Austal USA has begun construction on the future USCGC Ingham (WMSM-917), the third U.S. Coast Guard Heritage-class offshore patrol cutter (OPC) to be built at the shipyard's Mobile, Ala., facility. Company and Coast Guard OPC program representatives marked the milestone at a ceremony announced Aug. 27.
The cutter is being built under a contract that carries options for up to 11 hulls and a current potential value of $3.3 billion. The Coast Guard awarded Austal the OPC Stage 2 contract in 2022, covering hulls five through 15.
“Each new OPC moving into production demonstrates how far our steel shipbuilding team has come,” Austal USA President Gene Miller said in a statement. “Ingham will give the Coast Guard the endurance, flexibility and offshore capability it needs to protect our nation’s maritime interests. We are committed to building a strong, serial production program for this important class of cutters.”
Austal builds the cutters in modules, outfitting a high percentage of each block before final assembly. The company's engineering and production teams also developed a detailed 3D model of the cutter early in the design process to support planning, coordination and construction sequencing.
The 360' OPCs are intended to recapitalize the Coast Guard's aging medium-endurance cutter fleet and bridge the gap between the service's national security cutters, which work the open ocean, and fast response cutters, which operate closer to shore. The class is slated to replace the 1960s-era 210' Reliance-class and 1980s-era 270' Famous-class WMECs.
The design is based on Vard Marine's VARD 7 110 offshore patrol vessel design. Each cutter will have a range of 10,200 nautical miles at 14 knots and a 60-day endurance period. The OPCs will handle law enforcement, drug and migrant interdiction, and search and rescue, and can deploy independently or with a task group as a mobile command-and-control platform for surge operations such as hurricane response and mass migration events. The cutters are also expected to support Coast Guard Arctic objectives tied to emerging commerce and energy exploration off Alaska. The Ingham is slated to be homeported in Kodiak, Alaska.
With Ingham under construction, Austal has three OPCs in production alongside the future USCGC Pickering and USCGC Icarus. Construction on Pickering, the program's fifth hull, began in August 2024, with the keel authenticated in December 2025 and delivery scheduled for 2027. Icarus entered production in August 2025.
The three cutters sit within a steel shipbuilding backlog at Mobile that also includes four Landing Craft Utility vessels, three Navajo-class towing, salvage and rescue ships, an Auxiliary Floating Dry Dock Medium, and submarine modules for the Virginia- and Columbia-class programs.
The name Ingham and hull number WMSM-917 were originally assigned to Eastern Shipbuilding Group's third OPC in Panama City, Fla.; the Department of Homeland Security terminated the orders for that hull and for the fourth, Rush (WMSM-918), in July 2025.
Eastern Shipbuilding suspended work on the OPC program in November 2025, citing financial strain, and the Coast Guard confirmed in June 2026 that it had reached an agreement to close out the Stage 1 contract. The first two cutters, Argus and Chase, were left unfinished; Coast Guard fiscal 2027 budget documents had listed both for delivery this year.
The Coast Guard plans a class of 25 OPCs at an estimated cost of roughly $17 billion and has called the program its top acquisition priority. In a November 2025 report, the Government Accountability Office warned that Austal, like Eastern before it, started construction before the design was stable.
