While serving on a 210-foot medium endurance Coast Guard cutter as the independent duty yeoman and executive officer, we didn’t just lead the administrative team on board, we were the administrative team. When the poor internet connection prevented us from completing even the simplest online tasks, we decided to write this essay, to bring attention to the administrative struggles being experienced on board cutters. It does not have to be that way.
Throughout the cutter fleet, crews are struggling with the consequences of poor internet connections. This might sound trivial, but we can assure you this is a serious and crippling barrier to daily work. On a 210-foot medium endurance cutter—the only class of major cutters still using the KVH satellite receivers—there are 758 kilobits per second (kbit/s) available, divided among the cutter’s 33 computers. While operating in the eastern Pacific on the fleet broadband satellite, connection speeds are even slower, at 512 kbit/s. This means workday connection speed per computer is approximately a third that of an old dial-up connection. For those old enough to remember watching a picture appear on the page pixel-by-pixel, you can understand our concern as every conceivable administrative duty gets “upgraded” to an online version. Like Sisyphus continually rolling his rock up a hill, we often feel we’ve been doomed to watch pages load—and fail to load—for all eternity.
As the world and the service become more dependent on internet access, the Coast Guard’s aging cutter fleet is becoming less capable each time it gets under way. And this is no longer a problem just for the admin staff; many tasks the Coast Guard used to complete offline—maintenance tracking, purchasing, galley bills, evaluations—are being shifted one-by-one to online versions that cutters cannot access at sea. No division on board is free from the burden of poor connectivity. While these shifts are convenient for shoreside users and cheaper than maintaining offline-capable programs, they have made it nearly impossible to get the job done under way.
To correct this, either the websites we use need to have a low bandwidth or mobile version so people with lower speeds still can access them or the service needs to shift to higher-bandwidth satellite systems so we can get high-speed (or even medium-speed) connections under way. Another potential solution would be to develop forms that can be saved and filled in offline then uploaded at night when usage is lighter or when connectivity is stable. The recent message declaring the service’s intention to create a process for data entry by shoreside units also is hopeful, but sending tasking to generic inboxes creates a greater possibility for mistakes, delays, miscommunications, problems with logistics in foreign ports, and errors in members’ pay.
Yeomen must have access to the internet to do their jobs. Having limited ability to enter and retrieve data from applications such as Direct Access for personnel and pay data entry, the Coast Guard portal to access updated personnel messages and official directives, and the Travel Preparation and Examination (TPAX) system to process travel claims prevents them from ensuring members’ pay is correct, orders are cut, and questions are answered in a timely fashion.
The rest of the crew also struggle to complete simple, basic tasks on websites that are beyond reach while under way. They cannot access the Training Management Tool (TMT), into which they are required to enter every drill, qualification, recertification, and boat operation. At the end of our winter patrol, we flew one of our junior officers home so she could spend three days entering data prior to the tailored ship’s training availability. No one on board can access the Federal Procurement Desktop under way, so we flew two storekeepers home before the end of our spring patrol, armed with part numbers and hand-signed draft purchase requests, to complete dozens of hours of entries and make purchases before the ship’s return and the start of our maintenance period. The list goes on and on. How did we get to the point where a cutter’s crew can do their job only when they are 3,000 miles from the cutter?
We calculated the approximate work hours our crew wastes as a result of poor connectivity. A typical patrol for a 210-foot cutter is about 60 days, with a target of 185 days deployed each year. If approximately 11 of the 75 crewmembers have duties that require them to spend the majority of each work day completing (or attempting to complete) work online, and each page takes at least 40 seconds to load, each one of us wastes nearly 11 days each patrol simply waiting for websites to load. If we consider basic pay and entitlements and multiply the lost time across the fleet, the cost of poor connectivity is quite high. And this doesn’t take into account other online tasks, such as the completion of mandated training, that must be saved for inport maintenance periods, taking crewmembers away from the vital work that keeps a 53-year-old cutter operational.
Less-capable satellite systems and internet-based programs were implemented by the Coast Guard as cost-cutting measures, but are these immensely burdensome programs actually saving us money?
The afloat community is faced with a strange irony: Our mission involves being under way, but being under way prevents us from having sufficient internet connectivity and access to administrative assistance to complete our missions. We are short on personnel and qualifications, but we must consider leaving key crewmembers behind so they can do their jobs.
We are proud to have had the opportunity to serve our shipmates, but it should not be this hard—waking up at 0300 to see if there is enough connectivity to enter evaluations, or entering personnel data three times before it saves without crashing. Like the administrative teams on every cutter, we will keep doing our best to serve our crews. We’ll keep rolling that rock up the hill, even if we know it will be back at the bottom the next day.