Yesterday, Aug. 11, the newest Coast Guard vessel in Alaska was commissioned at Base Kodiak and is set to officially begin service.
The Earl Cunningham is the second of three new cutters to be homeported in Kodiak. It joins the John Witherspoon which was commissioned in Kodiak in April. By the end of this year the third vessel, the Frederick Mann, is scheduled to arrive in Kodiak and be commissioned into service as well.
Acting Commandant of the Coast Guard, Admiral Kevin Lunday said these 154-foot cutters have the capability to move beyond the Gulf of Alaska, into places like the Aleutian Islands and the Bering Sea.
“They’re amazingly capable, much more so than the older 110-foot patrol boats that they replaced," Lunday said. "And so that enables us to move them forward and base them temporarily, position them out of forward operating locations. We haven’t decided how to do that specifically in Alaska and the Arctic, yet.”
Lunday added that the plan is to have future fast response cutters homeported in Seward, Sitka and Ketchikan but infrastructure still needs to be developed in Sitka and Seward before those vessels can dock there.
It’s the latest in a build-up of Coast Guard personnel and infrastructure in Kodiak.
Since at least 2018 the Coast Guard has taken steps to build a handful of fast response cutters bound for Alaska – and to homeport three of them in Kodiak. That includes an expansion of 200 service members and their families on Base Kodiak, with more local housing at Nemetz Park to accommodate them. The new housing complex was announced in 2022, at a cost of $85 million. In that same time frame, the population of Coast Guard Base Kodiak has roughly doubled to over 2,000 members.
Although these Sentinel-class cutters were authorized to be built years ago, they are being included as part of plans the Trump administration said it has to renew the Coast Guard’s capability – called Force Design 2028. This initiative from Kristi Noem, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, is a blueprint to transform the Coast Guard after what she calls, “decades of underinvestment, neglect and strategic drift.”
The Department of Homeland Security oversees Force Design 2028 and the Coast Guard.
“Force Design 2028 kind of had two components of strategy and funding," Deputy Secretary of DHS Troy Edgar said. "So the strategy that had been laid out with the Secretary and worked very closely with the commandant, really took the Force Design 2028 that would take quite a bit of time, at least three to five years, to come to full fruition.”
During the commissioning ceremony in Kodiak on Monday, Edgar noted that the Earl Cunningham cutter is an investment in the Coast Guard’s growing presence in this part of the country.
“And with the Arctic region and the natural resources that are up here right now, you can see that the President and the Department of Homeland Security we’re very focused on making sure that we don’t leave the Arctic uncovered," he said. "And as we can see that right now, our adversaries are absolutely focused on this area.”
Roughly 24 hours earlier in Juneau on Sunday, Aug. 10, the service commissioned its first additional icebreaker in 25 years – the Storis, which was formerly the Aiviq.
Edgar said more investment is coming to the Coast Guard in Alaska after the One Big Beautiful Bill was signed into law by President Donald Trump on July 4. That gave the Coast Guard its largest budget ever; nearly $25 billion. That does not include the roughly $14 billion the Trump administration is asking to go to the Coast Guard in the fiscal year 2026 federal budget.
Last month on July 29 the Coast Guard started the process for ordering at least ten additional fast response cutters from Bollinger Shipyards in Louisiana with the new funding, according to a Coast Guard press release. So far, Bollinger has built 60 new FRCs for the Coast Guard, including four that are in service in Alaska.
The third new cutter to be homeported in Kodiak, the Frederick Mann, is scheduled to arrive in the next few months.
