US Coast Guard stays ashore

When talking about naval capabilities, you usually differ between brown-water and blue-water capabilities. Brown water is a littoral navy, staying close to the coast, such as the Chinese or the Danish, whereas a blue water capable navy can roam the high seas for months, with whatever that takes of logistics, systems and manpower.

But time is running from the brown water navy. As globalisation means that conflicts will probably move away from the vicinity of the nation state and out into the rim of the sphere of influence. Both China and Denmark has taken steps to adjust to this, albeit in very different scales and ways.

The US Coast Guard has traditionally been the US Brown Water Navy, doing inspections and rescue missions close to home. But they have also seen the need of going blue, starting a large revision programme called Deepwater. However, now the money falters, they have outsourced the development to large corporations and things are generally coming to a halt, with battles in congress.