The Indo-Pacific is the hottest ticket in town, and the United States Coast Guard Sentinel-class Fast Response Cutters (FRCs) are steaming low-profile down the middle of it all, sketching security’s profile out across these boundless ocean seas. They aren’t patrol ships but Swiss Army knives—of equal utility to chase off illegal fishing flotillas as to bring relief or assistance or establish trust with distant allies.
The push to propel these cutters further into the Pacific is no less than a roll of evils across borders. The most able, potentially, would be illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing. The problem is that the economic subsistence of island nations, which opens fish resources accessible to communities, violates sovereignty that cannot be pushed aside.
IUU fishing has been warned by experts to be just as large an environmental problem as it is a real food security and economic problem. In the South Pacific, not only is tuna a staple in regional diets, but a huge export, and yet increasingly larger percentages of the catch go into the black. That jeopardizes not only regional industries such as canneries in American Samoa that prepare to can products such as tuna, but also the security of the region itself.
The Coast Guard has thus stretched itself out to Guam and established FRCs there and brokered longer-term basing arrangements in other Pacific island nations. They’ve already set the price. Take the case of the USCGC Oliver Henry, for example: during a two-week coastal patrol of Palau, its crew escorted more than 15,000 square miles of ocean in tandem with Palau’s Division of Marine Law Enforcement.
Anticipated boardings and ship inspections yielded no offense—a telling figure that mere visibility has a measurable effect. As cutter commander Lt. Ray Cerrato described it, coordinated patrols are a testament to the enduring value of presence, shoulder to shoulder with friends in the neighborhood.
But the FRCs are police work plus. They’ve become contact points, as well. Oliver Henry, cutting the Coast Guard’s first mooring from Rota, CNMI, brought aboard local safety officials and kids along with it, filling niches gear can never try to fill. Training, exercises, and joint patrols have now become the norm, not only improving readiness but also trust between neighbors who too often wage the same wars out on the ocean.
Technically, the FRC is also agile and quick. With a length of 154 feet, the ship can record a top speed of 28 knots with a greater command and communications package and stern ramp launch for a fast-speed interceptor boat. It carries a light draft that allows it to visit and port at backcountry islands and ports that other ships can’t access, a blessing in an age of scattered-atoll and break-apart society. Bollinger Shipyard described it as a game-changer, and on the job, it’s lived up to it.
Perhaps best at what it does is the exercise of soft power that these deployments embody. A Coast Guard cutter shows presence, not swagger. Its mission set is one of unities—protection of the fishery fleet, perhaps, or disaster relief, or naval defense. It’s especially in the interest of wider U.S. Indo-Pacific policy, partnership rather than posturing.
American Samoan leaders and others have already made clear and firm expressions supporting homeporting the FRCs, with twinned security and new economic dividends to follow. There are certainly challenges.
The tiny Pacific island countries have little infrastructure, and being there permanently is not a cheap option and will take some cleverness. Budgets there do exist, naturally, and coordination with the Navy and others to get the task done. But previous missions are enough proof of why the cost is an expense that is amply justified. In one instance, Oliver Henry made a detour to a Kiribati atoll to provide fresh water when in-country supplies were exhausted—a proof of the usefulness of such vessels for humanitarian assistance and policing.
To the future, the Coast Guard’s continued employment of Sentinel-class cutters throughout the Pacific is a permanent shift in how America is extending itself to the Pacific. They are so much more than patrol boats. They are genuine words of cooperation, resolve, and disillusion— traveling across some of the world’s remotest oceans, dividing them, making them sustainable and networked.