Coast Guard Takes Delivery of High Tech Facility

The U.S. Coast Guard, Integrated Coast Guard Systems, and Lockheed Martin completed the final phase of the $20m Command, Control, Computers, Communications Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) simulator at Training Center Petaluma in Petaluma, Calif. The completion of this state-of-the-art training suite represents a milestone in the Coast Guard's $24b, 25-year modernization and recapitalization plan known as Deepwater.

As a result of commonality between Coast Guard and Navy C4ISR equipment, the training simulator provides both Coast Guard and Navy crews a safe, high fidelity environment to develop the skills and expertise needed to sail the military's newest, most capable ships into the 21st Century. To date, over 80 Coast Guard and 20 Navy students have attended nine courses at the new facility, and the first-of-its-kind team training will be convened in December for 30 members of the first National Security Cutter, Bertholf. Additionally, the site has served as an invaluable resource in the installation, evaluation, and testing of the C4ISR suite for Bertholf. C4ISR encompasses a wide range of technical and operational functions, systems, and activities. The C4ISR suite being installed on Deepwater cutters, as well as legacy Coast Guard cutters, provides the United States' lead maritime homeland security agency with the same interoperable intelligence and communications standard as that of the Department of Defense and other government first responders.

The Calhoun Building, site of a multi-million dollar renovation and outfitting project hosting the C4ISR training simulator, now houses classrooms, high-tech shipboard operations simulators, and state-of-the-art radar and electronics systems to train crews of the Coast Guard's new Legend-class National Security Cutters. Plans for further expansions over the next several years will ultimately more than double the size and capacity of the facility to accommodate training for additional cutter classes being built under Deepwater.