The Coast Guard exists so that the United States may use the seas safely, fully, securely, and wisely. Rather than a straight forward humanitarian focus, the Coast Guard has a complex purpose from which all its maritime roles and mission flow. The service needs a program to strengthen internal cohesion and identification with security, safety, and navel warfare.
At the broadest level, the U.S. Coast Guard upholds U.S. sovereignty, enforces U.S. laws, and contributes to the well-being of the United States and its citizens at sea. It is a combination of six different types of maritime agencies that in many other nations remain separate entities: (1) constabulary; (2) lifesaving; (3) navy; (4) safety and regulatory; (5) environmental protection; and (6) navigation agency. It is an arm of the federal government and acts in support of national aims, but it does so in cooperation with a range of agencies at the state, local, and international levels. The Coast Guard has broad responsibilities for safeguarding maritime security—its singular contribution to the nation's national security posture. In short, the Coast Guard's essence is maritime safety, maritime security, and naval warfare, and Coast Guardsmen at all times are maritime lifesavers, guardians, and naval warriors.
Losing Its Unifying Means
The Coast Guard has a fragmented view of itself and violently opposing ideas about its military role. The combination of divergent missions gives the service a unique nature with strong contrasts and some very powerful, conflicting, and simultaneous dualisms: a lifesaving service and an armed force; a regulatory agency and a law enforcement service; an operational service and an administrative oversight agency; and a domestic agency and an international agency. In addition, the Coast Guard is a full-time military service, but the customers for its services—boaters, fishermen, smugglers, merchant mariners, polluters, shippers, port authorities, law breakers, environmentalists, and advocacy groups—are predominately in the civilian maritime arena. These dualisms frequently pull the Coast Guard in opposite directions and prevent the organization from sharing common values, experiences, and cultural norms across the entire range of the six subcomponent organizations.
Though the whipsawing caused by each new Commandant's different interpretation of the Coast Guard's essence has muted, the Coast Guard still has not addressed the underlying causes for this lack of service unity. (See pages 52-53.) It is possible that the next Commandant could reintroduce radical policy changes. Absent a formal program to foster unity on the Coast Guard's essence, the Coast Guard may well become even more fragmented, because the primary means to unify the service have lost their effectiveness.
Sea duty, one of the Coast Guard's key unifying means, no longer provides the service with a common, shared experience. In the early 1970s, almost 40% of Coast Guard officers served at sea. Many cutters had more Officer Candidate School graduates on board than Coast Guard Academy graduates. Today, the marine safety specialty field has the highest percentage of officer billets, and only about 12% of officers serve at sea—the vast majority of whom are Academy graduates. According to Coast Guard personnel detailers, many officers and enlisted personnel do not want sea duty. The Coast Guard signaled the further erosion of sea duty by no longer referring to itself a sea-going service in its official publications. Instead, the Coast Guard calls itself "maritime."
Furthermore, in the 1960s and 1970s officers routinely served "rotational tours" in different operational specialty communities. This rarely occurs today. The high degree of technical knowledge required and mission complexity have led to increased specialization of our personnel and the loss of opportunity to serve outside one's operational specialty. The Coast Guard no longer produces flag officers such as Rear Admiral William "Mike" Benkert, an internationally acclaimed marine environmental safety expert and a commanding officer of a polar icebreaker as a captain. Nor is the Coast Guard producing officers such as Captain David "The Flying Rabbi" Gerhowitz, a pioneering polar aviator and a commanding officer of a marine safety unit responsible for the port of Seattle. Today, officers remain in their operational specialties until they retire or make flag rank, and then many find themselves directing missions they never performed as mid-grade officers or operational unit commanders. The result is that from the summer of 1999 to the summer of 2000 five out of the seven rear admirals who served as operational district commanders and all four vice admirals wore no cutterman or aviator insignia. More than 100 years ago, W. S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan described this cultural characteristic of the military in their famous lyric from HMS Pinafore about the admiral who became "the Ruler of the Queen's Navee" by never going to sea.
In March 1976, Coast Guard Lieutenant Commander Gary Russell wrote a perceptive Proceedings article about the Coast Guard's changing personality. He described an officer corps that grew up with ingrained beliefs that the Coast Guard was "an armed force with a specialized peace-time mission" and that its military and seagoing missions were dominant. He also wrote about the expansion of the environmental and safety missions, the significant growth of the officer corps along with a large decrease in the officer-to-enlisted ratio, and the loss of naval uniforms. With great insight he predicted: "The decreasing number of vessels and the increasing number of officers are transforming the Coast Guard into what C. Northcote Parkinson described as a 'magnificent navy on land.' This strikes at the heart of the sea-faring image of the service and reinforces the regulatory view of the Coast Guard: serving as administrative watchdogs with 'desk jobs' ashore."
Building a Common Coast Guard
At one time, sea duty and rotational tours provided organizational cohesion and a common definition of the service, as well as agreement on the service's essence through shared experiences. To offset their loss, the Coast Guard needs a program to strengthen its internal cohesion and identification with maritime safety, security, and warfare.
First, the Coast Guard must provide its personnel with a common and accepted definition of its essence based on maritime safety, maritime security, and naval warfare. Coast Guardsmen must understand that they are simultaneously and continuously maritime lifesavers, guardians, and naval warriors. They must speak and think with these descriptive titles in mind, and recognize that they do, in the words of Commandant of the Coast Guard Admiral James Loy, "noble work" for the United States. The recent publication of the Coast Guard's first directive on its corporate ideology—titled Coast Guard Publication-I (CGPUB-1)—is an important first step if it has the correct contents. This directive aims to set out a common Coast Guard philosophy, language, and purpose to achieve unity of effort. CGPUB-1 provides the context for understanding the Coast Guard as a whole by describing the overarching concept of what the Coast Guard does, and why it does it. It guides professional judgment and provides a common approach to thinking about Coast Guard issues without prescriptive rules.
Now, the Coast Guard must teach CGPUB- 1, and Coast Guard personnel must study it to understand and embrace its arguments. This instruction process must be a portion of all courses at education and training commands. The need for instruction and study is particularly applicable in the development of future senior noncommissioned and commissioned leaders, who will plan and communicate in large part the Coast Guard's vision, strategy, resource requirements, and role as an instrument of national security.
Second, the Coast Guard needs to adjust the Coast Guard Academy's curriculum to include academic study of ocean policy and national-maritime security affairs for all cadets. Presently, the Academy offers courses in the law of the sea and marine science, but it has no comprehensive curriculum that integrates all other disciplines of ocean policy into a holistic program that provides an academic foundation to the Coast Guard's essence. Instead, the curriculum emphasizes the educational requirements for the Coast Guard's support programs, such as civil engineering. This situation is rather like IBM having a business development center for civil engineering, but not one for advanced informational technologies. The Coast Guard should be the nation's preeminent federal agency for developing and executing ocean policy, but its Academy is pursuing excellence in support functions that are increasingly attractive for outsourcing.
Third, the Coast Guard must raise the level of knowledge that Coast Guardsmen have about their service's history. The need for teaching Coast Guard history to its members is substantiated by a 1997 Center for Naval Analyses study reporting that Coast Guard personnel "generally do not have a detailed knowledge of Coast Guard history" beyond "simply recalling that the Lifesaving Service 'had to go out' regardless of the weather or seas." The 1948 Ebasco Coast Guard Roles and Missions Study stressed the value of Coast Guard history: "Comprehensive knowledge of the historical background and development of any enterprise is essential in the determination and appraisal of problems confronted and the formulation of recommendations for the solution of such problems." This wisdom remains true today. Most Coast Guard personnel, uniformed and civilian, know very little about their service's history, do not use it, and what they do know is anecdotal and superficial. Coast Guard personnel need to have a greater appreciation of the service's rich heritage than this anachronistic and now totally inappropriate saying about "having to go out." The Coast Guard's history offers a rich trove of experience from which to forge a broader and more accurate understanding of the service.
Fourth, the Coast Guard must encourage its officers to express their ideas and opinions about the Coast Guard's essence, missions, national security role, and similar such topics in professional journals. The Coast Guard needs an ongoing rigorous, objective, and intellectual discussion explored on the pages of journals such as Proceedings. The senior officers must set the example to inform, stimulate, and contribute. To preserve consensus, the Coast Guard culture does not really tolerate or encourage professional writing. Peter Senge has observed that, "it is a myth that great groups are characterized by agreement and civility." Today, the Coast Guard has great agreement and civility, but few officers willing to challenge conventional wisdom by demonstrating the moral courage to put their ideas and opinions out there for all to see and not hide in the pack. The result is widespread "group think" and almost the complete inability to embrace the conclusions from innovative concepts such as reinvention or reengineering. The Coast Guard needs to turn this around by encouraging professional writing. One way to do this is to require every officer who attends postgraduate school or a war college to submit two professional articles on topics of their choice for publication. Whether a journal publishes the article is not critical. The value lies in changing the service culture that tolerates anonymity, consensus over debate, and what General Dwight D. Eisenhower called "passive non-concurrence."
Conclusion
The diversity and complexity of Coast Guard roles defy reduction into an expression of its essence by the single word "humanitarian." This label is inaccurate and harmful, misleads citizens, creates false expectations among would-be recruits, breeds cynicism among those already in uniform, and yanks the service in wrenching course changes. Coast Guardsmen are lifesavers, but they are also maritime guardians and naval warriors, and sometimes they fill more than one role simultaneously. Without formal efforts to foster common agreement on the Coast Guard's essence, the Coast Guard's members will not work together on common organizational goals. A refashioning of what it means to be a Coast Guardsman is in order.
Captain Stubbs retired from the Coast Guard in 2000. He works at Anteon Corporation in Arlington, Virginia.