Adapt or die is a powerful mantra often echoed in philosophy, leadership, and management—and the Sea Services. Today’s Coast Guard must balance the wisdom and traditions of the past while seeking change and direction from tomorrow’s leaders. Workforce shortages, retention rates, and outdated missions present ongoing challenges. However, the service is already well positioned to address these challenges by embracing new technology, reexamining its missions, and reallocating portions of the workforce to pave the way for tomorrow’s Coast Guard.
Implement Technology
The tech industry has adopted a “move fast and break things” philosophy when it comes to staying on the cutting edge. The Coast Guard should consider a similar—albeit more deliberate—approach. While caution is essential when lives are on the line, it is important to be daring and embrace new ideas. For instance, while serving at a very busy search-and-rescue (SAR) unit in California, I encountered numerous instances in which new technology could have greatly assisted the mission and mitigated fatigue and exposure for the crews. Drones could be used to spot persons in the water, locate vessels in distress when an approximate but not exact location is known, locate debris fields and/or pollution, and monitor situations to determine if reports of persons in distress require the launch of a small boat to assist.
This is not an unprecedented idea; the Coast Guard Academy is exploring similar concepts, and civilian SAR operations have been using unmanned systems on land for some time.1 However, the amount of red tape made their use too difficult to experiment with during my time on the station.
I was recently stationed on board a national security cutter, which often undergoes three-to-five-month deployments in remote areas of the globe. Unfortunately, the Coast Guard struggles with maintaining connectivity for its crews at sea.2 Further, the ports that cutters pull into are generally secluded and lack connectivity, compounding the problem. Numerous active-duty shipmates identified this as a hardship for them and their families. Connectivity is a necessity, not a luxury—especially as the Coast Guard moves to cloud-based computing systems. As Coast Guard Lieutenant (junior grade) Jake Skimmons wrote in a 2022 Proceedings article, “Senior Coast Guard leaders should not dismiss this as an unsolvable problem . . . if passengers on a commercial airplane can have this, certainly crew members on cutters supported by military technology can as well.”3 The Coast Guard should take a serious look at how technology can be used to both make jobs more efficient and recalibrate the work-life balance for service members at sea.
Think Critically and Reexamine Missions
I took part in hundreds of SAR cases during my time at the small boat station, where we often relied on other government agencies to assist. Operating with different launch parameters and staffing requirements, the other agencies frequently beat the Coast Guard to the scene. Further, their access to different equipment, such as jet skis and jet boats, meant they could enter areas the Coast Guard could not. This was evident with surfers and kite surfers in distress, where city lifeguards and firefighters could launch jet skis for a fast rescue the Coast Guard could not reach because of the distance from the shoal water or area of the surf zone in relation to the victim.
In the interest of saving lives and reducing mission fatigue for its service members, the Coast Guard should work to strengthen coordination with other agencies and consider shifting some missions to them as well. At the local level, the Coast Guard should shift certain local SAR duties to be fulfilled by other qualified agencies through formal SAR agreements.
On a larger scale, the service should examine how other government agencies might better accomplish or aid in certain missions. For example, shifting the federal aids to navigation mission to the Army Corps of Engineers or using civilian experts who are not moving every four years and already qualified to operate specialized equipment could increase mission effectiveness and efficiency without the Coast Guard having to consistently train and certify new personnel.
As a seagoing service, the Coast Guard should reevaluate each mission to determine if it would be better served by having local lifeguards, firefighters, or harbor patrol potentially step in. A thorough examination of the current missions and the establishment of formal partnership agreements could free the Coast Guard from some obligated staffing and mission requirements, allowing a greater focus on core missions.
Reallocate Human Resources
The Coast Guard should examine whether certain active-duty billets could be better filled by civilian staff (or reservists), freeing service members to return to an operational status for currently understaffed roles. Training centers are a fine example of a nonoperational unit with multiple, well-qualified operational active-duty candidates. In addition, there are numerous facilities at which active-duty personnel fulfill nonoperational billets.
Of course, care would have to be taken to maintain shore billets to sustain a decent sea-shore rotation. Further, there are certain billets in which a civilian could not replace an active-duty position, but this is not the case across the board. Similar work could be done to streamline the process to activate reservists who want to become operational or to use the Coast Guard Auxiliary more fully.
Looking Forward
The Coast Guard is currently facing significant personnel shortages, but its problems are solvable. Reexamining assumptions about its missions and fully using the talents of its capable members would help the service work more efficiently and maintain a state of Semper Paratus for the Coast Guard of tomorrow.
1. CADET 1/C Robert DeLillo, USCG, “The Coast Guard Must Use Unmanned Aerial Systems and AI in Search and Rescue,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 149, no. 7 (July 2023); and C. Van Tilburg, “First Report of Using Portable Unmanned Aircraft Systems (Drones) for Search and Rescue,” Wilderness and Environmental Medicine 28, no. 2 (March 2017).
2. LTJG Jake Simmons, USCG, “Personal Internet Can Keep Officers Afloat,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 148, no. 6 (June 2022).
3. Simmons, “Personal Internet Can Keep Officers Afloat.”
