The Coast Guard is a small organization. With just over 40,000 active-duty personnel and a diverse and broad mandate that covers six operational and 11 statutory missions and a mission to protect a coastline of more than 90,000 miles, the Coast Guard frequently is noted for having to do “more with less.”1 Because of the service’s small size, there are only 19 enlisted occupational specialties, also known as ratings.2 To put this in perspective, the Navy has more than 60 ratings, the Air Force has 135 Air Force specialty codes, and the Army has more than 150 military occupational specialty codes.3 The small number of Coast Guard ratings, coupled with the varied mission sets, has meant that enlisted members also must live by another unofficial motto: “Jack of all trades, master of none.”
In addition to its 19 ratings, the Coast Guard also requires personnel to serve in other roles. These jobs provide services that are not considered full-time duties but assist Coast Guardsmen and support wider service goals. Some of the more common collateral duties include victim advocate, command intelligence officer, hazmat transportation specialist, and command drug and alcohol representative (CDAR).4 Service members in all military branches have assigned collateral and other unofficial duties, but the small size of Coast Guard units creates challenges that are unique to the service.
The Reality of Collaterals
Many collateral duties require formal training, which can be difficult for members to attend and for the command to provide. As with everything, units must make the best of limited opportunities for training by scheduling personnel to attend around cutter deployments, operational actions, personal leave, and other obligations. Cutter crewmembers are called on to attend training that sends them on temporary duty assignments for 75 percent of an in-port period. On return to home port, members are sent to collateral training instead of spending time with their families, adding to the stresses that come from long separations. Furthermore, many of the training courses are available only a few times a year. For example, the CDAR and victim advocate trainings each was offered only four times between February and October 2020.5
In addition, when members transfer from units or depart the service, it can be difficult to train a replacement. I witnessed this challenge when I was assigned to a Coast Guard unit in Texas. The CDAR transferred in August, and the unit was unable to send a replacement to training until May of the following year. The CDAR provides drug and alcohol counseling to unit members, and to go almost ten months without a trained expert is unacceptable. The service needs to provide Coast Guard assignment officers with a system that allows them to better place personnel with certain collateral skills into units that need those skills. The Coast Guard needs to work to prevent gaps in collateral areas, such as the one that occurred at my unit in Texas.
The Coast Guard also must consider the needs of enlisted personnel and their career development. Most young people who join the military understand that sometimes they will have to do things they do not want to do. This can be true with collateral duties, but there can be a better way. No one is forced to be a yeoman or an electrician’s mate—they are given the opportunity to learn about the rating, sent to training, and then sent to a unit that requires someone with that training. The same can be done for collateral duties.
It is time for the Coast Guard to formally recognize the reality of collateral duties and the strain they place on enlisted service members. In the interests of fairness, continuity management, and resource allocation, the service needs to develop and implement an enlisted secondary competency code (SCC).
Create a Secondary Competency Code
The first step in creating such a code would be determining which collateral competencies are required by Coast Guard units. The best way to determine this would be through a series of working groups. There is a model for this in the Coast Guard Occupational Analysis rating reviews. These reviews meet periodically to determine the current expertise in rating outputs and what skills in a given rating are required to ensure units perform required operations. Unlike the rating reviews, the collateral analysis groups should be geographically distributed, with representatives from every type of unit and members from most paygrades and ratings. The results of these working groups would be submitted to the office of the Deputy Commandant for Mission Support for further study on feasibility, budgeting, and resource allocation.
The next step would be a Commandant Instruction to provide guidance on the new SCC. Both the Coast Guard Performance, Training, and Education Manual and the Navy Education Manual provide some examples of how such an instruction could look.6 Following publication of the instruction, both supervisors and junior enlisted members would need training on this new system and, once again, there is precedent for how this could be done. During implementation of the Blended Retirement System (BRS), all personnel were required to participate in training on the new retirement options if they were either eligible for the BRS or were supervising someone who was. A similar two-tiered online training course would work for the SCC.
The service also will need to determine which personnel will be required to obtain an SCC. Again, this should be implemented with the BRS model in mind. Initially, the SCC would be required for personnel who enter the service after a certain date, not implemented for those who have served for more than ten years, and would be optional (but encouraged) for those with less than ten years of service. Personnel will have a deadline to acquire an SCC. At first, they would have eight years to complete the required training, and, eventually, all enlisted members would need to obtain an SCC by the end of their second enlistment. Again, there is precedent for such a standard, as enlisted personnel must complete, be attending, or be on a waiting list for “A” school to reenlist.
Once the SCC system has been implemented, assignment officers could use it to decide where to place permanent change of station transfers. Each autumn, units validate their personnel allowance list to determine the human resource needs of their commands for the following summer. In addition to determining the ratings and paygrades needed, units also would now determine what collaterals they require.
When determining where to place enlisted members, the assignment officer could view their SCCs to help make placements. Balancing the needs of the service, unit, and member may be difficult, and assignment officers may not be able to guarantee that units never lack personnel with a required SCC, but the system still could aid in placement. If the assignment officers are unable to fill required positions, they could inform the units, which then could train the personnel they have.
When considering current and possible collateral duty assignments, one is struck by how many of them are in the service of people, rather than missions. A formal secondary competency code would help units and assignment officers allocate human resources, but that pales next to what it would do for the service members. Enlisted personnel are able to contribute to the well-being of their country by learning a rating. They would be able to contribute to the well-being of their shipmates by learning a collateral.
1. U.S. Coast Guard, “Workforce,” U.S. Coast Guard, “Missions.” Rebecca Harrington, “We Have No Idea How Big the U.S. Coastline Really Is,” Business Insider, 13 October 2015, www.businessinsider.com/how-big-is-the-us-coastline-2015-10; and Joseph Keefe, “Doing More with Less: No Longer an Option with the Coast Guard,” The Maritime Executive, 11 March 2020, www.maritime-executive.com/article/doing-more-less-no-longer-option-coast-guard.
2. U.S. Coast Guard, “Enlisted Opportunities” www.gocoastguard.com/active-duty-careers/enlisted-oportunities/view-job-descriptions/.
3. U.S. Navy, “U.S. Navy Ratings,” www.gonavy.com/; U.S. Air Force, “Enlisted AFSC Classifications,” www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/104609/enlisted-afsc-classifications/; U.S. Army, “Career and Jobs,” www.goarmy.com/careers-and-jobs.html.
4. Coast Guard Training Quota Management Center, “FY 2020 Course Schedule.”
5. Coast Guard Training Quota Management Center, “FY 2020 Course Schedule.”
6. U.S. Coast Guard, COMDTINST M1500.10C, “Performance, Training, an Education Manual,” 18 May 2009; U.S. Department of the Navy, NAVPERS18068F, “Navy Enlisted Classifications,” January 2019.