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The Coast Guard, while on its face tasked with preventing smuggling and maintaining the U.S. maritime border, also has a long history of running maritime blockades off the coasts of other countries.

The rundown:

• The Civil War: Cutters like the USRC Harriet Lane (which fired the first maritime shot of the war at Fort Sumter) were deployed to enforce blockades off Charleston, Wilmington, and New Orleans, with smaller, shallow-draft cutters often tasked with inshore interdiction while the Navy stuck to more blue-water ops.
• The Spanish-American War saw eight Revenue Cutters join the Navy’s blockade of Cuba and Puerto Rico. This included the USRC McCulloch, Morrill, Windom, Manning, and Hudson enforcing the outer and inner rings of the blockade off Havana and Cienfuegos, directly engaging Spanish shore batteries and gunboats while making turns to capture blockade runners.
• WWII Neutrality Patrol: The USCG established maritime blockades off Greenland to deny Germany access to cryolite mines and weather tracking stations even before the U.S. entered the war.
• Cuban Naval Quarantine-– Besides the Coast Guard patrol aircraft based in South Florida, at least 12 cutters were involved in the TF 136 and TF 137 blockade of Castro’s island during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, including the service’s only oceanography ship. Further, USCGC Barataria (WAVP-381), while on met duty at Ocean Station Echo in the North Atlantic some 2,200 miles northeast of Cuba, identified and solo trailed a Soviet freighter with missile deck cargo for several days until the Navy could join the effort.
• Vietnam War: Operation Market Time, arguably the most comprehensive coastal blockade in USCG history, which included Squadron One (deploying 26 82-foot Point-class patrol boats) and Squadron Three (deploying 31 blue water High Endurance Cutters between 1967 and 1972) assigned to the effort, getting their hands dirty numerous times and sending NVA trawlers loaded with weapons to the bottom. RonThree alone conducted more than 65,000 vessel stops in the Vietnamese littoral.
• The service conducted a sustained offshore surveillance of Grenada in 1983-84 (Operation Island Breeze) after the U.S. invasion of the island.
• Operation Maritime Intercept (1990–2003): Following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, cutters deployed to the North Arabian Gulf alongside Navy forces to enforce UN sanctions against Iraq. Coast Guard Boarding Teams (LEDETs) were heavily relied upon for their expertise in maritime law enforcement aboard civilian cargo ships.
• Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003): Six 110-foot Island-class USCG patrol boats and Law Enforcement Detachments (LEDETs) deployed to the Khawr Abd Allah waterway to maintain a blockade against Iraqi forces, secure oil platforms, and clear routes for humanitarian vessels.
• The Vigilant Sentry effort off Haiti has been ongoing since 2004.
• Operation Southern Spear combined maritime interdiction with the oil blockade and intervention in Venezuela, which has since morphed into JTF-WHEM last month. The Venezuelan oil blockade led the USCG to one stop (Skipper) and seven seizures, including the Guyanan/Russian-flagged Marinera (Bella 1) off Iceland after a leisurely 2,500 nm, 20-day pursuit. LEDETs may also have conducted three seizures in the Indian Ocean.

This brings us to a release last Friday announcing an all-USCG operation that stopped a vessel looking to break the oil blockade on Cuba, the M/V Grace, following the detention of a similar vessel earlier this summer, M/V Jaira Provider, also headed to Havana.

The old 210-foot cutter Alert (WMEC-630) stopped and rerouted the vessel to Mexico, assisted by the new 154-foot FRC Charles Sexton (WPC-1108) and other USCG assets.

In early September, a Coast Guard tactical team boarded M/V Grace in the Caribbean Sea. M/V Grace was transiting to Cuba, carrying fuel, and was believed to be employing tactics common amongst the “dark fleet.” After the boarding, the Coast Guard escorted the M/V Grace to Progreso, Mexico, where a Mexican Navy (MARINA) inspection team confirmed large quantities of fuel in the vessel’s ballast tanks. The vessel was also carrying several containers believed to contain illicit fuel.

More Maritime Patrol Birds

With the USCG so busy doing maritime patrol and blockade work as of late, it is no surprise that last week the service also announced it will be buying another six HC-130J Super Herks, expanding its program to 31 such LRSAs, complete with a 360-degree, belly-mounted, AN/APY-11 multimode surface search radar, advanced IR cameras, and a 20+ hour endurance.

They have been especially useful in keeping tabs on Chinese ships in the Arctic just off Alaska.