{"id":79220,"date":"2025-09-02T17:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-09-02T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/airforcetimes\/uncategorized\/2025\/09\/02\/coast-guard-to-get-first-mq-9-drones\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T16:37:46","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T16:37:46","slug":"coast-guard-to-get-first-mq-9-drones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/airforcetimes\/news\/pentagon-congress\/2025\/09\/02\/coast-guard-to-get-first-mq-9-drones\/","title":{"rendered":"Coast Guard to get first MQ-9 drones"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Coast Guard is getting its first MQ-9 drones to help counter human trafficking, assist with drug interdictions and improve search-and-rescue missions, an addition that current and former officials are heralding as a game-changer in the fight against smuggling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Known for their long flight times needed for extensive surveillance missions, the MQ-9 is among the most sought-after drones for combatant commanders across the globe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About $266 million of the nearly $25 billion that the Coast Guard received in the \u201cOne Big Beautiful Bill Act\u201d<\/a> signed into law in July will be used to procure the service\u2019s own MQ-9 Alpha long-range unmanned aerial systems, Lieutenant Commander Steve Roth said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Per U.S. Air Force data, an MQ-9 costs about $57 million, and the acquisition could increase the Coast Guard\u2019s inventory from zero to as many as four of these units. Officials say the drones will not be armed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each drone can collect intelligence information for about 24 hours in a 60- to 80-mile radius of detection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat\u2019s ions of improvement on the way we\u2019ve been doing it with manned aviation,\u201d Lt. Commander Andrew Denning, the long-range drone program manager for the Coast Guard, told Military Times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Coast Guard C-130 Super Hercules planes can patrol for about 14 hours, while Navy P-8 Poseidon aircraft can patrol for up to 10 hours at a time. The small crews on these manned aircraft work throughout the patrol, while MQ-9s rotate crews about every two hours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou have a fresh set of eyes, so you can really mitigate risk by doing that. By keeping the crew fresh, you can keep it out there, so you don\u2019t have as many pass downs going from aircraft to aircraft. It\u2019s pretty seamless,\u201d Lieutenant Commander Ryan Major told Military Times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Coast Guard has partnered with U.S. Customs and Border Protection since the mid-2000\u2019s to fly the CBP\u2019s MQ-9 Alpha drones to execute mostly customs missions out of San Angelo, Texas. Major said the CBP missions the service has pursued have been successful. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cRight now, the southern border is almost closed up. We\u2019re not seeing, we\u2019re hardly seeing anybody trying to cross the southern border, so we\u2019re moving operations out to the Gulf of America,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the money from the Big Beautiful Bill, Denning said the Coast Guard will still partner with CBP but will now be able to launch its own program with its own equipment, extending its intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) reach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019re hoping to take it out of San Angelo, where we work with CBP, to West Coast and East coast locations where we can start to use them on our own, prosecute them and push them out into our own mission set,\u201d Denning said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pilots said more drones could lead to more rescue successes. In November 2023, CBP and Coast Guard MQ-9 pilots at the Joint Program Office in San Angelo, Texas, were able to use one of the CBP\u2019s drones to find a lost vessel with four people on board following an unsuccessful search by Coast Guard helicopters and vessels in the Corpus Christi, Texas, area.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSo I think it was a great case study that we can use these [drones] for search and rescue going forward,\u201d Major said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Retired Navy Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told Military Times the influx of resources in the Big Beautiful Bill shows the administration\u2019s intense focus on homeland defense. The Coast Guard\u2019s use of unmanned long-range surveillance, he added, will save money without impacting the Pentagon\u2019s ISR platform stockpiles.<\/p>\n\n\n\t