| SEAPOWER/COAST
GUARD
The United States
Coast Guard is a military, multimission, maritime service within the Department
of Transportation and one of the nation's five armed services. Its core
roles are to protect the public, the environment, and U.S. economic and
security interests in any maritime region in which those interests may
be at risk, including international waters and America's coasts, ports,
and inland waterways. The Coast Guard provides unique benefits to the
nation because of its distinctive blend of military, humanitarian, and
civilian law-enforcement capabilities.
Beginning with a
military skirmish with France in 1798 and continuing to recent operations
in the Middle East--and including every war in between--the Coast Guard
has helped defend the nation in combat. Today, Team Coast Guard stands
ready with an active-duty force of 35,000 men and women, augmented by
8,000 Coast Guard Reservists, 34,000 volunteers in the Coast Guard Auxiliary,
and a civilian workforce of 5,500.
Strategic Goals
To improve its services
to the public, the Coast Guard has set strategic goals for each of its
five key mission areas. Following are brief summaries of each:
Maritime Safety: Eliminate deaths, injuries, and property damage associated
with maritime transportation, fishing, and recreational boating.
National Defense:
Defend the nation as one of the five U.S. armed services. Enhance regional
stability in support of the National Security Strategy, using the Coast
Guard's unique and relevant maritime capabilities.
Maritime Security:
Protect America's maritime borders from all intrusions by: (a) halting
the flow of illegal drugs, aliens, and contraband into the United States
through maritime routes; (b) preventing illegal fishing; and (c) suppressing
violations of federal law in the maritime arena.
Maritime Mobility:
Facilitate maritime commerce and eliminate interruptions and impediments
to the efficient and economical movement of goods and people, while maximizing
recreational access to and enjoyment of the water.
Protection of Natural
Resources: Eliminate environmental damage and the degradation of natural
resources associated with maritime transportation, fishing, and recreational
boating.
These strategic
goals are used for tracking program performance and making sound resource
decisions. They also offer a blueprint for thinking broadly about the
Coast Guard's ability to influence future national security issues positively
and to meet the needs of a seafaring nation. Following is a more detailed
explication of the programs and policies related to the achievement of
the service's strategic goals.
Maritime Safety
The Coast Guard's
motto is Semper Paratus (Always Ready), and the service is always ready
to respond to calls for help at sea. The Coast Guard answers every one
of those calls.
In 2001, the Coast
Guard responded to 39,478 calls for assistance--from a broad spectrum
of the public ranging from recreational boaters in distress to the captains
of freighters sinking in gale-force winds. During that same year--on a
share of its operating expenses totaling $359 million--the service saved
more than 4,000 lives and more than $71 million in property.
Search and rescue
(SAR) is perhaps the Coast Guard's best-known mission area; the service
is recognized by the international SAR community as the world's leader.
When the rescue alarm sounds, Coast Guard personnel are ready to confront
the inherently dangerous maritime environment, frequently going into harm's
way to save others.
The Coast Guard
works closely with other federal, state, and local agencies, and with
foreign nations, to provide the world's fastest and most effective response
to distress calls. It also maintains a vessel-tracking system called AMVER
(automated mutual assistance vessel rescue) that allows it to divert nearby
commercial vessels to render assistance when necessary.
During the past
decade, the number of American lives lost each year in boating accidents
and on commercial vessels has declined significantly. The Coast Guard's
Marine Safety Program promotes safety through both its regulatory and
inspection roles, inspecting merchant vessels and licensing their masters
and crews. The Coast Guard has established a goal of achieving a 20 percent
reduction in: crewmember deaths and injuries on U.S. commercial vessels;
passenger deaths and injuries; and the number of collisions and groundings
in the waters under Coast Guard jurisdiction. The Coast Guard Auxiliary
provides free boating safety courses, courtesy marine examinations for
recreational boaters, aids-to-navigation verification, and inspections
of commercial facilities.
As part of its dedicated
effort to prevent future mishaps, the Coast Guard investigates maritime
accidents. The lessons learned from accident investigations are fed back
into prevention programs, frequently in the form of revised regulations
and safety standards. As an international leader in this field, the Coast
Guard works with other nations and agencies--the International Maritime
Organization, for example--to promote higher safety standards for commercial
vessels and their crews.
National Defense
The Coast Guard
is an armed force capable of operating in the joint arena at any time
and functioning as a specialized service under the Navy in time of war
or when directed by the president. It also has been assigned command responsibilities
for the U.S. Maritime Defense Zone, countering potential threats to American
coasts, ports, and inland waterways through numerous port-security, harbor-defense,
and coastal-warfare operations and exercises.
Today, U.S. national
security interests can no longer be defined solely in terms of direct
military threats to America and its allies. The terrorist attacks on 11
September 2001 tragically underscored the threat faced on the home front
from highly sophisticated and covert adversarial groups. The Coast Guard
has assumed one of the lead roles in responding to these unscrupulous
attacks upon the United States by providing homeland security in the nation's
harbors and ports, and along the U.S. coastlines. Commercial, tanker,
passenger, and merchant vessels all have been subject to increased security
measures enforced by the Coast Guard.
In the period immediately
following the destruction of the World Trade Center towers and the attack
on the Pentagon, more than 2,600 Coast Guard Reservists were recalled
to provide operational and administrative support nationwide. Reservists
and active-duty Coast Guard members worked in unison to provide additional
manpower for the cleanup efforts in New York City and to enhance port
security all over the United States. As the nation redefines national
security and government leaders organize the Homeland Security Department,
the Coast Guard will continue its efforts to reduce the risk from terrorism
to commercial and passenger vessels traversing U.S. waterways and designated
waterfront facilities.
The Coast Guard's
national-defense role to support the commanders of the nation's unified
combat commands is explicitly outlined in a memorandum of agreement signed
by the Secretaries of Defense and Transportation in 1995. Four major national-defense
missions were assigned to the Coast Guard. These missions--maritime-intercept
operations, deployed port operations/security and defense, peacetime engagement,
and environmental-defense operations--are essential military tasks assigned
to the Coast Guard as a component of joint and combined forces in peacetime,
crisis, and war.
In past years the
nation's combat commanders have requested--and have been provided--Coast
Guard cutters to conduct maritime-intercept operations, carry out peacetime-engagement
missions, and perform other essential warfare tasks for all three forward-deployed
Navy fleets: the Fifth Fleet in the Arabian Gulf/Middle East; the Sixth
Fleet in the Mediterranean; and the Seventh Fleet in the Western Pacific.
In addition, Coast Guard cutters supported NATO operations during the
Kosovo crisis. However, the Coast Guard "Deepwater" fleet is
aging and in urgent need of replacement.
U.S. Coast Guard
Deepwater cutters and aircraft rank as third oldest in the world among
similarly sized navies or coast guards, and currently face operational
and support challenges. To address these challenges, the Coast Guard initiated
the Integrated Deepwater System Program, often referred to simply as Deepwater.
Instead of proposing a traditional one-for-one asset-replacement program,
the Coast Guard initiated an innovative performance-based acquisition
project, contracting with industry leaders in a competition to design
an integrated system of assets that would maximize operational effectiveness
while lowering total ownership cost. Deepwater encompasses the modernization
and/or replacement of the Coast Guard's major cutters and aircraft and
their communications, sensors, and logistics infrastructure.
Through the National
Fleet Policy Statement and continuing coordination through the Navy-Coast
Guard (NAVGARD) Board, the services will work together to ensure cooperation
and integration of nonredundant and complementary capabilities. With the
award of the contract, on 25 June 2002, to Integrated Coast Guard Systems,
a joint venture established by Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, the
service is delivering the capabilities required to perform all of the
Coast Guard's essential deepwater missions.
Outside U.S. coastal
waters, the Coast Guard assists foreign naval and maritime forces through
training and joint operations. Many of the world's maritime nations have
forces that operate principally in the littoral seas and conduct missions
that resemble those of the Coast Guard. And, because it has such a varied
mix of assets and missions, the Coast Guard is a powerful role model that
is in ever-increasing demand abroad. The service's close working relations
with these nations not only improve mutual cooperation during specific
joint operations in which the Coast Guard is involved but also support
U.S. diplomatic efforts in general by promoting democracy, economic prosperity,
and trust between nations.
Maritime Security
Since 1790, the
Coast Guard has served as America's principal "law of the sea"
agency. Originally established by Alexander Hamilton as the Revenue Marine,
the Coast Guard began with the mission of enforcing import tariffs. Since
then, its maritime-security responsibilities have expanded exponentially,
and almost always synergistically, to include the enforcement of all federal
laws related to the sea--from stopping pirates to enforcing vessel-safety
regulations and fisheries-conservation laws to interdicting drug and migrant
smugglers. Because the Coast Guard has law-enforcement authority, it can
apprehend foreign fishing vessels engaged in poaching, interdict vessels
carrying illegal drugs and undocumented migrants, and stop unsafe boaters.
The influx of illegal
drugs is another one of America's most difficult maritime-security problems.
As the nation's leading maritime agency in protecting the U.S. public
from the illegal drug threat, the Coast Guard plays a key role in implementing
the president's national drug-control strategy. Despite vast complications
in enforcement, the Coast Guard has been performing this task with only
modest additional funding. A tremendous number of assets are required
to patrol the long coastlines of the United States and the even greater
expanse of waters encompassing the maritime "transit zones"
used by drug smugglers. This six-million-square-mile area, roughly the
size of the continental United States itself, includes the Caribbean,
the Gulf of Mexico, and the Eastern Pacific.
To carry out its
drug-interdiction mission the Coast Guard established Operation Steel
Web, a multiyear program aimed at reducing the flow of illegal drugs into
the United States. In fiscal year 2001, the Coast Guard interdicted more
than 138,000 pounds of cocaine, setting a maritime cocaine seizure record
for the third consecutive year. Not incidentally, the Coast Guard seized
34,000 pounds of marijuana during the same period. This success is largely
due to improved intelligence collection, analysis, application, and coordination
and cooperation with other government agencies and international partners.
The street value of the cocaine and marijuana seized, estimated at $4.5
billion, exceeds the Coast Guard's entire operating budget for the year.
The protection of
U.S. living marine resources--primarily through the detection and deterrence
of illegal fishing activity--is another of the Coast Guard's historic
mission areas of responsibility that continues to expand. Beginning with
the protection of the Bering Sea fur seal and sea otter herds and continuing
through the vast expansion following World War II in the size and efficiency
of global fishing fleets, Coast Guard responsibilities in this mission
area have expanded significantly and now include enforcement of laws and
treaties in the almost 3.34-million-square-mile U.S. Exclusive Economic
Zone (EEZ), the largest in the world.
Approximately 110,000
commercial fishing vessels operate from U.S. ports in an industry worth
some $25 billion, netting commercial catches that in the early 1990s totaled
almost 4.7 million metric tons per year. The United States can anticipate
increased enforcement responsibilities in this field as the world's fish
stocks decline and more pressure is put on the Coast Guard to protect
U.S. fisheries resources. To carry out its added responsibilities, the
Coast Guard will continue to patrol the millions of square miles of ocean
that make up the U.S. EEZ and the high seas. This is a daunting challenge
for an agency with a finite number of assets available for the patrol
of such a vast maritime area.
The world's population
is anticipated to increase in the next two decades by nearly two billion
people. Ethnic and sectarian strife will likely continue to fuel sudden
and uncontrolled migrations of large numbers of people, putting increased
demands on the world's limited resources. The flood onto America's shores
of undocumented migrants in overcrowded boats is both a threat to human
life and a violation of U.S. and international laws. Coast Guard migrant-interdiction
operations are as much humanitarian efforts as they are law-enforcement
missions. In fact, most migrant-interdiction cases handled by the service
actually begin as search-and-rescue missions, usually on the high seas
rather than in U.S. coastal waters.
The Coast Guard
is the lead agency for the enforcement of U.S. immigration laws at sea,
stressing sensitivity in dealing with undocumented migrants in all realms:
mass migrations, asylum/refugee requests, smuggling, and repatriation.
Since 1980, the Coast Guard has interdicted an estimated 305,000 migrants
from 62 countries. Today, alien-smuggling ventures facilitate most of
these undocumented persons. In its effort to increase U.S. security against
undocumented migrations, the Coast Guard constantly monitors maritime
transit zones, interdicting undocumented migrants, rescuing people from
sinking or unsafe vessels, providing humanitarian assistance, and training
other nations to discourage undocumented migration into the United States.
Maritime Mobility
Prior to establishing
the Revenue Marine in 1790, Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton sought
ways to protect the vital cargoes carried by the American merchant marine--the
foundation of the colonial economy--and to collect the taxes generated
by those cargoes. As a preventive measure, he proposed the creation of
a federal agency (the Revenue Cutter Service) to protect American shipping
from the wide range of coastal hazards, including rocks and shoals, threatening
ships at sea.
In 1789, the Lighthouse
Service--another of the several predecessors of today's Coast Guard--was
created by Congress. The Lighthouse Service was one of the first federal
steps into the world of maritime transportation risk management. Today,
the U.S. Marine Transportation System consists of a complex mix of waterways,
ports, and intermodal landside connections that collectively allow the
nation's various modes and types of transportation to move people and
goods to, from, and on the water.
As the nation's
lead agency for waterways management, port safety and security, and vessel
safety inspection and certification, the Coast Guard maintains a continuous
and clear focus not only on the prevention of marine accidents, but also
on the response measures needed to cope with man-made as well as natural
disasters. The service also is responsible for maintaining and patrolling
the safe and efficient navigable waterways system needed to support domestic
commerce, facilitate international trade, and ensure the continued availability
of the military sealift fleet required for national defense. Operating
the domestic icebreakers that keep shipping lanes open for commercial
traffic in winter and managing the Vessel Traffic Services system that
coordinates the safe and efficient movement of commercial vessels through
congested harbors are two examples of how the Coast Guard maintains the
waterways.
The Coast Guard
also maintains the "signposts" and "traffic signals"
on the nation's navigable waterways--more than 50,000 federal aids to
navigation, including buoys, lighthouses, day beacons, and radio-navigation
signals. These navigation aids provide a critical component of the overall
navigational picture needed by all mariners. The Coast Guard's maritime
Differential Global Positioning System network is fully operational and
provides boaters and mariners with the most accurate electronic maritime
navigation system ever available.
With global maritime
trade forecast to double and perhaps triple in the next two decades, larger
numbers of ultra-large, deep-draft, and minimally crewed ships--many of
them carrying hazardous cargoes--will be plying U.S. waters and economic
zones, along with new super-sized cruise ships capable of carrying 6,000
or more passengers. Because the potential for disastrous environmental
harm and/or loss of life from even a single incident will continue to
grow exponentially, the Coast Guard is working on even more effective
systems for preventing--or rapidly responding to--marine accidents.
Protection of Natural Resources
The Coast Guard's
role in environmental protection dates back more than 175 years to the
1822 Timber Act, which tasked the Revenue Cutter Service with protecting
government timber from poachers.
The Coast Guard
is still protecting the nation's valuable natural marine resources. Today,
however, the principal dangers are poaching and overfishing. In the fight
to protect the biomass within the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone, the Coast
Guard is working on numerous fronts--e.g., patrolling the closed fishing
grounds off New England so that depleted species have an opportunity to
return to harvestable levels. Through close cooperation with other federal
and foreign agencies, the Coast Guard also is gaining ground against the
illegal use of high-seas driftnets in the Pacific Ocean. Coast Guard cutters
remain on constant patrol in the Bering Sea to prevent foreign vessels
from poaching in the rich fishing waters off Alaska.
The Coast Guard
also is playing an increasingly important role in the nation's efforts
to protect its threatened and endangered species. In the Gulf of Mexico,
the Coast Guard helps protect endangered sea turtles from being caught
in indiscriminate fishing nets. Along the Atlantic Coast, Coast Guard
units help free endangered northern right whales that have become entangled
in fishing gear. In Hawaii, Coast Guard buoy tenders remove tons of marine
debris from the coral reef habitat of the Hawaiian monk seal. From patrolling
Steller sea lion rookeries in Alaska to enforcing manatee speed zones
in Florida, the Coast Guard plays a vital role in helping the nation recover
and maintain healthy populations of marine protected species.
The Coast Guard
has pioneered the fight against water pollution. Its Research and Development
Center developed a technique to "fingerprint" oil to identify
the source of a spill. Today, the Coast Guard's National Strike Teams
are on call 24 hours a day to respond to accidents and spills in the marine
environment. The service also enforces federal regulations to reduce the
dumping of refuse and sewage from vessels of all types.
Through a public
education program called Sea Partners, the Coast Guard is promoting the
importance of a clean marine environment and is working closely with foreign
nations and international agencies to reduce the number of marine accidents
(and resulting spills) by establishing and rigorously enforcing improved
safety standards for commercial vessels and their crews. The results of
these efforts have been demonstrably successful. A 50 percent decrease
has been realized, from an annual average of 7.1 gallons spilled per million
gallons shipped for the year 1996 to only 3.5 gallons spilled per million
gallons shipped during the year 2001.
To reach the longer-term
goal of virtually eliminating environmental damage to U.S. waterways,
the Coast Guard pursues an aggressive three-pronged approach encompassing
prevention, enforcement, and response. The service has partnered with
the maritime industry to develop new safety standards for commercial vessels
and their crews, and enforces those standards through rigorous testing
and thorough investigations into marine accidents and spills.
The Coast Guard's website is www.uscg.mil. *
U.S. Coast Guard Academy
Located in New London,
Connecticut, approximately halfway between New York City and Boston, the
U.S. Coast Guard Academy has an undergraduate enrollment of approximately
850 men and women. Selection to the Coast Guard Academy is based on an
annual nationwide competition, a process unique among the service academies.
There are no congressional appointments to the academy, and geographical
quotas do not play a part in admissions decisions. The superintendent
is Rear Adm. Robert C. Olsen Jr., USCG.
Degrees and majors:
Cadets may choose from eight major fields of study: electrical, civil,
mechanical, and marine engineering and naval architecture; government;
management; marine and environmental science; and operations research.
Each graduate receives a Bachelor of Science degree and a commission as
an ensign in the U.S. Coast Guard.
Costs: To defray
the cost of uniforms and educational equipment, a $3,000 deposit is required
upon entrance; $300 of this sum is required at the time a cadet accepts
a full appointment. The remainder is due by 15 June.
Financial Aid: Each
cadet receives about $600 per month for uniforms, equipment, textbooks,
and other training expenses.
Admissions: Eligibility
requirements include satisfactory SAT or ACT scores, a satisfactory scholastic
record, and demonstrated leadership potential. Each candidate must pass
a medical examination before acceptance. New classes begin in July of
each year.
Application Information:
Applications, which are due by 15 December, are available online at http://www.cga.edu
or by contacting:
Director of Admissions
U.S. Coast Guard Academy
31 Mohegan Avenue
New London, CT 06320-8103
or by calling: (860) 444-8501 or
(800) 883-8724
Email: admissions@cga.uscg.mil
Website: www.cga.edu
Leadership Development Center
In 1998, the Coast Guard Academy created this educational center of excellence
for the entire Coast Guard--military and civilian, officer and enlisted.
The LDC consolidates into a single, rich learning environment several
prominent Coast Guard schools from around the country, including Officer
Candidate School, Chief Warrant Officer Indoctrination School, Chief Petty
Officer Academy, Command and Operations School, Officer-in-Charge School,
Key Civilian Orientation Program, and the Leadership and Quality Institute.
*
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