Rescue Warriors

by David Helvarg

  Strong personalities also compete to leave their imprint on the institution. A recent example is the competing visions of Commandants Jim Loy (1998– 2002) and Thad Allen (2006–2010) with Admiral Thomas Collins serving in between.

  Jim Loy, who was at the helm on 9/11, was a staunch defender of the organization during a time of shrinking budgets, the initiator of Deepwater fleet expansion, and the first commandant to go on to greater recognition as head of the Transportation Security Administration and number two at the Department of Homeland Security before becoming a lobbyist.

  Thad Allen, by contrast, won his fame while still Admiral Collins’s chief of staff cleaning up other people’s messes as head of federal response after Hurricane Katrina.

  When he became the boss, Admiral Allen issued ten Commandant Intent Action Orders (or CIAOs, pronounced “chows”). Taken as a whole they represent his attempt at a radical transformation of the Coast Guard as it enters its third century.

  In lieu of the Atlantic and Pacific area commands, he initiated the transition to a single operational command and numbered headquarters staff system like the Pentagon’s. This consolidation is supposed to reflect the global nature of the maritime domain the Coast Guard now works in while also marking an end to the historic M&O (Marine Safety and Operations) division of the service, though lack of funding and training for marine safety still hobbles many of its missions.

  Admiral Allen also created a single Acquisitions Directorate to oversee fleet and asset growth so that the service never needs to “outsource” its future to private contractors again, as occurred under Deepwater.

  He also created the Deployable Operations Group (DOG) as part of his newly perceived triad of Coast Guard assets: cutter forces, shore forces, and deployable forces.

  Another of his CIAOs adopts the integrated logistics model pioneered by the aviation wing of the Coast Guard and takes it servicewide so that everything from clothing to National Security Cutters will now have standardized lines of supply and life cycles.

  His directives also encourage greater “interoperability” between the Coast Guard, the Department of Homeland Security, and other marine stakeholders.

  Finally, Admiral Allen got the service to commit to regular scenario planning to prepare for future maritime challenges, be they intentional (terrorism), industrial (accidents), or environmental (disasters).

  As a result of this kind of outside-the-hull thinking, U.S. News and World Report named Thad Allen one of “America’s 20 Best Leaders.”

  On the Road

  We meet at 5:00 A.M. in FAA Hangar 6 at Reagan National Airport. There’s Allen’s assistant Mike “Batch” Batchelder, a strapping, shaven-headed thirty-something engineer. There’s Adm. Dave Pekoske, assistant commandant for operations, who’ll use the plane ride as a chance to debrief the boss; there’s his public affairs guy, Cdr. Brendan McPherson, and the low-key, gray-haired Paul Dahl, one of his CGIS security detail. Some large local Coasties and his aircraft’s four-man crew complete the posse.

  Out on the tarmac sits one of the Dolphin helicopters used for the Capitol air defense mission, a flying billboard to warn off potentially hostile aircraft, as well as the service’s Gulfstream jet and the Citation 604 we’ll be riding in.

  I pass my bag to a crewman and climb aboard the executive jet. Inside, the fog of air-conditioning vapor venting at floor level reminds me of disco smoke as I check out the passenger compartment’s dozen posh leather seats, shiny reflective wood finish, and mirrored rear wall.

  “The Boss,” Admiral Allen, climbs aboard. He’s just over six feet and 235 pounds, a stocky hard charger with a gruff foghorn baritone that he’s now using to effect, complaining to his press aide, Brendan, about a Minneapolis newspaper headline that reads “Coast Guard May Scrap Two Cutters.” It was a follow-up story on congressional testimony he’d given the day before, in which he’d told a congressman that not in the farthest reaches of his mind could he see such a thing happening.

  Brendan points out that the story was accurate, just not the headline.

  We take off fast and smooth. This is a two-day trip. The commandant is on the road at least two days a week. Yesterday was a typical stay-at-home day during which he rode his bike fifteen miles into work with a couple of CGIS agents, had a staff brief on operations at 8:00 A.M., then testified at that congressional hearing of the Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Subcommittee at 11:00. In the afternoon he had a White House meeting with the secretary of homeland security and more staff briefings back at the office.

  On his return, he’ll be preparing for a trip to St. Petersburg, Russia, for a meeting of the North Pacific Coast Guard Forum made up of the coast guards of Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, Canada, and the United States. On my next visit to DC, he’ll be off meeting his counterparts in El Salvador, Ecuador, and Colombia.

  About halfway through the flight, when he’s finished talking with Dave Pekoske, I’m invited to take a chair opposite the admiral, who gives me his biography. Some of the highlights are already known, at least within the service, including the fact that he’s the son of an enlisted chief petty officer and grew up on and around various Coast Guard bases.

  “My dad retired in ’65, and with our moving to Arizona everyone says I’m from there, but I grew up mostly in Alaska, Washington, California. It was natural to consider the Coast Guard Academy [after high school], but the reason I went is I thought I was too small for Division one football and so I was accepted to Annapolis and Cal Berkeley on a ROTC scholarship.”

  “You could have gone to Berkeley in 1967?”

  “Yeah, and seen my program burned down, but I chose the academy because in division three I got to play four years of football.”

  I ask about Objee, the mascot.

  “There was a bear keeper, but I never wrestled with the bear, and it probably wasn’t a good quality of life for the animal. Of course, cadets will do anything.”

  Brendan, who’s been listening in from across the aisle, mentions he saw a YouTube video of a cadet trying to ride a floor buffer.

  After graduating, Allen served on a World War II surplus cutter doing ocean observing and weather station patrols out of Miami. In 1972, he was on the second helicopter to respond to the crash of an L1011 jetliner in the Everglades. It was his first exposure to a catastrophic event and got him thinking about how best to respond.

  He then went to Puerto Rico to run a SAR center, grew a beard, and had a bachelor pad on the beach. “It was a Pirates of the Caribbean scene,” he says, almost cracking a smile.

  He’d wanted to go to Vietnam even though the war was by then winding down. His detailer (a kind of in-service career counselor but with more say) told him there was an opening to run a loran station in Thailand. His CO, Roger Rufe, said there was no such thing as a bad command, so in the fall of 1974, as a lieutenant junior grade, he got his first command. At the time, there were two loran stations in Thailand and two in Vietnam that the Coast Guard had turned over to contractors.

  Within a year of arriving, he had to oversee the evacuation of the loran stations in Vietnam during the 1975 Communist spring offensive while keeping his own running through the fall of Saigon and subsequent Mayaguez incident off the coast of Cambodia. That involved the seizure of a U.S. merchant ship by the Khmer Rouge and a bloody rescue mission by the Marines, who didn’t know the sailors had already been released.

  Allen had been promised an at-sea assignment after his Southeast Asian tour, and when that didn’t come through he considered leaving the service. He was getting ready to marry Pam (now his wife of more than thirty years) and apply for a job with the Drug Enforcement Administration when he got a call from a disgusted detailer telling him he could have the job he wanted as an operations officer on a cutter. After two years at sea he went on to a liaison job with the DEA, where he “learned a lot of interagency stuff.” Although he was still only a lieutenant, his next assignment was as a group commander running four SAR stations in New
Jersey.

  From there he worked his way into command of the Citrus, a buoy tender turned cutter that he ran out of Coos Bay, Oregon, doing fisheries patrols up and down the coast.

  He went on to a series of staff jobs and picked up a master’s in public administration from George Washington University and an SM in Management from the Sloan School at MIT, all the while fighting with his detailers, his own unique strategy for advancing through the ranks.

  In 1995, the Bath Iron Works in Maine was suing the Coast Guard for $60 million, and Todd Shipyards in Seattle, which had earlier filed for Chapter 11, was working on Coast Guard High Endurance Cutters. Allen spent two years renegotiating and stabilizing the contracts. This would put him in good stead later on as commandant to confront the CEOs of Lockheed and Northrop over the Deepwater management fiasco.

  Among his other career assignments, Allen was commander of the ever frenetic District 7 in Miami from 1999 to 2001.

  On 9/11 he was in charge of the Coast Guard Atlantic Area, a command he’s subsequently abolished. He then became chief of staff under Commandant Collins.

  Eight days after Katrina made landfall, he was asked to become deputy primary federal official (DPFO) to FEMA head Mike Brown. He was in Baton Rouge that night and New Orleans the next morning. Three days later, half an hour before a press conference, he was told he’d be relieving Brown as PFO.

  Allen, who based himself off the helicopter assault ship Iwo Jima in New Orleans, is credited with doing an exceptional job pulling various agencies, volunteer groups, and suspicious citizens together to help get posthurricane reconstruction under way. He mostly left his Coast Guard people alone, recognizing they were already doing the right thing.

  While in the Gulf area he was told he was being considered for commandant and ended up writing his proposal for how he’d transform the organization hunched over a laptop in a Baton Rouge hotel room while still working sixteen-hour days on hurricane recovery.

  W

  e land at the old Quonset Point Naval Air Station in Rhode Island, where we’re greeted by three Navy officers and local CGIS agents with a dark blue Chevy Tahoe that Admiral Allen climbs into. Brendan and I join Agent Dan Bradford in a black Ford follow-up vehicle. As we’re driving over the high bridge to Newport, a pickup truck slips between the SUV and us. Dan hits the dash-mounted siren and blue lights, and the guy gets out of the way quick.

  We pull up at the conference center inside the gates of the Naval War College, where the commandant is scheduled to be part of a symposium titled “Toward a New Maritime Strategy.” There’s a state trooper standing by the governor of Rhode Island, and a new bunch of guys with earpieces and suits show up with the chief of naval operations and the commandant of the Marine Corps.

  There are about a thousand people, uniformed and civilian, inside the clamshell-shaped auditorium for the opening panel that includes Allen, Chief of Naval Operations Mike Mullen (soon to be named Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) and Gen. Jim Conway, head of the Marine Corps. Things get going at 8:15 A.M.

  I’m struck by the contrast between Mullen and Conway’s purely military perspective on “maritime strategy,” and that of the Coast Guard commandant’s.

  Mullen uses a lot of military shorthand, talking about his “desire to solve things together,” and says, “Our mission set is expanding. There is the high end threat [let’s say China, which he doesn’t], the terrorist threat, but also disaster assistance and assuring the smooth flow of commerce . . . That’s why the taxpayers give us $115 billion a year.” (That’s fourteen times what the Coast Guard gets.)

  In lieu of a joke, Conway starts with a quote about how “Marines have to make sacrifices, and not the least of these hardships is to serve with sailors,” before going on to tell the audience that “the Marine Corps is unique, being the smallest of the services.” The Coast Guard commandant, seated next to him, maintains a look of blank equanimity. There are 185,000 Marines, 42,000 active-duty Coast Guard.

  Conway talks about how Marines are turning things around in Iraq and also Afghanistan and says these are not wars but the first battles of the Long War on Terror. His worry is that they’re not preparing enough for future amphibious operations. That seems to be his major maritime strategy concern, how ready they are to assault a beach.

  Allen then gives a clear and engaging talk, opening with an Arthur C. Clarke quote saying, in effect, that from space you’d look back and call it Planet Ocean.

  “There are no hard lines on the map like on the land, we have bands, not bright lines . . . We don’t track ocean traffic like we track aircraft for safety, but we may need this capability . . . We [the Coast Guard] are both military and regulatory. We deal with all hazards, all threats, all the time. So it’s a fair question to ask what constitutes adequate maritime security for the home team. Operating under Title 10 and Title 14, we’re bureaucratically multilingual. We can talk to first responders—to police chiefs and firemen—and then turn around and talk with Navy SEALs. We also take a different approach [from the other armed forces], believing that transparency breeds security—we need partnerships based on trust in order to exchange information and feel comfortable contacting and working with each other.”

  Allen cites examples of strategic concerns including the placement of LNG facilities on the U.S. coastline and a small boat conference he’s convened to reduce the risk of improvised small boat explosive devices like the one used against the USS Cole and the one that killed Nate Bruckenthal and two Navy sailors off Iraq. He talks about Arctic policy as melting ice from global warming opens up new shipping lanes and even mentions invasive species in ballast water and how they found cholera in the ballast water of a ship in Mobile, Alabama, “so you can see the implications.”

  “We’re looking at a broader, richer mosaic of safety, security, and stewardship. This stuff marries up perfectly across the three sea services,” he claims.

  My own impression is that while he’s talking about varied asymmetrical threats on the global commons, the audience is thinking counterinsurgency and maybe Iranian submarines.

  After the panel, the three service leaders hold a brief press conference attended mostly by military and defense industry reporters. I ask about changing conditions in the Arctic, and Mullen hands it off to Allen, referring to him as “my icebreaker guy.”

  Somewhere backstage Allen has changed into new ODU (Operational Dress Uniform) work clothes: a blue jacket and bill cap. We climb back into our vehicles and drive to a rundown section of waterfront at the old Navy Yard where three Coast Guard buoy tenders, the Ida Lewis, the Juniper, and the Willow, are berthed.

  Here he gets a briefing on pier repairs from a tall civilian, who explains the pier was built back in 1956. In the next two to three years the buoy tenders won’t be able to stay unless it’s fixed. It will take $16 million to $18 million in funding to renovate it; $10 million has been earmarked.

  “OK got ya.” The Commandant, who’s read the briefing paper, nods impatiently.

  They need to shift the funding to the other side of the pier, though.

  “Got ya.”

  They need to renovate the pier. Senator Jack Reed approved the funding but is open to moving the project a few hundred feet over.

  “Here?”

  “No, the other side. We have ten thousand pilings.”

  “Got ya.”

  “And Senator Reed approved it.”

  “I gotcha, I gotcha.” He knows everything he’s being told, but the man feels compelled to finish his presentation then asks if the admiral has any questions.

  “No, that’s it. Tell Senator Reed I touched Jesus’ wound here,” he says, then walks down the money-hungry pier and up the Willow’s gangway to be with his people.

  He enters the wardroom, where the buoy tender’s CO, Lt. Cdr. Jeff Dow, briefs him on their recent “underway,” a law enforcement cruise in the Florida Straits where they detained a number of migrants and the small boat they put over the side was ramme
d by a smuggler on a Jet-Ski who didn’t want to give up. At one point they had 122 Cubans under a shade canopy on their buoy deck, including four pregnant women and twenty children.

  “Where do you want to go next?” Allen asks the thirty-something CO.

  “I’d like to stay on the Willow,” he replies.

  “Where’s your family? What’s your wife do?”

  “We’re here. She does hairdressing and cosmetics. I think she’d also like to stay in the area.”

  “You’re sucking up to the right people.” The admiral grins, something he rarely does except on deck with the working Coast Guard.

  Months later, in early 2008, Dow would be relieved of command while charges he’d had an “inappropriate relationship” with a subordinate were investigated. Subsequently he was found to have committed conduct unbecoming an officer and gentleman, received a written reprimand, and had some of his pay forfeited.

  The crew holds an All Hands on the buoy deck, forming a rectangle with Allen, Adm. Tim Sullivan from the 1st District, and the hefty, sun-reddened CO making up the fourth side below the Willow’s high white bridge. A 41-foot utility boat and an armed 25-foot RBS are standing by on the outside of the ship across the channel from an old aircraft carrier. Allen gives out awards for their recent three-week operation that “sheltered and processed” 353 Cuban migrants and nine smugglers.

  After the awards he calls the crew closer in and shows them the new ODU he’s wearing, pointing out that it’s untucked at the waist and roomy at the hips. He passes out a swatch of fabric explaining how they can’t just throw out $10 million worth of old uniforms, so initially the new ODU will be optional for purchase, but as the old uniforms wear out they’ll make the switch. He talks about how PPEs—Personal Protective Equipment, meaning sidearms—may go to thigh holsters or even shoulder holsters to deal with the untucked shirt.