05 August 2007

Semper Paratus



“Semper Paratus” is the motto of the United States Coast Guard. It is translated as "Always Ready" in the sad state of Latin today. In ancient times, the words had another context- one associated with the male side of the reproduction of the species. That association is not in the dusty textbooks of the last century when the phrase was adopted as the mantra of service.

I like it, personally. It is a sort of wry inside joke, a classical example of institutional culture.

It's like "Military Medicine," or "Military Music." Try the "Uniformed Code of Military Justice," which contains at least three intenal contradictions. All of them are things so alien to real life that the average civilian would not recognize them. The differences between military and civilian cultures are deep and real, and reflected in the very language that the institutions use to define what they do.

Take a simple word like “Secure.” A civilian might think of it as a state of safety; a noun. For the military it is a verb, an action word. If directed to “secure” a building, for example.

The Marines will storm it.

The Army will surround it with a heavy division, and establish a secure logistics base for food, fuel and ammunition for the entire campaign and initiate the deliberate planning process in accordance with doctrine.

The Navy will lock up the front door and log the time.

The Coast Guard will deploy containment barriers and ensure that no toxic substances seep from the perimeter.

The Air Force will nail down a long-term lease at an exorbitant price, but get concessions on cable television service and the health club.

The multi-mission Coast Guard is the unique sea-service. By law, it joins the Defense Department only in wartime. In the post-war peacetme past, the service rested uneasily in the Department of Transportation, which accounted for only part of the mission. Now it rests in the bureaucracy of the Department of Homeland Security, which is just as uneasy, and much more confused. Everything is not about security, and more than it was all about transportation.

With the legal links to Defense in national emergency, the Coast Guard has a tradition similar to that of waterfowl, and is the only migratory service.

I once had a word with the burly and dynamic Admiral Thad Allen, the no-nonsense officer who is one of the two heroes of the response to Hurricane Katrina. Today he is the rock-star Commandant of the Coast Guard. I told him that although I was a Navy veteran, the only armed service that ever saved my butt was his. He smiled in response. His service is small, but its works are legend.

Still, like the other military services, the Coast Guard is managed by commissioned officers who have grown up in a culture of "zero defects.” Chester Nimitz advanced to the rank of five stars, a Navy Fleet Admiral in wartime. But as a young officer he grounded a ship, and in the Guard or Navy of this day he would have advanced no further.

Today's officers serve until they make a mistake: “One strike and you are out.”

The Coast Guard may have the most complex of pedigrees of any of the armed services, and that is a major factor in their military culture. They come from Revenue, Law enforcement, and public safety cultures.

In the first Wilson administration, the hodge-podge of lighthouse keepers, rescue boaters and customs and revenue water police were brought together into the new US Coast Guard. There was a war overseas, and it was past time for reform of the last line of defense at America's shores. The Revenue Marine absorbed the U.S. Life Saving Service when the President signed the bill in 1915. There were inequities, of course. The former officers of the USLSS weren't commissioned into the new "Coast Guard." Instead they were made Chief Petty Officers, the senior enlisted rank.

Placed as they were “below the salt” in the hierarchy, there was naturally tension and animosity between the two groups of predecessor agency officers. The first Commandant of the new "Coast Guard" did an unusual thing in an attempt to keep the peace. He created a new officer's crest for the "Coast Guard" and made the former Officer's crest of the Revenue Marine the official CPO insignia (the shield pierced by a single fouled anchor).

Thus, whenever the new "Coast Guard" Officers, who were then really old Revenue Marine officers, encountered a Chief they had to look upon their old officer's crest.

There was an accommodation to the Chief's mess, though. CPO's were made the keepers of all tradition and accorded unusual status, even as compared to the ones who actually run the Navy, and who actually exercise most day-to-day management of the ships and stations.

Certain entire mission areas of the Coast Guard, including coastal rescue stations and aids to navigation activities (inherited from the U.S. Lighthouse Service whose "keepers" weren't commissioned either) are CPO-dominated.

All the mission areas run by the Chiefs are doing just fine in terms of public image. Navigational aids are managed properly. Errant boaters are saved.

The Commissioned Corps is not doing so well. Some areas run by the commissioned corps, like regulation of the Merchant Marine are so poorly run that the "customers" are up in arms. The Coast Guard cannot successfully procure a new class of ships. The Congress is considering the removal of some functions from the Coast Guard altogether.

The Coast Guard is the military that most of us are likely to encounter when we are in trouble or in the aftermath of disaster. As such, I salute them as they are integrated once more into a new configuration in a new bureaucratic organization.

Adult leadership is hard to find in the new Department of Homeland Security, which is the amalgamation of more than twenty-odd organization with traditions and cultures that go back in some cases to the founding of the Republic.

There is so much confusion that the example of the Commandant long ago shines like a lighthouse. Honor the past, and honor tradition. Empower the workforce while holding them accountable for their actions. That is everything that was not done when the winds and waves of disaster overcame the levees in New Orleans.

Then, move out. Semper Paratus.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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