Rescue Warriors

by David Helvarg

  This is the somewhat Orwellian concept of a close to real-time observation system of the global maritime domain and anything happening on or in the sea that could impact U.S. safety or security, the economy, or the environment. It includes layered defense, and a simple example of its implementation was when Thad Allen, as Atlantic Commander, was able to divert Coast Guard cutters at sea into U.S. ports within twenty-four hours of the September 11, 2001, attacks, cinching a security belt tight around the continental homeland.

  “In looking at 9/11 you can see it worked. Another plan was to create a single command [structure for the Coast Guard],” he says, “but you had to put M&O [Maritime Safety and Operations] into one organization and people said it was ‘too hard’ and we didn’t trust ourselves enough [until he did it].

  “In the summer of 2002 I came in as chief of staff, and in 2003 we did the Long View again, only we called it the Evergreen Project. The payoff was, the Evergreen [plan] became the [2005 federal] National Maritime Strategy. So I propose we do this every four years, during the first year of each commandant’s tenure. My chief of staff is starting the next set of scenarios, so we’re institutionalizing this, institutionalizing change with Evergreen [which to me sounds more like Everblue].”

  Perhaps the most agreeable part of Thad Allen’s Coast Guard, at least from a journalist’s perspective, is his focus on transparency and diversity. He has a unique way of taking what many would see as democratic or moral imperatives and giving them a steely sheen of operational necessity, arguing, for example, that transparency is essential to both “self-correcting behavior” within the service and building trust with its outside partners.

  When asked why diversity is a necessity, he points to the Coast Guard’s need for more Spanish speakers for migrant interdiction but also to a wider operational need to reflect the makeup of the public it works with every day. “What makes us different from the other services is we deploy where we work and live. We’re the ultimate in community-based policing.”

  We land back at National Airport and he gives me a military coin on his way out, the armed services’ version of a baseball trading card.

  Second in Command

  I don’t know if Vice Commandant Vivien Crea will be the next admiral to head the U.S. Coast Guard, but it would make sense. Like Thad Allen she’s whip smart, but she also has a more collaborative style of leadership that will be needed if the service is to institutionalize the dramatic changes he began. Plus, as the first woman to head one of the U.S. armed services, she would command the kind of public attention (and hopefully respect) that is needed if the organization’s leadership wants to cultivate the internal and external constituencies needed to expand the Coast Guard.

  Whether in her headquarters office overlooking the Anacostia River in DC, decorated with photographs of aircraft she’s piloted and paintings from the Coast Guard Art Program, talking to a stream of officers, contractors, and officials at a National Press Club event, or meeting her people aboard the Bertholf, Vivien Crea radiates a kind of self-assured confidence that makes her seem both formidable and approachable. She has an impressive ability to grasp and retain detail and draw the best out of those around her, while also maintaining a navigator’s sense of focus except when it comes to tracking her reading glasses. About five-nine with sharp gray eyes and today’s reading glasses pushed high onto her feathery helmet of gray-brown hair, she recounts how she came to be where she is.

  “As an Army brat fresh out of college, I was interested in environmental protection and looked into NOAA and the EPA before deciding on the Coast Guard. I joined the second class of women to go through Officer Candidate School [winning her commission in 1973]. It was a lot of fun with a couple of barriers. They didn’t know what to do with us. We couldn’t [were not allowed to] go on cutters or to flight school if it meant landing on cutters, so I went to headquarters,” she recalls.

  Eventually she did become a pilot, the Coast Guard’s first female aircraft commander, flying C-130 Hercules, a Gulfstream 11 executive jet, and HH-65 Dolphin helicopters. She was also the first woman to command an air station.

  “Because Officer Candidate School was a few years ahead of the academy [in accepting women] and they had four years more [schooling] till they got into the fleet, we had a six- or seven-year jump on them, so the female flag officers [admirals] we have now are all OCS,” she explains.

  Until her husband retired from the Coast Guard with the rank of captain a few years ago, she also worked to balance her schedule with his so that they might find a few days a month of common ground while pursuing their careers protecting America’s waters.

  In addition to her other duties, Crea is the Department of Homeland Security’s principal federal official in charge of government response in case of a pandemic influenza outbreak.

  “We have to be adaptive,” she explains. “The only certainty of the ocean is it’s very unpredictable, so that encourages flexible on-scene initiative [within the Coast Guard]. We train with common terminology, equipment, and processes. We do a few things that are fundamental: trust each other, have that common training, a bias for action, on-scene initiative, core values, and stewardship of the public trust.

  “The bigger you get, the harder it is to keep these things integrated. So there’s an advantage to being lean and hungry.”

  “Even though they keep giving you new jobs to do?”

  “Our common definition of what we do is, we do everything wet . . . It’s serious business,” she adds as I grin, glancing at an oil-stained life ring on the wall.

  Later, looking around her office, I see that the old oil-stained ring is from the Blackthorn, a Coast Guard buoy tender that collided with a tanker in Tampa Bay on January 28, 1980. Twenty-three of its crew were lost that night.

  She’s quick to admit that presently more is required of the Coast Guard than it can deliver on a sustained basis. “We don’t have enough bench strength,” she says. “We’re this thick [holding two of her fingers a fraction of an inch apart], but we go in first!”

  That’s how I’ve come to see the Coast Guard, as a maritime multimission version of the U.S. Marines who “go in first,” only with one-fifth the people and one-tenth the equipment.

  Fortunately the Coast Guard has created a force multiplier in its commitment to on-scene initiative and the trust it places in its enlisted ranks to make command decisions and run many of its operating assets like surf stations, swimmer shops, patrol boats, and river tenders.

  Chief Ross Fowle, the CO of the harbor tug Line in New York, served three years in the Army before joining the Coast Guard.

  “As an E-4, I’d have to ask four people and get signatures to take a Humvee out to pick up a FedEx box. In the Coast Guard as an enlisted E-4, I would take out a 47 [-foot surfboat] without calling anyone. There’s that much difference in bureaucracy, or at least in trust.”

  “The enlisted in the Coast Guard are a lot more empowered than in other services,” agrees Senior Chief Lewis Hart, an ex-Marine turned Coastie who helps oversee the Rescue Swimmer School in Elizabeth City. “In the Marines, you don’t move till you’re told to. Here they expect you to figure it out—and go get it done. Lots of prior-service guys will first wait for an order and then realize it’s not coming. They [the Coast Guard leadership] expect you to be a self-starter. They have faith in their people. What’s so cool is we have this latitude to initiate commonsense action, and if what you do is based on good order and discipline, no one flips out when you do it.”

  While the Coast Guard is officially keen on how FEMA, Customs Enforcement, and other Department of Homeland Security agencies can now share their burden, history and experience suggest it will still be Coasties doing most of the grunt work the next time a major disaster confronts the nation along our ninety-five thousand miles of coastline, on our Great Lakes and rivers, or on our vast ocean frontier.

  At present the Coast Guard’s $9 billion annual operating budget is equal to what three wee
ks of U.S. military operations in Iraq cost during 2008.

  “So our problem is capacity,” says Commandant Allen. “We have authorities. We have capabilities. We have competencies. The issue is capacity.”

  Rep. Elijah Cummings has been told that the Coast Guard has the ability to grow by around ten thousand over the next seven years. However, given the rate of change in the maritime environment in terms of offshore activity, climate disruption, coastal sprawl, piracy, terrorism, and the collapse of living resources, it may actually need to double in the coming decade and double again in the following to make this smallest of armed services closer in size to the U.S. Marine Corps than to the New York City Police Department.

  “It would take a radical recalibration of Coast Guard leadership to deal with the level of growth that may be required,” says Scott Borgerson, the former director of the Coast Guard Academy’s Institute of Leadership. “There are many admirable qualities in the Coast Guard, but without question there’s also a junior varsity attitude where they’re not ready to go to this next level,” he claims.

  Ready or not, as we all learned on 9/11, after the invasion of Iraq, and again with Hurricane Katrina, history tends to force the issues.

  While politicians, like sharks, tend to be hardwired to a few simple stimuli, in their case money and votes, Deepwater taught the Coast Guard that Rescue Warriors are not genetically predisposed to run with big-money contractors and lobbyists if it means cutting corners. What the Coast Guard needs more than anything else is a political constituency of engaged citizens willing to demand that America’s forgotten armed service get the resources necessary to fulfill its missions.

  Certainly the Coast Guard’s fifty thousand active-duty and reserve members as well as their families, civilian employees, and twenty-eight-thousand-strong volunteer auxiliary need to keep building a base of support in the areas where they operate, not only on our coasts but on the Great Lakes and along the inland rivers of America.

  Conversely, the public needs to be fully informed about what’s happening to their Coast Guard, including the degree to which its work has reoriented since 9/11. Today the thirteen Maritime Safety and Security Teams each spend about $1.5 million a year for their port security operations, about the same amount as the twelve High Endurance Cutters spend to carry out their offshore missions.

  Few among the public are aware of the Coast Guard’s Airborne Use of Force doctrine or know that Coast Guard helicopters are armed with machine guns and sniper rifles.

  The Coast Guard has long bragged that unlike other armed services in times of peace (which some of us can recall), the Coast Guard is operational every day of the year and not just training for the next war. Now, though, hundreds of members of the Maritime Security Response Team do nothing but train for a potential armed confrontation with terrorists and their superiors are looking to establish at least four more teams across the nation.

  The widespread reaction to live weapons training on the Great Lakes in 2006 reflected the public’s ambiguity about the Coast Guard’s changed role in the Department of Homeland Security. They want the security missions to keep them safe from terrorists, criminals, and nut jobs, but they also want assurance that traditional Coast Guard missions like search and rescue, marine safety, and environmental stewardship are not being neglected.

  Also, while the Coast Guard’s leadership is delighted at having gone from being a victim of benign neglect in the Department of Transportation to a big fish in the murky pond of DHS, that doesn’t necessarily mean this is where they can best serve the public interest as a multimission maritime agency.

  The Department of the Ocean?

  “They need to get out of DHS. I voted for it [establishing the Department of Homeland Security] after 9/11, but they are always a stepchild. I would at a minimum put them back under the secretary of transportation or maybe create a secretary of the Coast Guard,” Rep. Gene Taylor, the Coast Guard veteran from Mississippi, tells me. “When the Deepwater program was having all those problems, who in DHS stepped forward to assume responsibility?” he asks. “We only heard from Admiral Allen. As far as [then Secretary of Homeland Security] Michael Chertoff is concerned, it was not that important. No one staked their reputation or career on this. If you don’t want that responsibility or are not willing to step up, maybe give it to someone who does think it’s important.”

  T

  he United States is and always has been an oceanic society. It owes much of its wealth, bounty, and heritage to the sea around us. The ocean provides us with the oxygen we breathe, is a driver of climate and weather, brings rain to our farmers and food to our tables. It offers us recreation, transportation, protein, medicine, energy, security, and a sense of awe and wonder from sea to shining sea.

  Forty years ago, in 1969, the Stratton Commission, a White House– appointed blue ribbon panel on oceans, published a report titled Our Nation and the Sea, which helped spawn major policy reforms, including the Coastal Zone Management Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Marine Sanctuary Act, and the Clean Water Act. However, its key recommendation, the creation of an independent U.S. ocean agency built around the Coast Guard, never came to pass.

  Part of the reason was timing. President Lyndon Johnson had just created the Department of Transportation and had transferred the Coast Guard from the Treasury Department to DOT to give it more heft. As a result, instead of assigning oversight of our oceans to the “Guardians of the Sea,” the next President, Richard Nixon, went on to create the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration out of the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, the Weather Bureau, and some other marine offices before sinking it in the trade-driven Department of Commerce, then run by his campaign fund-raiser and future Watergate bagman Maurice Stans.

  It would be another generation before new commissions were established to look at the state of America’s coasts and oceans. Much had changed in the interim.

  Although the Census Bureau declared the western frontier closed in 1890, on March 10, 1983, President Ronald Reagan, in one of the most significant and least-noted acts of his administration, established the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone that extends two hundred miles out to sea from America’s shore, in effect creating a vast new blue frontier six times the size of the Louisiana Purchase. At 3.4 million square nautical miles, our EEZ is 30 percent larger than the continental land base of the United States. It is a wilder, more challenging frontier than any known to past generations of Americans, one that is also part of a larger global ocean that constitutes 71 percent of our planet’s surface area and over 95 percent of its living habitat. This is the territory on which the U.S. Coast Guard operates every day.

  In 2000, with a majority of Americans living in our coastal zones, 97 percent of our trade coming through our ports, hurricane damage taking a precipitous upswing, and coastal habitats, water quality, and wildlife in steep decline, two new ocean panels were created. The eighteen-member Pew Oceans Commission was established by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which had grown tired of waiting for Congress to take action on the oceans. Pew’s action inspired a congressional reaction, and within months a sixteen-member U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy had been named by President George W. Bush.

  The Pew Commission was made up of scientists, fishermen, environmentalists, and elected officials including the governor of New York and had as its primary focus America’s living marine resources. Its chair, Leon Panetta, was a former congressman, lifelong Democrat, and chief of staff in the Clinton White House.

  The U.S. Commission included representatives from the offshore oil industry, ports, Navy admirals, academics, and Titanic explorer Bob Ballard and had a broader mandate to look at all aspects of the sea including commerce and defense. Its chair, Adm. Jim Watkins, was a former chief of naval operations, a lifelong Republican and secretary of energy under the first President Bush.

  After several years of public hearings around the country, they put out reports in 2003 and 2004. Given their very dif
ferent makeups, their findings were remarkably similar. Both commissions concluded that the physical and ecological degradation of America’s coasts and oceans had reached a critical stage that now threatened the nation’s economy, security, and environment. They proposed a range of solutions aimed at boosting our ability to maintain our ocean-dependent economy while restoring healthy and abundant seas and preventing natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina from turning into human catastrophes as a result of bad policy choices.

  Inside the Pew Commission, retired Coast Guard Adm. Roger Rufe, who headed the Ocean Conservancy, lobbied hard for the old Stratton Commission proposal that a new ocean agency be created, this time with the Coast Guard and NOAA at its heart. While Leon Panetta worried this would be a hard sell in Washington, they eventually agreed to move forward on the idea.

  Then, thirty-five years after the Coast Guard got shunted off to the Department of Transportation, the post–9/11 Bush administration, for political reasons, established the Department of Homeland Security and made the Coast Guard a part of it.

  The Pew Commission went ahead and proposed “an independent agency outside the Department of Commerce to address the national interest in the oceans and atmosphere,” presumably now to be made up of a reinvigorated NOAA.

  Before his retirement Senator Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, a longtime ocean champion on the Hill, called members of the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy “sissies” for not making a similar recommendation for an independent Department of the Oceans.

  U.S. Commission members told me they did not believe an independent agency was “politically feasible” at the time, especially after Congress had just done a major government reorganization with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.