nation” abides by international rules at sea.
“Because of your professional reputation and your unparalleled skills, the Coast Guard will be an increasingly central element in our engagement with the Indo-Pacific region to defend lives, preserve the environment and safeguard sovereignty throughout the region,” Biden told the graduates at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy graduation ceremony.
“In the Arabian Gulf, we are in the process of deploying six new rapid response patrol ships to escalate patrols in Southwest Asia. The Coast Guard’s expertise is helping our partners in the region enforce the law of the sea and conduct search and seizure operations.”
President Joe Biden told the 240 graduates of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in Connecticut in a commencement address on 19 May that “the world is changing. We are at an important inflection point in the history of the world,” he said, adding that the world faces growing global challenges and that the United States needs to “respond to them on land, on the sea, wherever we find them.
President Biden also issued public warnings to China and Russia about their maritime behavior. He said he discussed with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin the violation of long-standing fundamental maritime principles such as freedom of navigation. He said those principles are “the cornerstone of the global economy and global security.”
“It throws everything out of balance when countries try to cheat the system or tilt the rules in their favor,” President Biden said. “That’s why we are so adamant that those regions of the world that are arteries of trade and shipping must remain peaceful, whether it’s the South China Sea, the Arabian Gulf, and increasingly, the Arctic Ocean as well.”
This week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been in Iceland for an Arctic Council ministerial meeting. Getting U.S. maritime police to patrol the remote northern waters has strong bipartisan support in Congress.
“Russia and the Chinese Communists are increasing their malign influence in the region, testing the limits of the United States and our allies in the region,” Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Ariz.), the ranking Republican member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said Wednesday.
He said, “It is important that this administration recognize the strategic competition playing out in the Arctic, which is what it is called, and act quickly to counter it to ensure that the Arctic remains a safe, environmentally sound and stable region.”
Biden said there would be no unimpeded global commerce without the United States playing an active role in setting rules of conduct and “shaping them around democratic values rather than the values of autocrats.”
During his speech at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, Biden said, “That is why we will continue to support the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which sets out key principles to ensure that the waters of our planet are not exploited by any one nation, but are preserved for the benefit of all nations.”
President Biden also singled out a new partnership between the U.S. Coast Guard and Taiwan, saying it “will help ensure that we are well positioned to better respond to common threats in the region and to conduct a coordinated, humane environmental mission.”
The United States and Taiwan have not had formal diplomatic relations since Washington broke off diplomatic relations with Taipei in 1979 in favor of recognizing Beijing.
President Biden also cited the recent firing of 30 warning shots by a U.S. Navy patrol ship in the Strait of Hormuz while on a mission with the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet to deter Iranian attack speedboats “operating in an irresponsible and unprofessional manner in the area.”
Photos released by the U.S. Navy show the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy’s Has 55 passing in front of the U.S. Coast Guard patrol boat USS Monomoy at close range in an unsafe manner in the high seas waters of the southern Arabian Gulf. (April 2, 2021)
The U.S. Coast Guard currently conducts 11 missions by law, sending vessels and personnel on missions away from U.S. shores. The mission where the warning fire occurred is one of those 11 missions.
Since 2003, the Coast Guard has been conducting military support missions in and around Iraq, as required by the Department of Defense.
The U.S. Navy does not have law enforcement authority, so Navy ships must include members of the Coast Guard when taking police action.
In addition to traditional search and rescue and vessel security missions in home waters, Coast Guard responsibilities include ice breaking in the Arctic Ocean, drug interdiction off the coast of Central America, combating illegal fishing in the Pacific Ocean, and playing a forward role in interdicting smuggled weapons in the Persian Gulf.
To do all that, the U.S. Coast Guard needs more funding, said Craig Hooper, founder and chief executive of Themistocles Advisory Group.
“Because the Coast Guard doesn’t have that much money, they do things from a strong strategic template — often having the entire U.S. nation follow them all the way — so any additional funding should support the planning they’re already doing,” Hooper said. “If you cram too much money into this small elite organization, the U.S. risks losing the magic that makes the Marine Corps so effective.”
Hooper is also the publisher of NextNavy.com, a website for the next generation of the Navy. He told Voice of America that he also fears that as Biden’s Defense Department supports a high-tech version of the national security vision, “the Coast Guard – the military service that handles all the day-to-day work at sea and that is really keeping international order and peace at sea – will be ignored. Hypersonics, artificial intelligence and robots are great, but they won’t replace a marine police boarding assault team.”
In his commencement address Wednesday, Biden said the Coast Guard “has always recognized the broader definition of our national security” that has blurred the distinction between the Coast Guard and the Navy.
“The Coast Guard has essentially become a subsidiary of the Navy or a junior varsity of the Navy, and as soon as the Navy’s operational pace becomes too fast and they are needed, they can immediately fill in and join the starting lineup,” said Ted Galen Carpenter, deputy director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute ( Ted Galen Carpenter) said. “At this moment it is a critical reserve for the Navy and is not actually focused on its traditional mission of guarding the U.S. coast offshore.”
In wartime, the U.S. Coast Guard could be integrated into the U.S. Department of Defense command, but in peacetime, that was not the original intent of the Coast Guard’s mission.
File photo: The U.S. Coast Guard’s Legend-class patrol ship USS Bertholf, which is participating in the RIMPAC exercise, sails into Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii. (June 29, 2012)
The U.S. Coast Guard claims to be the oldest unbroken maritime force in the United States, with roots dating back to the 1790s when it was established as a small fleet to enforce tariff laws by order of the Department of the Treasury, and was transferred from the Department of Transportation to the then-new Department of Homeland Security in 2003.
After more than a decade of a stormy and controversial procurement process, the Coast Guard’s vintage Hamilton-class patrol ships are giving way to the new Legend-class national security patrol ships. The Coast Guard’s rapid response patrol fleet has been growing.
The Coast Guard’s admirals “certainly like a lot of the new stuff they’re getting, which is really cutting-edge technology,” Carpenter told Voice of America. “On the other hand, they’re feeling the pressure of the base of operations and the additional missions that have been given to them.”
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