There’s a Better Way to Organize the Coast Guard

The U.S. Coast Guard command-and-control (C2) structure last experienced a meaningful update in 1939.¹ Eighty-five years of societal, geopolitical, climate, economic, and technological changes necessitate an overhaul. Some of the most urgent developments include mounting pressure at the Southern Border, the opening of Arctic Sea routes, the Chinese government’s overreach, and the increasing severity of natural disasters. The Coast Guard must restructure itself to address those challenges. This will ensure continued U.S. prosperity and security—and take advantage of technologies that reduce or eliminate the need for redundant C2 structures. 

History of the District

The Coast Guard has used a district model since 1838, when Congress established the six districts of the Lighthouse Service.² Decades later, the Life-Saving Service was created, using 12 districts to organize its 183 stations.³ In 1915, the newly formed Coast Guard adopted the district model handed down from the Life-Saving Service. As the United States prepared for war in Europe, antiquated divisions were replaced with new boundaries that mirrored 1939 naval districts.⁴ Some districts have been combined, but the structure remains remarkably similar today. The last significant change occurred in 1996 when District 2 was absorbed into District 8.⁵ The nine current districts are:  

1st (Boston, Massachusetts)

5th (Portsmouth, Virginia)

7th (Miami, Florida)

8th (New Orleans, Louisiana)

9th (Cleveland, Ohio)

11th (Alameda, California)

13th (Seattle, Washington)

14th (Honolulu, Hawaii)

17th (Juneau, Alaska)

Balancing Oversight with Mission Performance

The service’s 1940s-era C2 system is not faulty because of its age or bureaucracy. A strong bureaucracy is necessary to coordinate consistent service across disparate responsibilities. With 95,000 miles of coastline, 3.4 million square nautical miles of oceans, and 361 ports to oversee, the Coast Guard must delineate how its resources and authorities are distributed to field units. However, managing operations across Coast Guard areas of responsibility has changed. In the world before fax machines, the internet, smartphones, and email, the Coast Guard needed layers of bureaucracy to bolster consistency and oversight. Today, fax machines are being sent to the new Coast Guard Museum, and online tools allow operational planners to track the location of cutters and small boats. These tools provide the chain of command with summaries of every small-boat sortie and vessel boarding. Station, sector, district, and area staffs can monitor an operation’s crew composition, risk analysis, on-scene weather, operations conducted, and final disposition. These tools, and others listed below, have significantly increased oversight of coastal (within 50 miles of shore) operations. That oversight has led to:  

• Increased standardization and operational capabilities of small boats and cutters, such as the response boat-medium and fast response cutter.

• Professionalization of federal responses to major oil spills using the Incident Command System.

• Technology that tracks missions and conditions (i.e., integrated weather reports, Automatic Identification System, Marine Information for Safety and Law Enforcement, Rescue 21, and GPS).

• Headquarters (HQ), area, district, and sector’s ability to view the status of all small boat, aircraft, and cutter readiness, as well as personnel training, medical readiness, evaluations, and career history.  

While the district model has remained relatively constant for the past century, there have been significant changes at the top and bottom of the service. The two most substantial of those changes stem from the 2002 Homeland Security Act. First, in 2003, the Coast Guard moved from the Department of Transportation to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Moving cabinet departments was an enormous change, but it did not fundamentally alter how internal C2 was exercised below the headquarters level. Second, there were changes toward the bottom of the organization—namely, the creation of 37 sectors. Sector modernization combined response units (groups) and prevention units (marine safety offices) under one command. In his 2006 statement to Congress, then–Commandant of the Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen summarized the change: “The new Sector organizational construct represents a transformation from a Coast Guard traditionally organized around its operational programs to one organized around core operational service delivery processes.”⁶ The creation and maturation of sectors has upgraded the nation’s capability in the coastal region. 

Today, a Coast Guard captain (O-6) leads each sector, and many larger sectors, such as San Francisco, have two captains and four commanders.⁷ With senior leaders as sector commanding officers, experienced response and prevention department heads, and increased oversight by district, area, and headquarters, coastal operations have surplus oversight. A sector, district, and area C2 model creates redundant supervision for coastal operations. These redundant resources can be reallocated to address the burgeoning national priorities in the Arctic, at the Southern Border, and in the Indo-Pacific, as well as  by improving capacity to respond to environmental crises and natural disasters. 

Update C2 to Better Serve U.S. Interests 

The value of district commands has waned for two key reasons. First, increasingly senior and experienced oversight is being provided by sectors. Second, technology now enables real-time situational awareness and communications for area staffs. The intermediary role that districts once filled is being squeezed from both sides. It is not that districts do not provide value—they do. However, in a lean service already down nearly 10 percent of its workforce, force allocation must be recentered around national priorities.⁷ 

In addition to overlapping and redundant responsibilities in the middle of the organization (sector, district, area), the current structure overtaxes the ability of area commanders to manage disparate critical national priorities. For example, the Pacific Area commander oversees the Arctic, the Southern Border, and the South China Sea. These geographic areas of national importance would benefit from having dedicated three-star commands that could focus on each area more intently. 

Proposed Three-Star Commands 

This proposal would merge current area and district staffs into five commands that manage operations below Headquarters and above cutters, air stations, and sectors. These new commands would be larger than current districts but smaller than areas. Operational resources—sectors, deployable specialized forces, air stations, and major cutters—would be reorganized to align with geographic areas of national importance instead of arbitrary regional districts. Sectors, air stations, and cutters would report directly to one of four geographic commands. This change would be relatively transparent to those individual units, and they would continue to conduct search and rescue, pollution response, maritime safety operations, and other missions. The difference is that there would be just one—not two—organizational levels between their units and Coast Guard HQ. Finally, a functional command would oversee the surge forces who support the four geographic commands. 

• Pacific Command

• High Latitude Command

• Southern Border Command

• Atlantic Command

• Littoral Surge Command

This proposal would enable these three-star commands to focus on operations, bilateral relationships, capital asset management, force generation, training and readiness, and strategic planning. Area commands would continue to oversee coastal operations within their geographic areas of responsibility. Further, specific sectors might be upgraded to one-star commands as required by responsibility and geopolitics (Los Angeles, New York, or Seattle, for example). 

Pacific Command

The Coast Guard has long been an instrument of international power. During World War II, more than a quarter million men and women served in a Coast Guard uniform, with up to 176,000 serving at one time.⁸ The Coast Guard is well positioned to conduct gray zone operations, which go beyond diplomatic options but fall short of kinetic military hostilities, in the South China Sea and across Asia.⁹ China uses its coast guard in gray zone operations, as well as “non-military assets to perform military functions.”¹⁰ The Indo-Pacific Strategy of the United States identifies an expanded role for the Coast Guard to ensure a region that is free and open, and the Coast Guard will continue its long history of operational presence in the region with additional cutter patrols and deployable specialized forces.¹¹

In this proposed model, the current Pacific Area would remain a three-star command that reports to Coast Guard HQ. District 17 and the southern part of District 11 would be removed from the current Pacific Area command to create the High Latitude Command and Southern Border Command, respectively. This change would remove the Arctic and southern border missions from Pacific Area command—parsing the Arctic, Southern Border, and Asia-Pacific into separate commands. 

High Latitude Command

The U.S. Coast Guard and Navy cannot easily or consistently operate along the nation’s northern maritime border in Alaska. Consequently, U.S. interests in the area cannot consistently be secured. Unfortunately, Russia takes its northern maritime border seriously and makes overreaching territorial claims that threaten global maritime norms. A dedicated command would deliver an intellectual and operational center of gravity for high-latitude operations. It would wield adequate influence to advocate for resources and engage with Department of Defense (DoD) counterparts. A story from former Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Paul Zukunft is telling: 

“The National Security Council approached me and said, ‘Hey, we ought to send the Polar Star through the Northern Sea Route and do a freedom of navigation exercise.’ I said, ‘Au contraire, it’s a 40-year-old ship. We’re cannibalizing parts off its sister ship just to keep this thing running, and I can’t guarantee you that it won’t have a catastrophic engineering casualty as it’s doing a freedom-of-navigation exercise, and now I’ve got to call on Russia to pull me out of harm’s way. So, this is not the time to do it.’”¹²

The Coast Guard can and should lead in the Arctic. However, the current two-star admiral District 17 commander in Alaska competes with three other districts for resources and attention. Instead, District 17 should be upgraded to a three-star command reporting directly to Coast Guard HQ. 

Southern Border Command 

Transit zone and southern border operations are currently split between Districts 11, 8, and 7. Combining the southern portions of those three districts would bring border operations under one command, consolidate leaders and operators who work on border issues, ease coordination with DHS counterparts, and achieve economies of scale. A three-star admiral reporting directly to HQ would lead this new Coast Guard Southern Border Command. 

Atlantic Command 

This geographic command would merge the districts from the current Atlantic Area that are not on the Southern Border or in the Arctic. In this new model, the current Atlantic Area would remain a three-star command, reporting directly to HQ and continue to oversee all Coast Guard assets in the mid-Atlantic and deployed to West Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. 

Littoral Surge Command

This functional command would combine the deployable specialized forces (DSF) under one three-star command that reports directly to Coast Guard HQ. Instead of having a geographic area of responsibility, it would ensure the readiness of a broadly defined DSF: maritime security response teams, maritime safety and security teams, national strike teams, deployable incident command system teams, and cyber operators. DSF units would provide the four geographic commands with surge capacity and special capabilities in response to mission needs. This would include, for example, providing extra security forces during the U.N. General Assembly in New York City, additional search-and-rescue and response forces after a hurricane hit, or clean-up units to respond to a major oil spill. Such situations could require organized responders to augment overwhelmed local units.

Challenges and Risks 

If change were easy, the Coast Guard would not have an 80-year-old C2 structure. Change is difficult and involves risk. Remember that it took a world war to bring about the current district model, and the events of 9/11 to precipitate the creation of DHS. The changes advocated here should be completed before a crisis necessitates them, but they may need to be triggered by a major event that unites national leaders to solve an existential problem. An oft-quoted Machiavellian maxim was explained by former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel: “You never want a crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” The Coast Guard must prepare for the next crisis, which could take the form of a China-Taiwan conflict, expanded war in the Middle East, or Russia denying access to international traffic in the Arctic. Whatever the crisis, the Coast Guard must have a plan ready to modernize its C2 structure.  

Several factors could preclude this change without a nationally unifying event. For example: 

• Executive Hurdles. The DHS Secretary has executive oversight of the Coast Guard. The situation at the border for the past two administrations has created a challenging relationship between the White House and Congress. Difficult Senate confirmations, threats of impeachment, and intense oversight keep the Secretary (or Acting Secretary) from having the space to explore organizational changes within the department. 

• Congressional Hurdles. Congressional leaders who would lose resources or influence in their districts will be more vocal than those who stand to gain. Imagine the response from Seattle’s elected leaders if District 17 (Juneau) and District 13 (Seattle) combined to form a High Latitude Command in Juneau. Further, combining areas and districts would require three more three-star admiral positions—and that change would require Congressional support. 

• Internal Hurdles. Many Coast Guard power brokers—active and retired admirals or command master chiefs—have served or aspire to serve at a district. Altering this system would create risk in the short term and reduce the number of two-star commands. For these reasons and others, achieving internal support for a structural change could be difficult. 

The bureaucratic incentive structure works to preserve the status quo, and ideas that critique it are often unwelcome. These ideas are put forward with the hope of starting a conversation that wiser and more experienced service leaders will join. 

To serve the American people and national interests more effectively in the decades to come, the Coast Guard must consider ways to update its organizational structure. Since the service adopted its district C2 model, this nation has created the entire Air Force—and then a Space Force. If the Department of Defense can adapt to new challenges and opportunities, then so can the Coast Guard. Eliminating a redundant layer of command and reorganizing service C2 around geographic areas of national interest would build a structure that ensures the service can meet the nation’s challenges for decades to come.