The Coast Guard is organizing specialized forces into a Deployable Operations Group (DOG). Its first commanding officer and a civilian expert explain how it works.
Key to launching the U.S. Coast Guard's new Strategy for Maritime Safety, Security and Stewardship is having the right assets and people, with the right tools, capabilities, and skills, where and when they are needed to meet daunting maritime security needs. In addition to its multimission maritime safety, security, and stewardship assets, the Coast Guard has several special-focus deployable teams that share fundamental similarities in mission execution but until recently have been tethered to specific mission areas.
Three teams predate the 9/11 tragedies: the National Strike Force (NSF) for oil and hazardous materials spill operations, Tactical Law Enforcement Teams (TACLETs) for law-enforcement operations, and Port Security Units (PSUs) for military and defense operations. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the United States, the Coast Guard established two additional teams—the Maritime Safety and Security Teams (MSSTs) for security and anti-terrorism operations and the Maritime Security Response Team (MSRT) for counter-terrorism and law-enforcement operations—to help satisfy critical counter-terrorism, homeland security, and defense requirements.
The Coast Guard's experiences since September 2001 and particularly the lessons learned from hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 have underscored the need for a more complete integration of these teams' people, assets, and capabilities. Katrina/Rita especially highlighted the inefficiencies from the teams' having been stove-piped into "cylinders of excellence," with circuitous, two-region (Atlantic Area and Pacific Area) chains of command, constrained personnel capacities, logistics shortfalls, and little or no joint training or exercises among themselves and other Coast Guard forces. And interaction has been even less with other homeland security and defense assets.
In addition, command-control-communications interoperability within the Coast Guard, as well as with other federal, state, and local agencies, as been insufficient. Real-world operations have also shown that it has been very difficult to mix and match elements from the various teams into an integrated, expeditionary package tailored for the specific requirements of an incident or crisis, overseas as well as at home, and to assure unity of effort with other governmental and non-governmental organizations.
Interagency Integration?
In late 2001, the Coast Guard began to assess what it saw as an increasing need for close integration of its specialized, high-end operational capabilities into task-organized, adaptable force packages that could be deployed domestically and internationally to meet emergency requirements. Moreover, to ensure that vital national—not just maritime—security interests would be protected, service leaders understood that these force packages would have to be available not only to Coast Guard operational commanders, but also to other U.S. defense and civilian agency operational commanders for missions throughout the United States and the world.
At the same time, a broad array of presidential directives, laws, national strategies, and plans further defined and expanded the context and requirements for enhanced Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Coast Guard specialized, adaptable, deployable, and expeditionary capabilities. Together they demand greater Coast Guard involvement in the nation's security posture and the means to bring critical capabilities to bear.
"We need a clear, coherent way to employ our forces to create a layered defense for the nation," Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Thad W. Allen explained in his 2007 State of the Coast Guard message. "We need to consider our operational forces as a 'strategic trident.'" In addition to shore-based multimission forces assigned to the new sector organizations and the service's long-range patrol and interdiction Deepwater forces and polar icebreakers, Admiral Allen called out for special consideration "deployable, specialized forces organized into a single unified operational structure, the Deployable Operations Group (DOG)."
Standing Up the DOG
Taking all these developments and dynamics into consideration, Admiral Allen in July 2007 stood up the Deployable Operations Group. Instead of having multiple operational commanders—areas, districts, and even a headquarters program manager—a single commander, Deployable Operations Group, is charged with organizing, training, and equipping these teams into a single force structure, reporting to the new Coast Guard Deputy Commandant for Operations (itself a change in the way the Coast Guard coordinates operations from the Headquarters level). As the restructuring continues, the DOG's teams will benefit from consolidating key functions—administrative and financial, intelligence, logistics, planning, training and exercises, command, control, and communications—under a single commander, ensuring unity of effort and improving interoperability. Once fully operational, the DOG will be able to provide a deployed command-and-control element to operational commanders in the Coast Guard, throughout DHS and the Department of Defense, and more.
Indeed, the DOG provides a single entry point for other agencies requesting specialized support, thereby streamlining coordination and improving efficiency and operational effectiveness. By allowing these focused deployable assets to operate seamlessly with each other, the Coast Guard will in turn have forces better able to integrate with its partner agencies, especially in the Department of Homeland Security. This has addressed numerous issues, both inside the Coast Guard as well as the still-new DHS, which continues the integration of 22 disparate agencies into a single, coherent entity. As the Coast Guard works to ensure focused, interoperable, adaptable, and deployable force packages that embrace its interagency mind-set, and reaches out to other DHS organizations (e.g., Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Transportation Security Administration), the DOG will inevitably serve as a forcing function for even greater integration, interoperability, and strategy, policy, planning, and program coordination and collaboration throughout DHS.
Additional shared benefits stem from this initiative. Under the National Fleet Policy, for example, both the Coast Guard and the Navy are looking for innovative solutions to meet current and future requirements across the scope of both services' roles, missions, and tasks. First promulgated by Coast Guard Commandant Admiral James M. Loy and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jay Johnson in September 1998, the National Fleet Policy has been formally expanded and embraced by subsequent Commandants and CNOs in 2002 and 2006. (See the article by Admiral Allen and CNO Admiral Mike Mullen in the August 2006 Proceedings for the most recent joint statement of personal and institutional commitment to the nation's Fleet.)
The DOG, with its special law-enforcement authorities and expertise in littoral operations and vessel boarding and inspections, can provide non-redundant, unique capabilities that the Navy should embrace as an element of joint operations, particularly those involving the new Navy Expeditionary Combat Command. Such close collaboration is spreading to the Marine Corps Special Operations Command as well as with the U.S. Northern Command and other DoD combatant commanders, worldwide. Those commanders continue to ask, "Where are the aircraft carriers?" in times of heightened tension—as in the April 2007 Royal Navy-Iran crisis when the United States surged two carrier strike groups into the Persian Gulf. But they also increasingly want to know, "Where is the Coast Guard?" to help meet broad humanitarian, constabulary, and security needs in the face of non-traditional, non-military threats and challenges.
In this regard, the Coast Guard is the only service not constrained in critical law-enforcement roles by the Posse Comitatus Act. And, as most of the world's navies are coast guards in all but name, it makes little sense to duplicate capabilities, assets, and people, particularly in an era of increasingly tight federal funding and competing domestic needs. Since 1790, the Coast Guard has owned what are now called littoral, green-water, brown-water, and riverine operations, in home waters as well as throughout the world, in peace and war. And the DOG is the latest Coast Guard innovation, among many during the past 217 years, focused on meeting the nation's need for maritime security at home and overseas.
More than the Sum of its Parts
The DOG is not a new set of forces or an additional layer of bureaucracy, it is simply a more effective and efficient—some would say transformational—way to organize, train, and equip forces that already exist and simplify the chain of command and control. Much remains to be done to implement the DOG concept, to be sure. Over the long term, however, the Coast Guard and the nation will reap broad benefits as the DOG takes root with its shared skills in training, tactics, techniques, and procedures—in short, as the new DOG learns old and new tricks for safeguarding America's maritime security.
Rear Admiral Atkin is the Commander, Deployable Operations Group.
Dr. Truver is Vice President, National Security Programs, General Dynamics Information Technology.
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Anatomy of the Coast Guard DOG
The Deployable Operations Group aligns all U.S. Coast Guard deployable specialized forces (DSF) under a single, unified command, headed by an admiral. It is headquartered temporarily in Arlington, Virginia, and is staffed by 101 active-duty officers, enlisted personnel, reservists, auxiliary, and civilians. DFS units are comprised of approximately 3,000 Coast Guard personnel from 12 Maritime Safety and Security Teams, the Maritime Security Response Team, two Tactical Law Enforcement Teams, eight Port Security Units, three National Strike Teams, and the National Strike Force Coordination Center. These units will be cross-trained with an awareness of specialized mission tactics, techniques, procedures, and equipment employed by all deployable specialized forces.