US Coast Guard accepts delivery of 59th fast response cutter

March 21, 2025, by Fatima Bahtić

The US Coast Guard accepted delivery of the 59th fast response cutter (FRC), Earl Cunningham, on March 6, 2025, in Key West, Florida.

Earl Cunningham is the second of three FRCs to be homeported in Kodiak, Alaska. The Sentinel-class FRCs are replacing the capability of the 1980s Island-class 110-foot patrol boats. The vessels possess command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance equipment, with improved habitability and seakeeping.

They operate in a wide variety of areas, including critical maritime border zones, to support law enforcement and alien interdiction operations.

A total of 67 FRCs have been ordered to date to perform a multitude of missions that include drug and alien interdiction, joint international operations, and national defense of ports, waterways, and coastal areas.

In February 2025, Coast Guard Cutter Emlen Tunnell successfully interdicted nearly 2,400 kilograms of illegal narcotics in support of a Combined Task Force operation led by New Zealand in the Arabian Sea.

Each FRC is named after an enlisted Coast Guard hero who performed extraordinary service in the line of duty. This cutter’s namesake, Earl Cunningham, was a World War I Army veteran as well as a Coast Guard hero, born in Kinde, Huron County, Michigan, in 1895. Cunningham was awarded the Gold Life Saving Medal for its service posthumously.

Fifty-seven of the 67 FRCs that have been ordered are in service: 13 in Florida; seven in Puerto Rico; six each in Bahrain and Massachusetts; four in California; three each in Alaska, Guam, Hawaii, Texas and New Jersey; and two each in Mississippi, North Carolina and Oregon. Future FRCs will be delivered to current FRC homeports and a future FRC homeport in Seward, Alaska.

In November 2024, shipbuilder Bollinger Shipyards handed over the 58th FRC, USCGC John Witherspoon. Last year, the company also received a contract to build two additional Sentinel-Class fast response cutters for the US.