Personal Internet Can Keep Officers Afloat

After weeks of breaking ice around the clock in the bitter cold and constant darkness of the Arctic in winter, the crew of the USCGC Polar Star (WAGB-10) finally caught a break: a 48-hour stop in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, to take on food and fuel. The threat of COVID confined everyone to the ship, but the crew was promised one of the new “Plum Kits,” which could provide ample WiFi in the hangar. After spending the holidays at sea and largely out of touch with family and friends, everyone looked forward the chance to reconnect.

Then they tried connecting to the Plum Kit, only to be greeted with the dreaded spinning circle. The Coast Guard’s solution to giving cuttermen personal internet access was a disaster, with barely enough bandwidth for four people at a time to check email.

Of all the hard-to-solve problems facing the Coast Guard and the cutter fleet today, lack of internet connectivity should not be one of them. But it is, and the cost is high. Younger generation Coasties increasingly are opt- ing out of sea duty, citing quality of life factors such as connectivity as a primary reason. The Coast Guard must make this a top priority.

Retention Problems

Senior leaders often extol the benefits of being a cutterman, but the fact remains that the most talented and forward-looking members of the service are not going back to sea, where they are needed. To stem the exodus of cuttermen, in 2020 the Coast Guard offered $40,000 incentives to qualified candidates willing to fill lieutenant and lieutenant commander department head and executive officer billets.¹ According to one source at the Office of Cutter Forces (CG-751), the offer failed to attract even one response. Only after it lowered the eligibility requirements did it attract applicants^.2 Naval Engineering has had to offer a similar bonus, and even command billets are barely being filled.³

Despite the incentives, only 44 lieutenants screened for 36 fast response cutter afloat commands in 2020—11 of them were only lieutenant-selects.⁴ Ideally, there should have been almost twice as many who screened. As it stands, the out- look for the afloat community is dismal.

Internet As Necessity

In the days before the internet, lack of contact with family and connection to services when away from home was not such a big deal. It was common for businesspeople to travel with little expectation of receiving personal mail or phone calls. That was then; this is now. From practical matters such as banking and bill paying to personal activities such as news, music and video streaming, email, video chat, and gaming, the internet is integral to modern life.

Reliable high-speed internet is abundant, and most people expect to have it almost everywhere. Cuttermen are no exception. In a 2019 RAND study on quality of life on board cutters, 60 percent of respondents cited a lack of personal internet connectivity while underway as a major deterrent to sea duty.⁵ It should come as no surprise that the Coast Guard cannot find volunteers for sea duty when it asks them to dissociate from what many consider a fundamental part of their existence. This is especially true for the junior service members who do not know life without connectivity.

There are some who insist personal internet access does not belong on cutters. Even some junior officers claim the lack of connectivity is part of what makes time at sea fun, that it preserves the distinct culture that only thrives on ships. Such a large tether to land, they say, dilutes the traditions of sea service and ruins its unique appeal. Others claim it distracts the crew from the mission.

Long, frequent calls home and other niceties on the internet interfere with good order and discipline and compromise operational security.

Indeed, it would be a mistake to think making sea duty more like shore duty is the ideal outcome. People like going to sea because it is different. However, the Coast Guard must face the reality: Officers do not want to go back to sea, and many say that extremely limited internet is a major factor. If the service fails to listen, they will speak with their feet.

This is not an issue of entitlement or a case of being soft. Personal internet access is a basic provision for modern life. Consider how the world responded to COVID-19. The ongoing pandemic has shown everyone how necessary the inter- net is, not just for entertainment, but for maintaining important relationships when in-person meetups are impossible or, as was the case with COVID-19, unsafe.

Senior Coast Guard leaders should not dismiss this as an unsolvable problem—other organizations have solved it. For example, passengers on a Southwest Airlines 737 can fly over a Coast Guard cutter in the middle of the ocean while firing off text messages and, for just eight dollars, have unlimited internet aloft for checking email, web browsing, news, and social media. If passengers on a commercial airplane can have this, certainly crew members on cutters supported by military technology can as well.

Solutions Tried

In a recent fleet-wide message titled “Sea Duty Readiness,” Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Karl Schultz acknowledged the hardships cuttermen are facing during the pandemic while simultaneously trying to convince Coast Guardsmen that “the opportunities for seagoing members have never been greater.” He cited attractions such as new ships, better sea pay, the Plum Kit WiFi hotspots, and a “Sea Duty Readiness Council” tasked with identifying more ways to improve life afloat.⁶ These are all exciting and appreciated, but the WiFi piece has missed the mark. The other enticements do not help those who really just want to Skype with their kids on Christmas.

A Value Proposition

Everyone has a price. A big enough bonus can lure almost anyone back to sea, although perhaps for the wrong reasons. A smarter approach, one that honors and respects cuttermen, is to lower the personal cost of going to sea. In The Psychology of Wealth, Charles Richards says, “Cost is what you pay, value is what you get.” Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden, “The cost of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” These guys are onto something.

If cuttermen believe the value of going to sea outweighs the personal cost, they will be more willing to go. Personal internet access offers a big value proposition to that end. It could arguably be worth ten times its direct cost through savings from bonus incentives alone. Timewise, the Coast Guard could provide fleet-wide personal access before the first cohort of $40,000 bonus recipients even complete their tours. It would be challenging, but the Coast Guard can do it.

In the beginning of Moby Dick, Ishmael says going to sea is “my replacement for pistol and ball.” This may be extreme, but today, with a generation of young sailors for whom internet access is part and parcel of their lives, the Coast Guard must leave behind a mind- set that frames sea duty as atonement or total retreat from the world. COVID-19, among its miseries, put into sharp relief the gaps in our interconnected lives, but the internet helped fill those gaps and allowed us to continue to function as people and as a society. Likewise, if we want to maintain the chain of cuttermen from one generation to the next, we need to ensure the chain is not fouled on an issue like poor internet.

Compared to other goals like designing a better shoreside support system for when cutters are in port, internet should be an easy and fast win. For the Coast Guard to remain the world’s premier seagoing service, it needs to recognize and embrace the holistic needs of its service members. Personal internet access while underway is a priority for Coast Guards- men now and will be even more so in the future. To win the war for talent, the service must meet this need quickly and decisively. It’s time.

When the Polar Star left Dutch Harbor and continued rumbling through the Arctic ice pack, the sad, feeble Plum Kit went back on the shelf, useless away from the cell towers that gave it purpose. Some were lucky enough to eek out one or two bars of cell service at the pier and reconnect, but the rest had to wait until the next port call in Juneau, 72 days into the patrol.