It is not because I’m ungrateful for my service’s efforts to recognize its people, or that I am not proud of being a U.S. Coast Guard officer. I wear only one row of ribbons because our awards system is being abused. The plethora of awards being handed out, and the relative ease with which so many personnel qualify for them, have cheapened the system. Uniform Regulations allow me to wear all my ribbons, or the three highest in precedence. Those three aren’t necessarily the ones that mean the most to me, but wearing them allows me to make my own small protest.
We used to make fun of Russian admirals—now we’re beginning to look like them! The burgeoning number of awards and the increasing ease with which awards are processed and approved have led to a corresponding decrease in their value.
As an exchange pilot with the Royal Navy (RN), I often found myself explaining the meaning of my numerous ribbons to curious RN officers. Invariably their rather cynical and sarcastic comments were that I must have received one of those ribbons for crossing the Atlantic. It is not uncommon for a Royal Navy admiral or captain to display one or two ribbons.
Since my exchange tour in Great Britain, I look curiously at my colleagues with three, four, or even five rows of ribbons. 1 see boot camp and academy graduates with five or six ribbons! We need to recognize our people, but how do we preserve the value of that recognition? Even though we maintain that these ribbons are indeed recognition of excellence, we have reduced the main criteria to simply being there between a pair of dates.
There are two root causes for such inflation:
- Our desire as good leaders to recognize our people outweighs our ability to exercise discipline within the system
- The unfortunate fact that medals are tied to our enlisted advancement system
When Coast Guard members are polled, invariably they are dissatisfied with the delays that almost always seem to be a part of the award system. Several years ago, an Awards Quality Action Team (QAT) chartered by the Thirteenth Coast Guard District recommended that the authority to award the Commandant’s Letter of Commendation be delegated down to commanding officers of the rank of lieutenant commander and above. In addition, it recommended that the authority to award the Coast Guard Achievement Medal be delegated to commanding officers of the rank of captain and above. These measures were adopted by the Coast Guard in an effort to reduce the delays in awards processing.
Other awards seem to be subject to the same inflationary pressures, for example: The Secretary’s Gold Medal; the Humanitarian Service Medal, the National Defense Service Medal, and the Bicentennial Unit Commendation were awarded to the entire service. If you entered the Coast Guard in 1990 and hung around for four years, you would have at least two medals and two additional ribbons! I applaud the efforts of our leadership to recognize the Coast Guard’s efforts, but surely there are other ways to do so.
Awards need to be divorced from the enlisted advancement system. It is sad to hear someone say that “receiving a Commandant’s Letter of Commendation is like getting a slap in the face.” The motivation for this comment was undoubtedly attributable to the fact that personal awards are tied to the enlisted advancement system: a Letter of Commendation is worth only one point in the advancement system, while a Coast Guard Achievement Medal is worth two. A Commandant’s Letter of Commendation used to carry much more weight—with the troops and the individual—but inflation has taken its toll. If performance is what counts—as we are constantly told and as we tell those who work for us—then the impact and influence of being in the right place at the right time, and having a supervisor who’s a whiz at writing award nominations, should be minimized.
Finally, assuming that the inflationary trend most likely will continue, the Coast Guard’s Medals and Awards Manual—despite its recent revision—needs to provide some adequate guidance. Some standard criteria for the Achievement Medal is needed other than “for professional and/or leadership achievement of a superlative nature . . . of such merit as to warrant more tangible recognition than is possible by the Commandant’s Letter of Commendation, but which does not warrant a Coast Guard Commendation Medal or higher award.” Now that the system does not benefit from a more-centralized approval authority—which keeps inflation in check and monitors award criteria to ensure its standard application across the Coast Guard—a standardized and detailed set of guidelines is more important than ever.
In the meantime I’ll continue to wear a single row of ribbons . . . it’s less gaudy.
Lieutenant Commander Troedsson is an HH-65A pilot and serves as the air operations officer at Coast Guard Group/Air Station Port Angeles, Washington.