The U.S. Coast Guard is one of our great but perhaps underappreciated national treasures. Most of the time the service performs its mission in its usual quiet, professional manner. Only when some great disaster strikes, whether natural or manmade, is the Coast Guard suddenly thrust into a national spotlight. It happened with Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and now again with the Deepwater Horizon oil platform explosion in April.
The spill has been taxing Coast Guard personnel and equipment to the limit these past several months, and it's all happening against the backdrop of a looming budget crunch that could force the service to shed personnel and threaten future shipbuilding plans. Into this gathering storm steps the new Commandant of the Coast Guard, Admiral Robert J. Papp Jr. The admiral recently took time from his busy schedule to sit down with frequent contributor Art Pine for a wide-ranging interview. The Commandant is under no illusions about the challenges he's facing, and observers say he's the perfect choice to guide the service during one of its most crucial periods.
At press time, responders were cautiously optimistic over progress being made to contain the oil spewing from BP's damaged Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico. As part of our coverage, Dr. Joe DiRenzo III and retired Coast Guard Vice Admiral James Hull assess the response to this disaster and sound a warning that the Coast Guard, other federal agencies, and private industry must do more to be prepared for the next oil spill, because if history is any indication, more such incidents are inevitable.
Whether one serves 5, 10, or a full 20 years in the military, reentering civilian life can be a challenge. The world is often a different place from the one the service member left, friends may have moved on and old jobs vanished or been filled by others. Finding a new job commensurate with the level of responsibility one held in the service can be difficult as skills learned in the military don't always translate readily to civilian employment.
Retired Marine Corps Major General Matthew Caulfield tackles this issue in his article, "Help Wanted." Unemployment figures for returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are shockingly high, and failure to find meaningful work can lead to further problems, including homelessness and suicide. Measures such as the Transition Assistance Program of the 1990s are inadequate to handle the needs of today's troops. General Caulfield explains that the Marine Corps may have found a solution in a new program at Camp Pendleton that works with civilian partners to provide transitioning Marines the skills they need to find fulfilling jobs.
The new AirSea Battle Concept has landed with much hoopla in the defense community. Four naval strategists
Jose Carreno, Thomas Culora, and two longtime friends of the Naval Institute, George Galdorisi and Thomas Hone take a look at this new strategy and find that much of it really isn't all that new. Which is not to say that it's necessarily flawed, but the United States has been coordinating its air and sea assets ever since World War II, tracking U-boats in the Atlantic and supporting amphibious operations in the Pacific. In the process of their review, the authors outline the fundamentals of today's concept.
Finally, many classic movies featuring newspapers often include a scene where a crusty old city editor grabs the phone and yells "Stop the presses!" on learning of some new development that will wreck their front page. If only it was so easy in the real world. As the June issue of Proceedings, containing our Wanat story, was being printed, we learned that the Army had rescinded the career-ending reprimands given to individuals involved in the battle. Alas, it was too late to update our print product, but we did get the change made to the online version. We apologize for any confusion this my have caused readers. Ah, the perils of a monthly magazine.