The Coast Guard began a recapitalization effort in the late 1990s to modernize a significant portion of its entire surface and aviation fleets by rebuilding or replacing assets. This effort was formerly known as Deepwater, and included the FRC and NSC programs, among others. In 2006, the Coast Guard acknowledged that it had relied too heavily on contractors and, citing cost increases, took over the role of lead systems integrator. The Coast Guard reorganized the programs that comprised Deepwater and since 2012 has referred to them broadly as the Coast Guard’s recapitalization. The FRC and the NSC are two of the newest assets in the Coast Guard’s fleet. First delivered in 2012 and 2008, respectively, the cutters were designed to provide additional capability beyond that possessed by their predecessors. The FRC is intended to replace the current fleet of 49 110- foot Island Class Patrol Boats—which were first built in the 1980s—with 58 FRCs that provide the Coast Guard with additional capabilities, such as advanced intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance technology, and cutter boat deployment. The NSC is intended to replace the 12 High Endurance Cutters—which were first built in the 1960s—with a smaller fleet of NSCs that provides the Coast Guard with additional capabilities, such as the ability to collect, analyze, and transmit classified information as well as to carry, launch, and recover unmanned aerial vehicles, among others. The Coast Guard originally planned eight NSCs to fulfill the capability gap left by retiring the High Endurance Cutter fleet, but Congress directed, in December 2015, that of the funds provided by the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2016, not less than $640 million be immediately available and allotted to contract for the production of the ninth NSC. Appendix II provides the current delivery schedule of FRCs and NSCs. The FRCs conduct operations in coastal and high seas conditions up to 200 nautical miles from the coast, enabling them to respond quickly to emerging situations. These cutters are expected to spend no more than 185 days away from their homeport and conduct 2,500 operational hours each year, with each patrol lasting roughly 5 to 7 days. Due to its larger crew—126 for the NSC compared to 24 for the FRC— and size—418 feet for the NSC compared to 154 feet for the FRC—the NSC is able to patrol worldwide and conduct extended operations beyond the capabilities of the FRC. The NSCs are expected to conduct operations from at least 50 nautical miles from shore including in extreme climates, such as the Arctic. Coast Guard standards dictate that the NSCs will spend no more than 210 days away from their homeport and conduct 3,780 operational hours each year, with each patrol lasting longer than 60 days. Appendix III provides more detail of the FRC and NSC’s operational capabilities. The Coast Guard defines the goal of cutter maintenance as ensuring optimal readiness to perform missions at the lowest cost over the asset’s service life. As with any ship, maintenance is a major portion of the total ownership costs for Coast Guard cutters. Unnecessary maintenance increases ownership costs and limits a cutter’s availability to conduct missions, decreasing its readiness. In order to optimize the cutter fleet’s mission availability and decrease ownership costs, the Coast Guard employs Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM), a process used to determine maintenance needs and ensure that maintenance is applicable and effective. RCM is at the center of the Coast Guard’s maintenance philosophy and guides maintenance decisions, determining scheduling and resource requirements. The RCM analysis, which is initiated during the program’s acquisition phase, is unique to each cutter class and is used to determine preventative maintenance requirements by identifying the likely functional failures of hardware and the failures’ impacts. Maintenance procedure cards, which provide detailed instructions on how to complete each maintenance task, including the expected amount of time the task will take to complete as well as the needed tools and parts, are one outcome of the RCM analysis. The Coast Guard employs a bi-level maintenance strategy to meet the preventative maintenance requirements derived from the RCM analysis. Tasks are separated into either organizational-level maintenance or depot-level maintenance. Organizational-level maintenance: Maintenance that is performed by the operating units—i.e., the cutter crews. The Coast Guard assigns maintenance requirements at the operating unit level only if it has been determined that the task is within the ability of the crew to complete, taking into account additional demands such as training, and the availability of tools onboard to complete the assigned task. Depot-level maintenance: Maintenance that is beyond the capability of the crew, including changes and modifications to the cutters deemed too extensive to be performed by the crew. The Surface Forces Logistics Center (SFLC), in Baltimore, MD, is responsible for completing the RCM analysis and determining the responsibility of maintenance tasks for the boats and cutters, including the FRC and NSC, in sustainment. In addition, SFLC is responsible for managing the supply of spare parts and developing maintenance schedules for each fleet. SFLC is divided into five distinct product lines, each of which acts as the point of contact for various maintenance needs of the Coast Guard fleets. Figure 1 shows the organizational structure of SFLC. The product lines were created after SFLC was established in 2009 to optimize the technical, logistical, and depot-level maintenance support for surface assets. Each product line is intended to provide complete naval engineering and logistics support for all assigned surface assets. In order to plan for the individual maintenance needs of each cutter, SFLC generates and maintains a 5-year maintenance plan for each asset class depicting the major depot-level maintenance tasks. Each year, SFLC updates each cutter’s 5-year maintenance schedule to formulate short- and long-term budgets, project shortfalls, and interface with operational commanders for scheduling purposes. Appendix IV shows the timeline of scheduled major maintenance events for the NSC and FRC. The Coast Guard also performs unplanned maintenance, which occurs largely as a result of equipment failures, and is corrective in nature. Unplanned maintenance is performed as necessary by the crew, if possible; dockside by shore technicians; or if the unplanned maintenance is beyond the capabilities of the crew and dockside technicians or requires the cutter to be taken out of the water for repair, the cutter will undergo an emergency dockside or drydock event. In addition to established maintenance procedures, the Coast Guard has several processes by which it can address problematic equipment systems. One such process is the Engineering Change Process, or design change. This process is governed by a process guide that provides detailed instructions on how the Coast Guard should initiate and implement an engineering design change. The Engineering Change Process is the vehicle for implementing changes to assets across the fleet to improve operational capabilities and increase supportability. This process is intended to facilitate configuration control of systems and equipment on all surface assets in an effort to reduce total operating cost over the life of the asset class. The Engineering Change Process includes numerous reviews of relevant product designs, budgets, and procedures and facilitates the delivery of engineering and/or logistics actions to the field. The Coast Guard uses the Electronic Asset Logbook (EAL) program to record all maintenance and operational activities for surface assets, such as the FRC and NSC, among others. EAL records and tracks equipment failures and mission capable statuses, and is updated in real time by cutter crews to allow for total asset visibility across a cutter class. The EAL process is governed by a process guide that provides detailed instructions to product lines and cutter crews to ensure the EAL system is used uniformly across the fleets. The EAL program provides the product lines insight into the percentage of time each cutter is capable of conducting missions by using five ratings: partially mission capable, not mission capable due to maintenance, not mission capable due to supply, and not mission capable due to depot maintenance. Each cutter class has an acceptable target range for the percentage of time that the Coast Guard expects the asset to be mission capable. The target ranges are determined during the acquisition phase for each fleet using the Coast Guard’s employment standards, which dictate the limits for Days Away From Home Port and operational hours as well as the minimum number of depot-level maintenance time needed per year. Figure 2 depicts a notional visualization as to how asset status data is used to assess the health of the fleet from an engineering perspective. The FRCs are expected to be mission capable 48 to 60 percent of the time, while the NSCs are expected to be mission capable 49 to 61 percent of the time. In order to be considered fully mission capable, the cutter must be able to support all of its assigned missions. In order to be considered partially mission capable, the cutter must be able to effectively execute some of its assigned missions, but be unable to fully respond to at least one assigned mission due to an equipment system failure. Taken together, the fully mission capable status and the partially mission capable statuses comprise the cutter’s mission capable rate. Influencing the mission capable rates are the three “not mission capable” statuses. A cutter is considered not mission capable due to maintenance if it has an equipment failure that requires the cutter to return to port for maintenance during the period that the cutter was originally scheduled to be conducting operations. Once the source of the equipment failure has been determined and if the Coast Guard has to wait for a spare part, the cutter will be placed into the not mission capable due to supply status until the spare part is received and the correction can be implemented. The cutter will be placed in not mission capable due to depot-level maintenance status if the cutter is unavailable to conduct operations due to planned depot maintenance (i.e., non crew conducted maintenance). This can include conducting both anticipated and unanticipated maintenance.