Another RDC project involves helicopter electronic surveillance sensors. “We’re searching for objects – like missing boats or a man in the water – in a large area. We’re establishing the tactics, techniques, and procedures that the aircrews would use when they go out and do their search patterns in different environmental conditions. So we have to look at these things under different sea states, against different sea clutter and lunar conditions, and so forth. We created thermal mannequins to replicate the thermal signature of a body in the water so we can test the IR [infrared] sensors of our aircraft. We’ve developed the modeling and simulation to characterize what the detection probabilities are. So that translates into how the operators do their job and will ultimately save lives.

“We are going to be testing some airborne use of force with lethal weapons to learn what the fragmentation and ricochet zones would be on running engines. We’re studying the use of video recorders on our over-the-horizon boats for evidentiary purposes. And we’ve created low-cost devices that can track contraband when it’s been jettisoned by a bad guy and we’re off chasing them so it doesn’t just float away. Then we can come back and collect the evidence, because these chases can go on for miles,” Macesker said.

DHS Science and Technology

The DHS S&T Directorate has the mission of doing science and technology across the operating components of DHS – including the Coast Guard, as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Transportation Security Administration, the Secret Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and others. Within DHS S&T, the Borders and Maritime Security Division (BMD) primarily serves ICE, the CBP Office of Air and Marine, and the Coast Guard.

According to BMD Director Anh N. Duong, BMD is in a position to prioritize and invest in technologies that can serve more than one component.

“The mantra for BMD is ‘miracles for cheap,’ meaning that we are acutely aware of our customers’ poor pockets. We don’t need the Cadillac solution. We don’t need to stay on the leading edge of technology. It’s more about what we can afford. Our borders and maritime approaches are so vast; we just don’t have enough manpower and resources to have it equipped with Cadillacs all the time. It’s really about affordability,” said Duong.

“We’re not just going after the bad guys; we’re looking for the bad guys among the good guys. So it’s about detection, tracking, and then somehow being able to prove that somebody did something bad before you can even prosecute them,” she said. “You don’t simply detect and shoot.

“The main goal is bringing new capabilities to our customers within the constraints of their budgets and manpower,” Duong said. “We are very much mission- and operationally focused. We only pick investments or technologies that will give an obvious ROI for the customer down the road. There may be game-changing but expensive technologies out there that the Coast Guard might not be able to buy, let alone operate and maintain. And in this budget-constrained climate, we look for technologies that can free up the Coast Guard personnel or agents so that they can do other tasks.”

Today, the requirement for presence and domain awareness calls for a broad range of capabilities to maneuver in Arctic environments.

Duong, too, has a constrained budget and a huge area of responsibility and set of customers. “I don’t invest in research. My entire portfolio is really the ‘T’ of the S&T. I harvest science from other places like universities or national labs. Mostly I look for technologies that have already been developed for DOD [Department of Defense] and repurpose them. We primarily look for high technology-readiness levels [TRL] – TRL 5 or 6 and above. The innovation here is about how can you lower the cost, and adapt the technology to be a force multiplier? The key here is a dollar sign – how can we be more efficient? The Coastal Surveillance System is a good example. We’re not spending dollars to develop another generation of maritime radars or sensors. People already bought a lot of radars, so let’s see if we just connect the dots. It’s more about information. Can we just leverage other people’s platforms and sensors, and build whatever we need to repurpose that technology so that it would report on smallboats, which is what the Coast Guard is interested in, for example.”

DHS S&T just completed an evaluation of small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). “These are systems under 50 pounds, but a lot of them are 25 pounds or even less, man-portable, and hand launched,” said Duong. “There are plenty of those out in the market. So we’re not in the business of developing yet another class of small UAS. Instead, we have tried to help our first responders with a public safety mission to better understand the utility of these UAS and understand the utility of various classes of small UAS and how they might serve, or how they may augment or help their public safety mission. And at the same time, we are helping the vendors better understand what a customer might need for a public safety mission – is it more endurance, is it time to launch, is it a better camera? This helps vendors guide their investment. There is no universal approval for DHS to use unmanned vehicles [in] the national airspace. The FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] needs some guidelines. And the FAA is looking at our report to help decide on all these rulings.”

Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory

The Navy used to operate America’s icebreaker fleet, a mission it turned over to the Coast Guard in the mid-1960s, and still operates submarines under the ice. But most Navy ships are not made for prolonged operations in extreme latitudes.

Today, the requirement for presence and domain awareness calls for a broad range of capabilities to maneuver in Arctic environments.

With the diminished multiyear ice cover, the region is opening up to exploration, tourism, fishing, and commerce, and the Navy is developing new strategies to address changing conditions and emerging mission needs in the Arctic. The Navy is again looking at vessel ice susceptibility and hardening, and the Coast Guard has been looking at ways to maintain a more visible and effective presence there. The unique facilities of the CRREL in Hanover, New Hampshire, have been used to test ship hulls, submarine sails, and structures in terms of ice forces under different conditions.

CRREL is part of the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), which consists of seven laboratories across four geographic campuses in Vicksburg, Mississippi; Alexandria, Virginia; Champaign-Urbana, Illinois; and Hanover.

ERDC has one of the most diverse engineering and scientific research communities in the world and can benefit from inter-lab collaboration for large multidisciplinary programs. According to CRREL Director Robert E. Davis, Ph.D., the Coast Guard and CRREL have a productive partnership.

“We recently worked with the RDC to test Coast Guard Arctic craft concepts in the CRREL ice tow tanks. We conducted tests in the performance of the different propulsion systems used on the Arctic small craft in ice environments,” Davis said.

Davis said the Coast Guard has shown its commitment to having a presence in the region. The 2014 Arctic Shield exercise tested both resources and capabilities for domain awareness, for example, detecting and mapping oil in, around, and under ice. “CRREL contributed personnel to sail aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Healy to help and observe so that we can work better together in the future,” he said. “Specifically, our role as a participant helped evaluate the sensor platforms that could deploy the oil-detection technology under testing at CRREL.”

“With the emphasis on ‘whole of government’ approaches – rather than rice bowls and stovepipes – and the current budget environment, the idea of coordinating and synchronizing efforts to learn how to deal with oil in ice has major potential.”

The idea of a spill under or near ice has many agencies interested and partnering on tactics, techniques, and procedures of marshaling the resources needed to address such an event.

The Coast Guard and CRREL are currently working to establish a collaborative national network between the Interior Department’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement Oil Spill Response Research and Renewable Energy Test Facility in Leonardo, New Jersey, the CRREL oil-in-ice testing, and Coast Guard in-situ burn facilities for oil spill response in extreme latitudes.

“This seems like an obvious fit of complementary capability,” said Davis. “With the emphasis on ‘whole of government’ approaches – rather than rice bowls and stovepipes – and the current budget environment, the idea of coordinating and synchronizing efforts to learn how to deal with oil in ice has major potential.”

CRREL published a study on ice management for the Coast Guard and helped the service to create an anti-icing roadmap. “Icing on vessels can tip them over. The standard method for removing ice remains with baseball bats and humans. Research here has looked at ice adhesion and cohesion on surfaces and the prediction and avoidance of ice-producing conditions,” said Davis.

One of the techniques to mitigate icing has the operators covering the system or boat with a tarp. CRREL conducted ice adhesion tests with various materials using both fresh and salt water.

With nearly 15 program and agency partners working toward a common goal of doing more with less to tackle new challenges, the Coast Guard is realizing its return on innovation.

This article first appeared in the U.S. Coast Guard 225th Anniversary publication, a special edition of Coast Guard Outlook.