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Vessels of Opportunity Under Fire: What the Coast Guard Gets Wrong

Vessels of Opportunity were never meant to be dedicated assets. They’re a planning concept—local vessels identified for possible use, evaluated and activated only if and when they’re actually needed. In this episode of The Tactics Meeting, we’re joined by Vince Mitchell, Incident Commander for the Washington State Maritime Cooperative, to examine what happens when that planning concept starts being regulated as if it were a standing, pre-certified response resource.

 We dig into the growing disconnect between field-level response reality and federal policy, including attempts to impose inspection, certification, and readiness standards on vessels that were never intended to operate that way. This conversation gets into the operational consequences—slower activation, reduced participation, higher costs, and diminished surge capacity—as well as the broader implications for Unified Command authority and real-world response effectiveness.

This is a candid discussion about flexibility versus control, planning versus regulation, and what’s at risk when policy drifts away from how response actually works.

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