Coast Guard, Sovereignty, and Homeland Defense

"U.S. defense planning rests on the assumption that wars are fought abroad, by expeditionary forces, against defined adversaries. For decades, those assumptions held. But today, many of the most consequential security challenges facing the United States violate all three. They occur closer to home, below the threshold of armed conflict, and in domains where sovereignty is enforced incrementally. The shift has exposed a chronic mismatch between how the United States defines its defense priorities and how it allocates resources and respect."

"While defense discourse continues to stubbornly emphasize power projection and high-end conflict, many of today's challenges revolve around the more modest and rote enforcement of U.S. territorial integrity and national sovereignty-functions that are vital to U.S. strategic objectives yet lack the optical prestige of winning wars abroad. Sitting at the center of this gap between prestige and need is the U.S. Coast Guard, whose mission profile aligns directly with America's most important strategic objectives-the enforcement of sovereignty and homeland defense-yet"

"In an era of increased gray-zone competition and persistent coercion, the failure to properly appreciate the Coast Guard threatens real strategic fallout. In the third decade of the 21st century, U.S. defense planning remains heavily oriented toward expeditionary warfighting and high-end kinetic conflict. Budget conversations still revolve around Ford-class supercarriers, F-35 fighters, and A2/AD penetration. This orientation shapes not only force design and budget allocations, but also institutional prestige and political capital."

U.S. defense planning assumes wars are fought abroad by expeditionary forces against defined adversaries, yet many major security challenges occur close to home, below armed conflict thresholds, and in domains with incremental sovereignty enforcement. This mismatch produces chronic misalignment between stated defense priorities and resource allocation, privileging prestige platforms—supercarriers, F-35s—over routine sovereignty enforcement. The U.S. Coast Guard's mission directly advances homeland defense and territorial integrity but lacks strategic valuation and political capital. In an era of gray-zone competition and persistent coercion, underappreciation of the Coast Guard risks real strategic fallout and undermines effective enforcement of U.S. sovereignty.

Read at The Cipher Brief