"Great battles," Winston Churchill remarked, "change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, in armies and in nations." The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have had such an effect on the United States and its Coast Guard.1 The "great battle" against al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups has launched two new paradigms with the power to fundamentally alter the Coast Guard:
- An operational paradigm that demands greater concentration of resources and organizational focus on counterterrorism
- A policy paradigm that redefines the Coast Guard's national defense role as one of limited overseas deployments, if any, and extremely low-end, domestic force protection
Unlike all other federal agencies, the Coast Guard has multiple functions—transportation safety, environmental protection, search and rescue, constabulary, and defense. The new operational and policy paradigms bring into question whether the service can continue in this vein. If it seeks to preserve its multifunctional status, and does not address the full implications of these two new paradigms, the Coast Guard stands to transform much of the service into little more than a physical security force, and for all intents and purposes, becomes a uniformed, and not a military, service.
New Operational Paradigm: Active Deterrence
Vice Admiral James Hull, Commander, Atlantic Area, until his retirement on 16 July 2004, has described the Coast Guard's new operational paradigm: "We used to have one boat in the barn, so to speak, and we'd bring it out and respond when called upon. It was a firehouse response. Now we're proactive. I want the bad guys to see our presence, to see our boats, to see our planes, to know we rely on intelligence and technology and say, 'Geez, I'm going to go someplace else. This isn't worth it.'"2
While his "fire house" metaphor obviously does not apply to the Coast Guard's aggressive conduct of its law-enforcement missions, the admiral has brought into sharp focus a fundamental shift in Coast Guard operations since the 11 September attacks. Counterterrorism demands that the Coast Guard expand its operational paradigm from "static response" to "active deterrence" throughout the U.S. maritime domain, while still conducting its full set of pre-9/11 missions.
Active deterrence requires the Coast Guard to project a willingness and a capability to deny terrorists their objectives by making hostile acts as difficult as possible to carry out and, if an attack occurs, to prevent attainment of the group's goals. In addition, active deterrence requires the service, using primarily the authorities of the Maritime Transportation Security Act, to establish a "national maritime security regime" by developing and enforcing physical security standards for ports, ships, and the maritime industry.3 Coast Guard operational forces must be equipped and trained for defensive activities that aim at protecting people, critical infrastructure, and key assets from terrorist attacks and for offensive activities that aim at interdicting, disrupting, and destroying terrorists that are planning to (e.g., gathering intelligence) or are on their way to attack a target. Coast Guard prevention forces, responsible for establishing the national maritime security regime, must become subject matter experts in physical security, port operations, and supply chain logistics from point of origin to destination.
In the most far-reaching change, interdiction of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or terrorists en route to attack demands Coast Guard personnel be prepared to give their lives in defense of their country. It is a hard truth, but in the war on terrorism, they are expected to give their "last full measure." Just as "every Marine is a rifleman," Coast Guardsmen at all tactical units must now be trained and equipped to a baseline law-enforcement and physical-security standard—weapons and boarding team qualified at a minimum. No matter their specialty, Coast Guard personnel must be well grounded in basic maritime security tasks to defend themselves and their units. In active deterrence, few operational missions will not require Coast Guardsmen to be armed.4
The implications of this new operational paradigm are enormous. It will change the way the Coast Guard organizes, trains, and equips its forces, and how it plans and executes its missions. To its credit, the Coast Guard has recognized these realties and made many key adjustments:
- It has declared counterterrorism shares the same high priority as its traditional search-and-rescue mission.
- It has established a new tactical command-and-control organization to replace its fragmented arrangement of independent units with maritime "sector commands" that merge these units into one organization responsible for all missions.
- To improve training, it recently established a Maritime Law Enforcement Academy in South Carolina by relocating and fusing the Maritime Law Enforcement School in Yorktown, Virginia, and the Boarding Team Member School in Petaluma, California.
- It has established a law enforcement qualification program to increase its ability to train, grow, and retain law enforcement professionals among its enlisted rates—but did not go so far as to authorize a new and separate law enforcement rating.
- It is well on its way to standing up 13 specialized domestic physical security units, Marine Safety and Security Teams, at critical seaports.
- It commissioned Maritime Intelligence Fusion Centers at the Atlantic and Pacific Area commands, assigned a Field Intelligence Support team to vital seaports, and increased staffing at its Intelligence Coordination Center.
It is evident from the types of new units established and the nature of the terrorist threat that Coast Guard personnel involved in law enforcement, planning, security, and intelligence require greater levels of specialized skills than was the case before 11 September. They need extensive training in a host of counterterrorism and weapons subjects; frequent requalification; and something as prosaic as security clearances and physical fitness. Personnel operating aircraft and boats that deliver lethal and nonlethal fires require even more specialized training and frequent practice because of the significant consequences of errors and the danger inherent in their duties. The hundreds of persons assigned to the expanded intelligence program are an even more special case. The enlisted personnel are sourced from ratings such as yeoman, storekeeper, subsistence specialist, and marine science technician to become trained intelligence or counterterrorism analysts, with high-level security clearances, including special access. Once in the intelligence program, they can further specialize in disciplines such as imagery, electronic, or human intelligence. The upshot of all this is that a significant portion of the Coast Guard's total workforce is becoming highly specialized for maritime security duties.
New National Defense Paradigm: Guard the U.S. Coast
Through a series of actions, the Defense Department is redefining the Coast Guard's national defense function as guarding the homeland and low-end force protection responsibilities. Some key DoD leaders publicly questioned the appropriateness of the Coast Guard's deployment of 11 cutters and 4 port security units (PSUs) to the Persian Gulf for Operation Iraqi Freedom in view of the magnitude of the Coast Guard's homeland security responsibilities and the anticipated increase in the homeland threat level.5 They pointed to the apparent paradox of Navy frigates conducting counterdrug operations and Navy patrol craft conducting domestic homeland security missions while the Coast Guard dispatched cutters to Iraqi. Some Defense officials harbored additional concerns that—short of a declared war—DoD could not rely on the Coast Guard to fulfill its obligations spelled out in the combatant commanders' contingency plans because its domestic homeland security duties have precedence.
In addition, the Navy is replicating Coast Guard national defense capabilities called out in the 1995 Memorandum of Agreement between the Defense and Transportation Departments. This memorandum defines five categories of "specialized" capabilities the Coast Guard provides: (1) maritime interception operations (MIO); (2) port operations, security, and defense; (3) military environmental response; (4) peacetime military engagement (PME); and (5) coastal sea control.6
For each category, the Navy has either replicated the capability or can hire it elsewhere. The Navy began its own MIO by establishing boarding schools whose curricula have many similarities to those at the Coast Guard's law enforcement schools.7 Today, the Navy's MIO capabilities are so good that a U.S.–Liberian accord signed in February 2004 authorizes the Navy to board Liberian registered commercial ships in international waters to search for WMD.8 The Navy's mobile security squadrons (MSSs), naval coastal warfare groups, independent boat units, mobile inshore undersea warfare units, and harbor defense commands provide equivalent capabilities to the Coast Guard's for the port operations, security, and defense category and for the coastal sea control category. The MSSs, with 175 active-duty personnel operating six 25-foot patrol craft, are the Navy's version of the Coast Guard's PSUs. If DoD operational commanders need environmental response capability, they can get it from the Environmental Protection Agency or buy it from a contractor. In a similar fashion, commercial firms such as DynCorp, MPRI, or Kellogg, Brown and Root can provide PME capabilities in Coast Guard missions.
Transformation
The Coast Guard's essence is the interchangeability of its people and platforms for multiple duties. Although most federal agencies are organized around a single core function, the Coast Guard has multiple core missions. In keeping with its corporate ideology, Coast Guard personnel are assigned to a disparate range of duties, as exemplified by the recent comment of a chief petty officer: "Just a year ago, I was a boarding officer and managing an engineering team on a Coast Guard cutter. These days, I'm helping mariners navigate the challenges and consequences of drug use, and trying to prevent future marine accidents by determining what caused them."9 This typical Coast Guardsman cites at least four different primary duty functions he has performed: (1) maritime law enforcement boarding officer; (2) senior marine engineering technician; (3) criminal investigator for drug misuse; and (4) maritime transportation safety analyst.
Being multimission has caused the Coast Guard to generalize the professional development and training of its people. For example, it is not uncommon for an officer to spend 25 years as a support specialist, be selected for admiral, and become an operational field commander, responsible for missions he has never conducted. In lieu of formal, resident training, the Coast Guard counts on on-the-job training and professional qualifications standards for the majority of its law enforcement personnel, and unlike DoD, it does not require joint professional military education (JME) for its officers, but it expects to be integrated into military operations and commands in the same manner as the other services. The multimission doctrine obliges the Coast Guard to place a greater value on being a generalist than a specialist and to treat those who do support missions as interchangeable with those who do operational missions. Unfortunately, one very harmful result of this doctrine is that other federal agencies, especially the law enforcement agencies, and the other military services have mixed views of the Coast Guard's competencies.10
The Coast Guard acknowledges that the costs of maintaining a multimission force are too high. Prior to 11 September, plans were afoot to remove all weapons but side arms from operational shore units with small boats. In a cost-cutting move, the Coast Guard already had removed chemical, biological, and radiological capabilities from its cutters. And when 200 Haitians sailed brazenly into Miami harbor in fall 2002, the first Coast Guard unit to spot them and attempt an interdiction was a single-mission, aids-to-navigation vessel with no law-enforcement capabilities; it consequently failed in the attempt.
As the Coast Guard embraces this new operational paradigm, the increased demand for a specialized workforce devoted to maritime security and the associated costs of maintaining workforce competency preclude multimission career paths for most Coast Guardsmen. It is imprudent operationally and economically to assign highly skilled and trained law enforcement and intelligence personnel with special security clearances to unrelated duty assignments such as boating safety, icebreaking, repairing aids to navigation, oil spill containment, or personnel management.
DoD is sending the Coast Guard a message to stay home and guard the coasts. Underscoring that message is a Navy policy to replicate Coast Guard "non-redundant capabilities" and its less than full commitment to fund the combat systems for all new Coast Guard Deepwater cutters. The Coast Guard's national defense role is being redefined as one of little relevancy and value to the Defense Department. Aside from the 1995 Memorandum of Agreement, DoD leaders have thought so little of the Coast Guard's national defense contribution that they have never acknowledged the Coast Guard's national defense role in any formal planning or reporting document, such as the Secretary of Defense's Annual Report to the President and the Congress.11
An Unaffordable Ethos
New operational and policy paradigms force the Coast Guard to reexamine its multimission ethos. It no longer can afford the training costs; the nation cannot risk "generalists" going in harm's way against the likes of al Qaeda; and in attempting to be all things to all people, the Coast Guard sets capabilities and personnel expertise for many of its missions to a baseline level. DoD has pounced on this shortcoming. It perceives a major gap in our national capabilities for domestic maritime interdiction. The Commander, U.S. Northern Command, questions whether the Coast Guard can deal with terrorists smuggling a WMD into the country on a vessel.12 The Chief of Naval Operations wants "a maritime NORAD" and has stood up a Navy working group to do just that.13
The attacks of 11 September 2001 were a defining moment for the Coast Guard. Its expanded role in homeland security and its relocation to the Department of Homeland Security will not be reversed. By maintaining its emphasis on its multimission doctrine, and underestimating the full implications of these two new paradigms, the Coast Guard transforms a large portion of the service into a domestic, paramilitary guard force, forfeits its status as a valued member of the nation's defense team, and loses the lead for maritime security—at home as well as overseas.
Captain Stubbs served in the U.S. Coast Guard for 30 years, with duty as a senior strategic and force planner, a combat tour in Vietnam, and command of a major Coast Guard ship conducting maritime security missions. After the 11 September 2001 attacks, he was asked by the Commandant to participate in his strategic task force to define the Coast Guard's way ahead in homeland security and was a member of the Heritage Foundation study group on homeland security. Currently, he works for Anteon Corporation as a national security consultant.
1. Victor Davis Hanson, Ripples of Battle (New York: Doubleday, 2003). back to article
2. David Lamb, "Coast Guard's Status Is on a Rising Tide," Los Angeles Times, 8 February 2004. back to article
3. Joint Statement of Adm. Thomas H. Collins, Commandant, U.S. Coast Guard; Robert C. Bonner, Commissioner, Customs and Border Protection; and RAdm. David M. Stone, USN (Ret.), Acting Administrator, Transportation Security Administration, Department of Homeland Security, on Maritime Security Status before the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation U.S. Senate, 24 March 2004. back to article
4. This does not mean the entire Coast Guard is trained and equipped for the full range of counterterrorism operations. Instead, specialized quick-reaction units provide enhanced capabilities (e.g., lethality, vertical insertion, opposed boardings). back to article
5. John Mintz and Vernon Loeb, "Coast Guard Fights to Retain War Role," The Washington Post, 31 August 2003, p. A07. As The Washington Post reported, some Defense and Navy officials suggested that the Coast Guard restrict itself to "guarding the coast"; that overseas deployments of Coast Guard units be "written out" of current DoD operational plans; and that the Navy begin developing organic equivalents for many of the capabilities now provided by the Coast Guard, such as maritime interception and port security in forward areas. back to article
6. Revised DoD and DoT "Memorandum of Agreement on the Use of U.S. Coast Guard Capabilities and Resources in Support of the National Military Strategy," 3 October 1995. back to article
7. At these schools, "students learn to embark and debark foreign vessels to review documents, and inspect the vessel, its cargo and personnel. Students also learn to identify and control threats and hazards, collect evidence and intelligence information, and manage medical emergencies." JO2 Sean A. Hughes, USN, "Navy, Coast Guard Team Up for Boarding, Search and Seizure Training," Commander in Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet Web page news item, undated. back to article
8. Edward Harris, "U.S. Navy Gets OK to Search All Liberian-Flagged Ships for WMD," Associated Press, 13 February 2004. back to article
9. LCdr. Todd Offutt, USCG, "Coast Guard 'Columbo,'" Hawai'i Navy News, 12 March 2004. back to article
10. Because of the Coast Guard's training methods and because the Coast Guard does not conduct investigations, federal agencies are reluctant to authorize armed Coast Guard personnel to conduct missions on land without elaborate and special provisions—something the Coast Guard urgently requires to improve its security posture in the ports and waterways. back to article
11. The Navy also has not supported the Senate and House Armed Services Committees receiving any testimony or even informal briefings on the Coast Guard's national defense capabilities, the National Fleet policy, or the Deepwater Project. back to article
12. Chris Strohm, "Military Explores Greater Role In Maritime Security," GovExec.com, 3 March 2004. back to article
13. James W. Crawley, "Top Admiral Urges 'Maritime NORAD' for Security on Seas," The San Diego Union Tribune, 5 February 2004. back to article
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All forces must be fully deployable, either in totality or in detachments, for assignments in other regions as the threat or operational conditions change. In addition, for Coast Guard forces to act as deterrents, they must have credibility that they have the skills and weapons to get the job done. Obsolescent forces or forces with a capability-to-threat mismatch have low credibility and are easily countered. Finally, these forces must be prepared for all eventualities. They must be ready for the unexpected, since they no longer can trust that "what they see is what they get." If events go sour on a boarding at sea, Coast Guard forces cannot as easily extract themselves as their land-based brethren can from a vehicle they have stopped or a building they have entered. When it comes to unexpectedly confronting a terrorist threat on a ship in the course of a "normal" boarding, Coast Guardsmen at sea are in a "Velcro boarding"—they are stuck. They need to be well trained and well equipped for counterterrorism operations.
Active deterrence shifts mission execution from relatively straightforward single-unit sorties for discrete, short-duration, maritime incidents to enduring, complex, multiagency, multiunit campaigns with detailed tasking orders against numerous, adaptive, and asymmetric threats. Operational commanders, especially those at the tactical (port and regional) level, must be supported, not only by a current operations staff, but also by separate, dedicated staffs for planning and intelligence. In lieu of focusing on reactionary operational decision making as experienced in the fire-house model, field commanders must concentrate on developing extensive knowledge of terrorists' capabilities, methods, objectives, ideologies, and organizational structures to assess their strengths, vulnerabilities, and centers of gravity. On the basis of this understanding, they can plan and implement reliable protective measures and effective defensive and offensive operations and identify requirements to operate against agile adversaries versus rescuing distressed boaters.