"What college did you attend?" A random survey of 20 Coast Guard commanders would elicit a wide range of responses. The Coast Guard Academy is a sure-bet answer. Public and private colleges and universities would be represented. Many officers would name two or three places, since it's likely they"ve earned a graduate degree. A few would name a senior service school from one of the other armed services. But no one would list the Coast Guard Staff College. That's because there is no such thing.
That needs to change. It's time the Coast Guard revisited the way it prepares junior officers for senior leadership positions. It's time for a Coast Guard senior service college.
The Coast Guard is growing; the workforce has increased 12% since 11 September 2001, and the budget has grown over 61%.1 Yet mission expansion threatens to outstrip this growth.
In order to keep up with this expansion, the Coast Guard's organizational structure is being overhauled. In the past four years, Maritime Safety and Security Teams have stood up across the country. Captains of the Port have been handed another hat to wear, that of the Federal Maritime Security Coordinator. Cutter crews now conduct security boardings and patrols just outside U.S. ports. Marine Safety Offices, Groups, and some Air Station field commands have been combined into new integrated organisms called Sectors.
Breaking Down Stovepipes
These changes demand more from the service's mid-grade and senior officers who will command these units and bear new responsibilities. As junior officers, they are expected to develop expertise in their program specialty. The Coast Guard requires them to concentrate on becoming first-rate ship drivers, pilots, marine inspectors, or group operations officers, and learn how to lead others in such work.
Yet the promotion selection system reinforces the concept that all officers are generalists. As they advance, in order to succeed as generalists they need information that will help them understand the subtle, and often not-so-subtle, variances in the different program responsibilities, challenges, and workplace cultures.
The Coast Guard needs a staff college that allows junior officer specialists to transition to senior officer generalists, a staff college that will help break down inter-program stovepipes, and one that will serve to educate rising leaders as strategic thinkers and analysts. It must also stand as the service's center for strategic analysis and research.
The Coast Guard's entry-level training and education centers, the Academy and Officer Candidate School in New London, Connecticut, bring new leaders together for common education. Graduates then leave these schools and go to the field. They choose a specialty. They are challenged to become expert aircraft pilots, officers of the deck, ship's engineers, or marine inspectors. They may be selected to attend graduate school for advanced education within a particular service program.
Officers are encouraged to aspire to positions as department heads, executive officer, and, ultimately to command, for the most part, within a specific program or specialty. Their training and education while serving in these positions is almost exclusively program-specific.
Commanding officers' conferences and preparatory training are also mostly segregated, with, for example, Area Afloat commanding officers attending their own conferences at least once a year and their Air Station counterparts holding a separate annual conference.
There is some cross-pollination at district commanders' conferences, but the Coast Guard does very little to prepare its future leaders to cross over from being a specialty leader to a strategist and manager who will focus on the combined good of all service programs.
A staff college would broaden an officer's understanding of the various aspects of the Coast Guard and better enable her or him to bridge from specialist to generalist. In addition to breaking down program barriers, it would also help provide officers with the higher-level education they should have as they assume responsibilities that call for more strategic thinking.
In today's Coast Guard, a few high-performers are selected each year to attend one of the other senior military service schools. These are valuable experiences for those fortunate enough to be picked, but those programs are tailored to the needs of the host service or the Defense Department.
The Coast Guard is different from the other armed services. It is a military service with missions that bring its members into daily contact with the maritime industry, non-governmental organizations, and the American public. Senior officers should have an education in the philosophy of all three worlds: military, business, and non-governmental organizations. They must understand and emulate the best of each. A Coast Guard staff college could build a curriculum to do this.
The Coast Guard also needs its own research and analysis center-not a hardware research-and-development center, which exists in Groton, Connecticut, but a software center where the Coast Guard can grow new ideas and build strategies to meet the challenges of the new millennium. The maritime world of the Coast Guard is changing so quickly that the service must have its own strategy incubator, a place where maritime accidents and the follow-on safety measures that were imposed could be studied in an effort to break the cycle of safety legislation in the wake of tragedy.
The center would also be the focal point for development of the Coast Guard's detailed doctrines and innovations in areas such as search and rescue, port security, drug interdiction, and preventive maritime safety (human factors analysis). It would be a place for systems thinkers to build on the premise behind the Deepwater program and look for synergistic methods for Coast Guard operations as a whole.
Lest this be seen as something that is merely "nice to have," others in government recognize the need for this type of senior-level training. The Secret Service has 24 employees enrolled in a two-year program at the Division of Public Safety Leadership at The Johns Hopkins School of Professional Studies.2 The other armed services each have their own staff colleges and senior service colleges, and, of course, there is the National Defense University.
Part of a Larger Whole?
Good arguments have been made for a larger Homeland Security University for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).3 The Coast Guard Staff College could be a component of this larger university, but such an institution should not be viewed as a substitute for the staff college. Coast Guard officers must first understand their own service's wide range of missions and programs before they tackle the much larger issues of multi-agency understanding and joint operations.
The staff college curriculum should be designed for Coast Guard lieutenant commanders. This is the right time in most officers' careers to start thinking of themselves as potential forces in service-wide policy development. A few officers might be afforded opportunities to have some impact on large-scale Coast Guard policies before they reach lieutenant commander, but most are still developing as "subject matter specialists" and leaders.
The school should be mandatory for every lieutenant commander before promotion to commander. The program of instruction should focus on giving the student the big picture of the Coast Guard, and how the service fits into DHS as well as the rest of the federal government. Including topics such as the annual budget process, national legislation formulation, and Capitol Hill processes will help each officer understand why the Coast Guard ends up with the funding it gets. The program should also cause students to examine the military/civilian "values gap" in our society, which many argue is expanding.
Establishing the staff college in New London would be ideal. The Coast Guard's officer entry schools, the Academy and Officer Candidate School, are there, along with the Leadership Development Center. Space is tight on the Academy campus, but even if the staff college were placed at a site nearby, perhaps as part of a Homeland Security University, it would still yield valuable synergies to have all of these institutions near each other.
An argument could be made for placing the college near the nation's capital, providing easy access for guest speakers from the service's flag ranks and senior executive service corps, headquarters program managers, congressional staffers, and representatives of other federal government agencies as well as industry. But visitors can reach New London easily and fairly inexpensively by flying through Providence, Rhode Island, and would be offset by cheaper facility costs in eastern Connecticut. Besides, establishing the college away from Washington would help to ensure it did not become an adjunct of Coast Guard Headquarters.
The course of study should last several months at a minimum, but the need for classroom-type interaction has to be scrutinized. Extended on-site instruction lasting several months or more, conducted anywhere, carries a heavy price tag in student travel expenses, student separation from families, and loss of full time work resources. And the current challenges to the workforce strength, with dramatic growth in the last four years, make it painful to free up large groups of lieutenant commanders to attend this type of school full-time for extended time periods. As computers, telecommunications equipment, and distance learning capabilities improve, the Coast Guard must explore the creation of a program of study that mixes distance learning with intermittent, intensive, and collaborative on-site classes or workshops.
Navy Admiral Gregory Johnson, speaking to a graduating class at the Naval War College, recalled a defining moment for him in his naval career. It came while he was a student at that college:
pilot trying to fill up my logbook; I was a member of the national security
profession, and in my view, national security was the nation's highest
calling. . . .The aim [of the Naval War College] is simply to invite officers to
meet together to discuss questions pertaining to higher branches of their
profession and to enable each one, according to his or her inclination, to
prepare for the highest and most responsible duties that can devolve upon a
naval officer. That is exactly what this institution did for me. It extended my
horizons to the higher branches of this profession, and I will ever be in its debt.4
More than ever, the Coast Guard needs leaders who yearn to be not only the best ship drivers or pilots or marine inspectors, but the best maritime security professionals. The service needs to prepare its officers to assume strategic responsibilities within the service, the Department of Homeland Security, and the nation. The Coast Guard needs a senior service college and the time is now.
Captain Sturm is Chief, Office of Port, Vessel, and Facility Security, at Coast Guard Headquarters, Washington, DC. He has held a number of field and staff assignments during his 26-year career, including Captain of the Port, Charleston, South Carolina, and Commander, Coast Guard Activities Europe, in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
1. Coast Guard Office of Budget and Programs, Washington, DC, 27 December 2005. back to article
2. "Secret Service Hits the Books," Johns Hopkins Magazine, February 2004, p. 17. back to article
3. Doyle, Michael E., and Stump, Greg, "Whey We Need a Homeland Security University," Homeland Defense Journal, December 2003, pp. 22-27. back to article
4. Johnson, Adm. Gregory G., USN, "A Larger Meaning. A Larger Purpose," Naval War College Review, Winter, 2004, Vol. LVII, No. 1, p. 37. back to article