The Coast Guard commissioned its newest vessel in Kodiak on Friday, Feb. 13, the fast response cutter Frederick Mann. That’s the sixth one based in Alaska. And more Coast Guard assets are in the works.
Rear Admiral Bob Little said during the Frederick Mann’s commissioning ceremony that the newest vessel will eventually be homeported in Seward. Seward also has its own JAG shipyard which already services Coast Guard vessels among other marine vessels.
Little, the commander of the Coast Guard in Alaska, said he’s advocating for an increased presence in Alaska’s Arctic.
“So my objective and my direction [for] my team, is push forward, push into the Arctic, find places to operate out of, test the system, identify capabilities that we need," Little said.
And that effort requires a lot of money.
During a press conference last month on Jan. 29, Alaska’s junior Sen. Dan Sullivan highlighted last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which included nearly $25 billion for the Coast Guard. The Republican Senator said that’s the single largest cash investment the military branch has ever seen, which the Coast Guard has confirmed.
Sullivan said more than $200 million of those dollars have gone towards adding three fast response cutters for Coast Guard Base Kodiak, which is the largest in the country. And he said there’s hundreds of millions of dollars more flowing to Kodiak.
“They’re expecting two additional offshore patrol cutters. They’re going to go from five to nine MH 60s, these are the new helicopters," he explained. "They’ve had almost $150 million in family housing, $40 million for the Child Development Center. $145 million for a new fuel pier. So that’s just Kodiak.”
The funding breakdown for Kodiak, according to Sen. Sullivan’s office, includes: $202 million for OPC and FRC homeports; $147.2 million for family housing, $40 million Child Development Center, $145 million for a new fuel pier; and $5 million to repurpose an aircraft hangar for MH-60 helicopter operations.
He said the six current cutters will be spread across coastal Alaska and joined by other Coast Guard vessels in the future.
“Spread it out to make sure that it wasn’t just Kodiak and Ketchikan, but fast response cutters to Sitka to Seward, 87-footers to Juneau to Petersburg and then we later got one to Valdez," Sullivan said.
The Coast Guard is planning to homeport a new Waterways Commerce Cutter in Petersburg and a 87-foot patrol boat in Valdez in the coming years according to Sullivan.
Three fast response cutters, the John Witherspoon, Earl Cunningham, and Frederick Mann, currently dock in Kodiak, but one is slated to be homeported in Seward after $50 million of new infrastructure is in place there.
Likewise, Ketchikan has two fast response cutters of its own, the John McCormick, which was commissioned in 2017, and Bailey Barco. A third, the Douglas Denman, is temporarily docking there until facilities in Sitka are ready according to KRBD.
According to Sen. Sullivan, the infrastructure in Sitka should be ready to accommodate their cutter, the Douglas Denman, and its crew sometime between 2027 and 2028.
“As we build out our ship building and ship maintenance capacity, which is clearly happening in Seward and Ketchikan and other places, because we’re getting more ships, the Coast Guard’s interest in putting even more ships in Alaska increases," Sullivan said.
Sullivan is also pushing for some of the yet-to-be-built medium icebreakers to be homeported in Alaska as well.
Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Kevin Lunday hasn’t committed to where the 11 Arctic security cutters will be homeported. But he said during a Senate Commerce Subcommittee hearing last month on Jan. 29 that four of the vessels could go to Alaska.
