Closing small boat stations has proven difficult. Leaving them unchanged is operationally inefficient. These units are enduring parts of the Coast Guard’s force structure, yet their full potential is not always realized. This article proposes a model to better align their mission with national priorities.
During the recent Senate confirmation hearing for the next commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, senators raised a wide range of global maritime concerns, including Arctic competition, cyber threats targeting ports, migration pressures, and increasingly severe storms. Yet the hearing repeatedly returned to a far more local subject: the Coast Guard units in senators’ backyards.
Coast Guard small boat stations are not just operational units — they are deeply rooted community institutions.
Those who have followed a station optimization effort know the pattern: government studies recommend closures, local coverage highlights quiet harbors alongside concerned community leaders, and elected officials ultimately insist the stations remain open.
Members of Congress and their constituents want visible local stations. At the same time, Coast Guard leaders must distribute limited resources to the highest priority missions. These goals are not incompatible. A station whose mission evolves can offer both local presence and broader strategic adaptability.
The Coast Guard is entering a period of expansion. Under Force Design 2028, directed by the Department of Homeland Security, the service has outlined plans to grow by approximately 15,000 personnel, a 36 percent increase over the current 41,426 active-duty force. How will that growth be structured? Small boat stations that persist due to statutory requirements and congressional backing provide a logical foundation for absorbing that growth.
Selected small boat stations, particularly those targeted for closure, can be redesigned as multi-mission hubs that generate surge capacity, accelerate training, and strengthen recruiting — expanding the Coast Guard’s ability to respond to crises and meet the nation’s maritime needs.
What is a Coast Guard Small Boat Station?
A U.S. Coast Guard small boat station is a shore-based operational unit positioned along coasts, rivers, and major waterways that serves as the front line of the service’s maritime response. These stations are typically equipped with small, fast-response boats and staffed by boat crews trained in search and rescue, maritime law enforcement, and emergency response. Their primary function is to maintain immediate readiness within a defined geographic area, launch on short notice to assist mariners in distress, enforce federal laws on the water, and support port safety and security. As part of a larger network that includes cutters, aircraft, and command centers, small boat stations provide the closest and often fastest response capability to incidents near shore and in heavily trafficked waterways.
Operationally, these stations function much like maritime firehouses: crews stand watch around the clock, ready to deploy within minutes. Organized under larger Coast Guard sectors, they execute missions within specific areas of responsibility while coordinating with federal, state, and local partners. Though often small in size, these stations are multi-mission by design and deeply embedded in the communities they serve, providing both a persistent federal presence on the waterfront and a critical operational link between national maritime priorities and local response.
Challenges to Efficient U.S. Coast Guard Resource Allocation
Coast Guard stations now under scrutiny were established as far back as 1844. The maritime operating environment around them has changed dramatically. Modern response boats are faster and more capable than their predecessors. Rescue helicopters can cover large geographic areas in minutes. State and local maritime responders play a much larger role in incident response. Together, these developments have fundamentally altered how quickly help can reach mariners in distress.
Yet while the operating environment has evolved, the station network itself has proven resistant to change. Local communities value their Coast Guard stations, and once a unit is established, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to close. Members of Congress routinely defend stations in their districts, and federal law requires the Department of Homeland Security to provide public notice and comment before closing a station. Between 1973 and 2014, the Coast Guard proposed closing duplicative boat stations eight separate times. None of those proposals ultimately succeeded.
External reviews have reached similar conclusions. The Government Accountability Office has repeatedly examined the station network and, at one point, identified 18 stations whose search-and-rescue coverage significantly overlapped with neighboring units. That finding referenced overlap among boat stations, but even more overlap exists when one considers Coast Guard aircraft and other federal, state, and local responders.
Even small changes in asset allocation can expect strong political reactions. Late last year, when the Coast Guard temporarily moved a rescue helicopter on the Oregon coast, elected officials quickly intervened, and a federal court ordered the aircraft returned. As U.S. District Court Judge Ann Aiken explained during the proceedings, “It’s not a chessboard of assets; it’s a statute that has to be followed.” Members of Congress made clear they were prepared to block further changes.
In practice, this means the Coast Guard must assume its existing station footprint is largely fixed. The lesson is straightforward. Once a Coast Guard station becomes embedded in a community, closing it is rarely a politically feasible option — no station was closed between 1988 and the 2017 study. Any strategy for modernizing the service’s small boat network must therefore assume that stations will remain in place. The focus should shift from how to close stations to how to use them more effectively.
Reframing the Role of Small Boat Stations
If closing stations is not politically feasible, the Coast Guard should reconsider how its approximately 183 stations contribute to national readiness. Units that appear underutilized when measured only by local workload may in fact represent latent capacity that can support emerging national priorities.
Reimagined in this way, selected stations could serve three strategic purposes: generating national surge capacity for major crises, accelerating training and qualification pipelines for operational personnel, and strengthening mission-driven personnel recruiting by bringing prospective members into direct contact with the Coast Guard’s work.
Building a Coast Guard Surge Tier
The Coast Guard increasingly faces crises that require large numbers of trained personnel for extended periods. Migration surges, climate-driven disasters, and port infrastructure failures often demand sustained operations lasting weeks or months. Yet the service’s force structure is not designed to generate large pools of personnel who can deploy quickly and remain on scene for extended periods.
Recent operations underscore this growing reliance on surge forces. Major hurricanes such as Ian and Ida required rapid, large-scale mobilization of personnel and assets. The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore demanded an immediate and sustained federal presence to secure the waterway and restore the flow of commerce. Irregular migration along the southwest border has driven large deployments such as Operation River Wall, a prolonged surge requiring significant numbers of qualified operators. These events are not anomalies. They reflect a shift toward an operating environment that depends on flexible, deployable capacity.
The Coast Guard’s Deployable Specialized Forces and Reserve component provide some surge capacity.
Deployable Specialized Forces are comprised of Coast Guard members trained for counterterrorism, high-risk maritime law enforcement, and other specialized missions. Their deployments are typically short and focused. These units are essential and highly capable, but their training and capabilities are more specialized than most domestic crises require — particularly those crises that demand sustained operations long after an initial response.
Reservists also play a critical role in the Coast Guard’s surge structure, and their contributions during major events are indispensable. However, the Reserves are not designed to meet the predictable, recurring demand for boat crews and maritime law enforcement personnel that now emerges each year. Qualification rates for key operational roles remain uneven. Reliance on the limited pool of fully qualified reservists places strain on the service when deployments become frequent or prolonged.
The Coast Guard is already regularly pulling active-duty personnel from operational units to meet surge demand. In my current role as commanding officer of U.S. Coast Guard Station New York, our station receives frequent requests to send qualified personnel for surge events. We find ourselves caught between meeting these national surge needs while still maintaining minimum staffing requirements to fulfill our regular daily operations. What if certain stations, by design, had excess personnel ready to surge when needed without negatively impacting local readiness?
The Coast Guard already possesses the foundation for a surge capability. Across the country, 183 small boat stations provide personnel with versatile skills in boat operations, law enforcement, engineering, and search and rescue. Yet there is no formal framework for mobilizing that workforce to support national priorities. Instead, surge requirements are often filled through email requests for volunteers sent to unit commands across the fleet. This approach creates a challenging dynamic for stations thinly staffed to meet their own minimum readiness standards.
Under this model, the Coast Guard would assign personnel to designated stations and employ them as a structured surge force, available for deployment across a wide range of domestic missions — namely, response to hurricanes and inland flooding, migration surges, port closures, and maritime infrastructure disruptions — where skilled small boat operations are essential.
The Coast Guard has come to expect a steady demand for sustained domestic surge operations. That responsibility is best suited to an active-duty force. Reservists can continue to respond to rare, unexpected crises, and Deployable Specialized Forces can continue to provide high-end capabilities. Active-duty surge forces should meet predictable and recurring demand.
Stations as Training Engines
To create surge capacity, the Coast Guard must have trained response personnel. The same stations that could develop deployable crews could also become powerful engines for enhancing operational skills across the service.
One of the Coast Guard’s persistent challenges is qualification throughput. Developing personnel who are fully qualified in small boat operations and maritime law enforcement takes time and consistent training opportunities. At high-tempo stations, operational demands leave less room for structured training. Crews spend much of their time responding to incidents rather than deliberately building new qualifications.
Many quieter stations face the opposite dynamic. They have experienced leaders, favorable operating conditions, and available training time, but not enough operational cases to fully develop junior crews.
Instead of viewing these stations as underutilized, the Coast Guard could treat them as training accelerators.
Structured training programs at selected stations could provide predictable progression for key operational qualifications while aligning more closely with the standards taught at Coast Guard training centers. Local operating environments would become an advantage rather than a limitation. Great Lakes chop, New England fog, inland river currents, dense recreational traffic in a metropolitan area, and cold-water operations in Alaska all produce mariners with distinct operational experience.
Properly designed, these stations could function as force-generation hubs that prepare personnel for assignments across the fleet while simultaneously contributing to national surge capacity.
Recruiting Improves Instantly When Candidates See the Mission
At Coast Guard Station New York, I regularly see the effect of recruiters bringing prospective members to the unit. The impact is immediate — a candidate steps onto the pier or climbs into a response boat, and their face lights up as they begin to imagine themselves running the boats and carrying out the mission. They meet the crews, feel the energy on the waterfront, and picture themselves in the pilot house. That kind of clarity is difficult to create in a strip-mall recruiting office. Stations offer something recruiters cannot manufacture on their own: direct contact with the mission.
Station-based recruiting would also expand the Coast Guard’s national footprint in the recruiting market. By engaging communities across different regions of the country, the service could attract young people with varied experiences but a shared commitment to service. Stations provide a natural place where that connection between community and mission can begin. For a service seeking to expand its workforce, this may be one of the lowest-cost and highest-impact recruiting tools available.
Making Fixed Stations More Effective
Not every small boat station is a good candidate to receive extra billets designated for surge capacity, training, and recruitment. The strongest candidates are stations that have been identified for closure due to low operational demand or overlapping coverage, but remain difficult to close in practice.
The value of “redundant” stations is physical and enduring. In many cases, “redundancy” is an advantage and reflects the ability for neighboring units to meet congressionally mandated minimum response-time standards. These stations provide real value and removing them would extend response times. Stations occupy waterfront property that would be extremely difficult to replace, particularly in locations that provide access to major boating populations at appropriate intervals along the coast. That combination of access, response capability, and community presence helps explain the consistent local resistance to their removal and reinforces their role as durable assets within the force structure.
Reconfigured for a broader role, these stations can continue to provide faster-than-congressionally-required response times while also becoming force-generation hubs. Additional personnel assigned to these locations would support national surge requirements, develop qualifications in diverse operational environments, and contribute to recruiting by offering a visible, mission-oriented entry point into service. As the Coast Guard prepares to grow its workforce in the coming years, these stations offer a ready foundation for recruiting, training, and flexibly deploying personnel.
Why Surge Capacity Protects the Coast Guard’s Future
Surge capacity is not just a staffing concept. It is the Coast Guard’s strategic insurance policy. The service has always been most valuable to the nation when it can adapt quickly to shifting political priorities, emerging missions, and unpredictable crises. Unlike other armed forces, the Coast Guard’s skill set, small-boat operations, maritime law enforcement, rapid response, maritime crisis management, and coastal security is inherently flexible. That flexibility is one of the service’s greatest strengths, but only if it can be scaled to meet mission demand.
The United States routinely sustains military forces whose ultimate missions are rarely executed. Readiness, not constant activity, is the metric that matters. Aircraft carriers have not fought a near-peer naval battle in generations. Fighter pilots rarely engage in air-to-air combat. Nuclear submarines spend decades deterring adversaries rather than launching missiles. Yet the nation invests in these capabilities without hesitation. Their value lies in being ready when needed, not in daily utilization rates. The Coast Guard is no different, but it is too often evaluated as if it were.
Internal expectations to justify units through quarterly case numbers apply an accounting logic that is incompatible with national security missions. The Coast Guard safeguards the maritime transportation system, secures the border, and serves as the nation’s first responder to increasingly complex domestic crises. These are functions whose strategic utility should be measured over years, even decades. Excess capacity is not inefficiency — it is the prerequisite for resilience in a maritime era shaped by climate volatility, geopolitical tension, and unpredictable migration patterns. A force designed for 10-year risks cannot be judged by 90-day demand signals.
Priorities shift. Administrations change. When a service’s assets are tied to a single mission or area, they risk being overlooked when the mission moves elsewhere. The Coast Guard cannot afford that. To remain an indispensable national asset, the Coast Guard must offer the Department of Homeland Security, the administration, and Congress a flexible toolset they can employ across a wide range of priorities. Surge capacity makes that possible.
When the national focus turns to irregular migration, the Coast Guard must be able to deploy trained operators to manage maritime surges without hollowing out its other missions. If warfighting demands grow, the service must have personnel who can support littoral operations, port security, and integrate into naval forces in contested environments. When weather disasters strike, as they increasingly do, the Coast Guard must have crews who can respond to hurricanes, floods, port closures, and mass evacuations without delay. This is not hypothetical — it is the world we already live in.
The Coast Guard is unique in its ability to perform these missions with the same foundational skills: small boat handling, law enforcement, and maritime crisis management. Few military specialties map so cleanly across such diverse national needs. But the service must organize around that advantage, not assume it will be obvious to policymakers.
Proving the Model at Scale
The right starting point is not a nationwide overhaul, but a structured pilot program. Any effort to introduce new staffing models will encounter institutional friction, particularly where long-standing assumptions shape how risk, accountability, and success are measured. A pilot allows the service to test alternative approaches, contain risk, and generate evidence before challenging service-wide norms.
This proposal is not cost-neutral — a full implementation would require investment in infrastructure, billet growth and redistribution, and more formalized training pipelines. The Coast Guard, however, is entering a period of resource expansion. In addition to its baseline budget of roughly $14 billion, recent legislation has provided more than $24 billion in supplemental funding, alongside investments in a new training center to support an estimated 15,000 additional personnel. These resources reflect a broader commitment to growing the service’s size and capability. The central question is not whether additional funding will be required, but how to structure that investment to produce the greatest operational return.
Under Force Design 2028, the Coast Guard is reexamining core assumptions about force structure in pursuit of priority outcomes such as Border Control, Flow of Commerce, and Contingency Response. A pilot program would translate those strategic aims into operational insight, informing how personnel can be aligned to stations best suited to generate surge capacity while maintaining required local readiness.
A small number of stations would provide an appropriate testbed. Ideal candidates share three characteristics: relatively low search and rescue workload, infrastructure suitable for retrofitting, and sustained congressional interest. A representative mix across regions, such as the Great Lakes, New England, and a major metropolitan area, would allow the service to evaluate performance across varied operating environments. At the conclusion of the pilot, the Coast Guard would have empirical data to inform future force design decisions, reducing institutional risk while strengthening the case for reform where it proves effective.
Small boat stations are woven into the country’s maritime fabric. They represent local presence, operational readiness, and a tangible connection between coastal communities and the federal government. But they also hold untapped potential as engines of training, recruiting, and surge readiness, if the Coast Guard broadens what it asks of them.
For years, the service has been caught between congressional expectations for visible presence and the need to allocate resources efficiently. As the Coast Guard prepares to grow its workforce, these stations offer a practical way to reconcile those pressures. Reimagined as multi-mission hubs, they can maintain their local role while generating the surge capacity, training throughput, and recruiting access needed to meet evolving demands. In a maritime environment defined by disruption and increasing operational requirements, that alignment strengthens both the Coast Guard and the nation’s ability to respond when it matters most.
Craig Johnson is an officer in the U.S. Coast Guard. He commands the largest U.S. Coast Guard small boat station in New York City. The views expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Coast Guard, the Department of Homeland Security, or any part of the U.S. government.
Image: Petty Officer 3rd Class Anthony Pappaly via DVIDS
