The Coast Guard plans on multi-crewing the CGC BETHOLF and her sister ships being built as part of the Deepwater program. The traditional paradigm to man cutters is one crew-one cutter.
There are advantages to a single crew per cutter. First, the crew maintains a high degree of stewardship. The crew knows that they have to live and work aboard the cutter year round and there won't be anyone else to take care of the cutter for them. In addition, crew's take pride in keeping the cutters clean, working and looking good.
Second, crew's really get to know their cutter when they can stay on the same hull for a long period of time. Despite configuration management efforts each cutter will be slightly unique.
The Coast Guard is moving towards multi-crewing to in an effort to save money by building less hulls. Shipbuilding is an expensive endeavor. Several crews per hull allows the cutter to stay deployed for longer without burning out personnel. The downside of longer deployment times for the hull is there becomes less time to conduct needed maintenance in port. There are a few unchanging maxims for ships, and cutters are no different; equipment always breaks mostly for no apparent reason and even newly painted ships will break out in rust after a few weeks at sea.
The CG is multi-crewing 110' patrol boats due to a shortage of hulls. There isn't enough data widely available for the fleet to determine if the effort is working.
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