The Coast Guard promptly put this strategy into practice, surging more people and assets into the Eastern Pacific and Caribbean transit zones near the cocaine-growing region around Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. It tightened its coordination with international partners, working with the State Department to build on 41 existing bilateral counter-drug agreements and employed a targeted, vectored, risk-based approach to actionable intelligence.

The results of this surge have been striking. In October 2014, the cutter Boutwell’s 90-day patrol in the Eastern Pacific resulted in the seizure of 28,000 pounds of cocaine, with a street value of nearly a half-billion dollars – an impressive haul, but one that would be dwarfed on Aug.10, 2015, when the cutter Stratton unloaded 34 metric tons of cocaine at San Diego Naval Base. The drugs, worth more than $1 billion, were seized in 23 separate interdictions. In the first 10 months of the 2015 fiscal year, the Coast Guard and its partners established a record-breaking annual haul: 215 suspected smugglers apprehended, and more than 119,000 pounds of cocaine confiscated, with an estimated street value of about $1.8 billion.

Impressive – but just a chink in the armor of a $750 billion enterprise. Zukunft calls the Coast Guard’s anti-drug capabilities a “$10 billion slingshot.” Though the Coast Guard and JIATFS have actionable intelligence on about 90 percent of known maritime drug movements, he said, existing air and surface assets are only able to target about 20 percent of that known traffic. As the cartels continue to vie for control of maritime trafficking routes, the Coast Guard and its partners will face increasingly difficult choices in the transit zones.

 

Stretched Thin

While the Coast Guard’s focus on the Western Hemisphere achieves such results, however, the rest of the world refuses to sit still. As Obama’s historic visit to Alaska’s Arctic in the summer of 2015 demonstrated (see “Challenges in the Arctic,”), the Arctic is emerging as a maritime domain that requires a Coast Guard presence. In August 2015, the National Security Cutter Waesche withdrew from its counter-drug patrol in a transit zone to help establish a Coast Guard presence in the region. Assertive Russian territorial claims and infrastructure projects, combined with Russia’s recent penchant for military adventures, have led some to question its intentions for the Arctic.

At the same time, the People’s Republic of China is asserting its aggressive claim to nearly all of the South China Sea, building port facilities, military buildings, and even several islands from dredged material to bolster its foothold in the Spratlys, a disputed cluster of reefs and islands more than 500 miles from the Chinese mainland. China’s claim of 80 percent of the South China Sea extends to the “nine-dash” line that pushes up against the exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. These nations view China’s claims as a threat to their national sovereignties.

China has made a point to temper the appearance of aggression by relying mainly on white-hulled Chinese coast guard ships, rather than the more intimidating gray hulls of naval vessels, to assert its own sovereignty in these disputed waters.

The Coast Guard’s role in the Asia-Pacific – and everywhere else in the world – is clearly spelled out in the recently updated “U.S. Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower”, released in March 2015 by the leadership of the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard. The strategy, also known as CS21, mentions the Coast Guard’s continued work with partners in joint and combined controls, shiprider exchanges, and multinational exercises. It doesn’t mention Coast Guard cutters in the South China Sea. But the fact that its expertise and ability to work closely with partners – including partners whom others view as antagonists – reveals a challenge unique to the Coast Guard: When you’re a multi-mission agency, capable of projecting an American presence around the globe, you’re likely to encounter demand for your services anywhere in the world.

In executing its Asia-Pacific pivot, the U.S. Navy risks an escalation of tensions by introducing its own gray hulls to the South China Sea to check China’s advances. The U.S. Coast Guard has longstanding and cordial working relationships with its counterparts in both Russia and China, through bilateral agreements and multilateral cooperative organizations such as the North Pacific Coast Guard Forum and the new Arctic Coast Guard Forum – a circumstance that has led some to speculate that it should play a more significant role in the region. In June 2014, in an interview with National Defense Magazine, Capt. David Adams, then-director of the Warfighter’s Initiatives Group for the U.S. Navy’s 7th Fleet, raised eyebrows when he appeared to call for an increased Coast Guard presence in the region. “We have no white hulls in the Pacific, hardly,” he said. “We are going to have to fund the Coast Guard, not to do their conventional missions, but to come and help with the white-hull problem in the Pacific.”

To Zukunft, the idea of diverting more cutters to the Pacific from the Coast Guard’s aging, shrinking fleet is a non-starter. “The opportunity cost of sending those assets to the nine-dash line is pretty significant,” he said. “The China coast guard just launched a 12,000-ton cutter, bigger than an Aegis cruiser by far. For every ship I send, China can probably send 15 or 20. We do not have a policy, per se, in terms of the U.S. role there. Are we going to arbitrate compliance in the East South China Sea? The answer is no. But it probably requires a multilateral effort.”