Since this is for who pays for dinner, cites or links to relevant but tangential information would be appreciated.
I’ve looked about, and can’t really find specific information, most likely because it’s military, and they don’t just go posting their practices online.
Here’s the question: Does the Coast Guard do regularly scheduled patrols of their areas, and if so, are those patrols routine, standardized, and repeated from year to year (or at least for one single year)?
In other words, if you had a patrol that swept from Base, to Lighthouse A, to Cove B, to Outlook C, and back to Base, would that patrol be something that an opposing force could watch a few times and determine that it was 1) routine, 2) on a specific timetable, and 3) reliably adhered to, such that said opposing force could plan to be specific places when the Coast Guard wasn’t there?
Yes, the US Coast Guard does routine patrols. They are regular in the sense that there is normally one (or more) USCG vessels on active patrol in a broad general area (the Western Caribbean) though not so specific that a route and timing is predictable (every Thursday at 10am departing from X harbor and proceeding to Y port).
The Coast Guard has shown a reluctance to provide exact coordinates for one of their vessels even when requesting emergency assistance from a friendly foreign country. Kinda almost paranoid.
The USCG patrols I have had dealings with have been nowhere close to the coastal waters of the United States. They do drug and immigrant smuggling interdiction in the Western Caribbean well south of Cuba.
They do routine helicopter and boat patrols in San Francisco Bay and its surrounding waters. As Iggy points out, a lot of their business relates to smuggling of drugs or people. They’re under Homeland Security now and they also have the responsibility of guarding public and military assets from terrorism, as well as saving the asses of boaters and coordinating commercial vessel traffic. So yeah, they patrol a lot.