Charting
A New Course For The 21st Century: Commandant's Direction 2002
By THOMAS H. COLLINS
Adm. Thomas H. Collins is the 22nd commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard.
He relieved Adm. James M. Loy on 30 May 2002.
Throughout our 212 years of service to America, the Coast Guard has forged
a rich legacy of meeting America's diverse maritime requirements. We have
always stood ready to heed the call to service and provide our military,
maritime, and multimission skills, expertise, and services whenever and
wherever needed. Key to our success has been the integrity, professionalism,
and adaptability of our people, and the multimission capability inherent
in our forces. Now we are poised to transform our Coast Guard to meet
the demands of the 21st century, confident in the enduring character of
our Service, strengthened by our core values of honor, respect, and devotion
to duty, and renewed in our sense of purpose and commitment to serve America.
The Coast Guard will continue our tradition of national and international
leadership across all of our roles and missions. However, following the
horrific terrorist attacks of September 2001, we have a new national mandate
that supersedes all others: to protect America's homeland and citizenry
from attack. As we respond to this call for action against a new and unpredictable
terrorist threat, we must place our immediate emphasis on strengthening
our maritime homeland-security capabilities, yet be careful to do so with
a watchful eye on our full mission set. Each mission is inherently connected
with the others, and excellence in all is the rightful expectation of
the American public. We must be vigilant and always ready for the call,
whether we are upholding maritime security, ensuring marine safety, protecting
our precious natural resources, facilitating maritime mobility and trade,
or safeguarding national defense.
To ensure the highest levels of performance attainable, which is what
America expects and deserves from its Coast Guard, and to ensure we achieve
our strategic goals and objectives, we will focus our energies in three
key areas:
* Take affirmative steps to improve current and future Readiness;
* Place renewed emphasis on the growth, development, and well-being of
the Coast Guard's People; and
* Aggressively reinforce our Stewardship of the public trust.
Readiness
My first area of emphasis, readiness, is critical for ensuring the Coast
Guard will remain capable, competent, and vigilant in all mission areas
in the decades ahead.
Superior operational service is our core purpose and we have long been
recognized as the world's best coast guard. America expects that we will
bring the same level of professionalism and maritime leadership to the
war on terrorism that has traditionally been reflected in the conduct
of our missions. We must ensure all our key mission areas are pursued
vigorously and all our maritime requirements and needs are met, while
building our maritime homeland-security strategies and capabilities as
our top priority.
As the lead force for maritime safety and maritime homeland security,
we will do all within our power to ensure that our units employ sound
and safe doctrine and tactics; are supported with responsive, integrated
logistics systems; are adequately staffed with properly trained and highly
motivated people; and are equipped with modern and well-maintained cutters,
boats, aircraft, command-and-control systems, equipment, and facilities.
Our units will operate to the level that our support systems can sustain,
within prescribed employment and crew fatigue standards, while aggressively
managing risk. To improve our current and future readiness, we will:
* Build robust maritime homeland- security strategies, capabilities,
and competencies;
* Design and implement a maritime-domain-awareness capability that provides
an integrated, afloat, ashore, and airborne command, control, communications,
computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) capability
that is focused on meeting both the informational needs of decision makers
and the tactical needs of operational commanders;
* Ensure supporting command, control, and communications (C3) organizational
structures exist at the port level to meet tactical mission objectives;
* Ensure our future readiness by leveraging the Integrated Deepwater System
Program, the National Distress and Response System Modernization Project,
and near- and long-term maritime homeland-security initiatives as significant
steps in the strategic recapitalization of our required operational and
support capability; and
* Build strategic partnerships to enhance mission outcomes at all levels--federal,
state, and local; international, regional, and bilateral; and public and
private--to bring clarity to mission planning and execution and leverage
the capabilities of Coast Guard forces and force structure.
People
To prepare the Coast Guard for the full spectrum of challenges and opportunities
we will face in the coming years, I have made the men and women of the
Coast Guard--whether active-duty, selected reservists, civilian, or auxiliarist--my
top priority! More than ever before, the Coast Guard needs to be committed
to its people, and its people committed to the Coast Guard.
Of my three priorities, my people initiative is appropriately positioned
between readiness and stewardship because the men and women of the Coast
Guard must remain center stage. Our ability to attract, develop, retain,
and deploy a quality work force is the key to the Coast Guard's future.
Coast Guard people will increasingly operate in a more complex and technologically
sophisticated environment than ever before, characterized by new Deepwater
cutters, superior response boats, upgraded aircraft systems, advanced
C3 systems, and greater information connectivity at all levels of the
organization. Transforming our Service with this new technology requires
that we transform our dedicated and professional work force with the same
care and foresight. To achieve these goals, we must restructure decades-old
human-resource policies and processes--and be more agile in adapting to
the new marketplace for people, provide for quality of life and workplace,
and leverage performance-based policies to manage our work force. Therefore,
we will:
* Emphasize education, training, and professional growth for all elements
of the work force;
* Grow the work force to meet increasing mission demands;
* Identify new strategies to recruit, train, deploy, and retain a diverse,
highly capable, and flexible work force;
* Implement restructured personnel, operations, and support systems that
guide assignment and advancement in order to attain greater stability
and flexibility for the work force and achieve better quality of life
and work; and
* Incorporate human-resource-sensitive requirements into the design, engineering,
acquisition, and deployment of new hardware and information-technology
systems, as well as into the implementation of new policies driven by
the changing security environment.
Stewardship
My third area of emphasis is stewardship. Good stewardship of the public
trust mandates that the Coast Guard be properly aligned from top to bottom
and bottom to top, in order to fully embrace innovation, technology, and
effective management practices to achieve positive and measurable results.
The Coast Guard has earned a reputation for excellence in managing its
resources, due largely to the dedication to core values of the Coast Guard's
people and our emphasis on performance-based planning and resource allocation.
As outlined in Coast Guard Publication 1, U.S. Coast Guard: America's
Maritime Guardian, knowing who we are, where we came from, what we do,
how we do it, and why we do it is critically important. Engaging our strengths
and capabilities and unleashing our collective ingenuity and resourcefulness
as we consider how to accomplish every mission is imperative. We must
continue our emphasis on customer-focused and outcome-based operations.
We must exhort our people to identify and embrace necessary change, employ
their creative talents, share new ideas, and deliver the highest quality
of service possible to the American public. To strengthen our stewardship
of the public trust, we will:
* Strive to be the best led and best managed organization in federal
government;
* Inspire a culture of innovation and process change, and ensure the creative
infusion of technology in all mission areas to enhance productivity and
reduce workload, while driving toward effective and efficient results;
* Take advantage of the opportunities presented by our innovative acquisition
initiatives, such as the Integrated Deepwater System Program, through
which we will develop strategic relationships with vendors and revolutionize
our operational and support processes to the advantage of the American
public, Coast Guard people, and overall Service excellence; and
* Deliver measurable results that support the President's management agenda
and directly contribute to achieving the desired outcomes of the Coast
Guard Strategic Plan.
Together, these three areas of emphasis--readiness, people, and stewardship--will
ensure the Coast Guard's future remains bright and that the Service is
fully prepared to meet head-on the challenges inherent in America's war
on terrorism, as well as the other more traditional threats and challenges
that we are certain to face in the 21st century. As we look forward with
optimism, we dare not drift with the current, nor should we secure our
anchor in the past. We must sail on, thinking and acting anew, being always
ready to heed the call to service to ensure the safety and security of
America and its citizens for generations to come. * |
