NY TIMES
> December 14, 2006
> Editorial
>
> Ships That Don't Dare to Sail
>
>
> The Coast Guard, supposedly our first line of defense against water-borne
> terrorists and drug smugglers, has been staggered by a shipbuilding scandal
> of enormous proportions. A long-term modernization program to replace nearly
> all of the Coast Guard's ships, planes and helicopters - begun four years
> ago in the wake of 9/11 - is foundering while its projected costs are
> skyrocketing. In Iraq, lax government oversight and incompetence or
> profiteering by contractors have disabled reconstruction efforts. Now the
> same disease is undermining our coastal defenses.
>
> The Coast Guard fiasco was laid out in depressing detail by Eric Lipton in
> The Times last Saturday <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/09/us/09ship.html> ,
> and in a similar article in The Washington Post. The misjudgments and
> slipshod work would be grist for slapstick comedy if the consequences, in
> cost and weakened defenses, were not so serious.
>
> As described by Mr. Lipton, the estimated costs of the project, known as
> Deepwater, have ballooned from $17 billion when it started in 2002 to $24
> billion today. The plans call for 91 new ships, 124 small boats, 195 new or
> rebuilt helicopters and 49 unmanned aerial vehicles. But don't count on any
> of the new vehicles working.
>
> The initial venture - converting the Coast Guard's rusting patrol boats into
> bigger, more versatile cutters - has been canceled because hull cracks and
> engine failures made the first eight ships unseaworthy. Plans for a new
> class of ships with an innovative hull design were halted after the design
> was found to be flawed. And even the radios placed in small open boats
> proved faulty; they shorted out because they had not been made waterproof.
>
> In the latest chapter in this disgraceful performance, Mr. Lipton reports in
> today's paper that the Coast Guard did not inform Congress that it was
> warned two years ago by its chief engineer that a proposed National Security
> Cutter, meant to be the flagship of its fleet, had "significant flaws" in
> its structural design and should not be started until the problems were
> addressed. The Coast Guard began construction anyway. It plans to reinforce
> the first two versions that are being built and change the design on the
> remaining six.
>
> How could this happen? Mostly because the Coast Guard, in an astonishing
> abdication of responsibility, gave two large military contractors, Lockheed
> Martin and Northrop Grumman, near total freedom to plan, supervise and
> deliver the new ships and helicopters. In some cases, the contractors made
> boneheaded decisions, as when their shipyard partner ignored warnings by
> Coast Guard engineers that the converted patrol boats might buckle under the
> extra weight. In other cases, they might have put their own interests ahead
> of the nation's, as when they adopted a risky hull material that had never
> been tried on a large American military ship but was pushed by Northrop,
> which had just opened a new plant to manufacture the hulls.
>
> No wonder the contractors are ducking for cover as the scandal reverberates,
> and are leaving all comment to the hapless Coast Guard. The Coast Guard
> seems, belatedly, to be moving in the right direction by giving its own
> engineers more supervisory power over the work and creating a division to
> oversee procurement and maintenance of ships and planes. Even so, the new
> Congress and the Department of Homeland Security, which is responsible for
> the Coast Guard, will need to keep a sharp eye on the Coast Guard's
> performance. The industrial contractors have proved they were not up to the
> job.