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Transcript: Q&A with Adm. Thad Allen |
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by David Silverberg
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Sunday, 01 November 2009 |
Full transcript of interview with US Coast Guard Commandant
By David Silverberg, Editor
Interview date: Aug. 25, 2009
Q: What changes if any there have been under the new administration and under Secretary Napolitano for the Coast Guard. How has it affected the mission, has it changed it at all?
A: If I were to give you a general observation, having a governor as a secretary has brought a focus on what I would call integrated concepts of homeland security related to all the different levels of government and what federalism really means, if you will. She has a very good understanding of the responsibilities of being a governor, the governor of a state on the southwest border. While they don’t have hurricanes they certainly have wildfires and other things that require them to interact with FEMA.
Q: You’re from that area.
A: I’m from Tucson, yes. She was my governor.
So what I think that you see is a pretty comprehensive view of the roles of government and the responsibilities of different levels of government clear down to what citizens ought to be doing in terms of preparedness and things like that. And I think that a hallmark of her tenure so far has been a sense of collaboration with governors in trying to understand the local implications of federal decisions. If I were to give you an overarching theme it is probably that.
Q. When you came in, you had this vision of independent commands; innovating, taking initiative, and carrying out the mission. Has it changed your vision, the vision you had of the Coast Guard, under this new administration?
A. No, in fact, some of the roles and missions of the Coast Guard are going to be more finely described or described with greater accuracy.
One of the challenges that the Department of Homeland Security has moving forward is that there are seven operating components and we don’t have a structure in the department that would be similar to what you would have in the Department of Defense where each service has a service secretary and then there’s a joint staff. What you have is a very set structure on how command and control is exerted, how forces are integrated and that’s all under the National Command Authority and the secretary of Defense to the president.
I think one of the challenges in maturing the Department of Homeland Security is creating integrating mechanisms within the department to coordinate across components and then creating mechanisms to coordinate across departments for non-defense-related incidents. Homeland Security Presidential Directive 5 in the Homeland Security Act places many of those responsibilities with the secretary of homeland security. So when we start conducting operations we need to understand what the command and control relationship is to the secretary for Coast Guard operations or when we’re doing joint operations--say between Customs and Border Protection and the Coast Guard--and how all that relates.
Just prior to this administration arriving, they created an ops planning and coordination function in the department. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it’s a replication of the joint staff, but it is a structure whereby you can do planning and coordination of operations across the components of the department on behalf of the secretary at the departmental level.
I think the secretary has the opportunity and is seizing it, to use that structure to integrate operations across all the components.
Q. That raises, of course, in terms of homeland security, the counterterrorism mission. Do you see that being reduced? How do you see that changing nowadays? Is there less emphasis on it?
A: I’m not sure there’s any less emphasis on counterterrorism. I believe what you have in the Department of Homeland Security is a portfolio of missions that all relate to basically stopping bad things from happening in the homeland. That includes weather, germs, terrorists, things related to cargo, and at the Coast Guard we like to talk about all-hazards, all-threats and specifically, if it’s not purely a DoD responsibility under National Defense mission, it’s going to naturally gravitate to homeland security and I think the challenge there is both the internal coordination and the external coordination and I know the secretary is focused on that very much.
Q: We wanted to ask about procurement, Deepwater, and the assets. Let’s start with Deepwater. Will this be recompeted in the next year and what’s the status?
A: I’m not sure I know what you mean by “recompeted.” We were in the last contractual phase of our relationship with Integrated Coast Guard Systems, which was the joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, which was the basis for the Coast Guard contract award.
We made the decision to assume lead systems integrator responsibilities within the Coast Guard so at the end of the current contract award with Integrated Coast Guard Systems, we will assume those duties and there will be an extension of that contract.
That said, the component parts of Deepwater, which are being built out--the national security cutter, the CASA-235 aircraft, and our patrol boats--we will continue to do that but each platform will be openly competed and then we will be responsible for the integration of those assets into the Coast Guard command and control structure.
So that the big difference now is: Deepwater as a concept and a project is moving forward but it will not be through a lead system integrator external to the Coast Guard. We will do that and each of the platform decisions will be made based on open competition and best value.
Q: How is the Coast Guard procurement side of that coming?
A: Well, you have to be prepared. If you’re going to be the lead systems integrator, you have to create a Coast Guard that’s capable of what I would call “life cycle management” of an asset from solicitation, procurement, acquisition, program management, the commissioning of those platforms into service, with logistics support and then product line management of these assets over their lifecycle.
Part of what we’re doing in the Coast Guard through our modernization efforts is restructuring how we do maintenance and logistics and acquisition so that they’re all under one single officer in the Coast Guard who is accountable for the entire cycle. It was kind of broken down before into a Deepwater program office, and we lost a lot of continuity and synchronization that needed to take place inside the service.
With the creation of a deputy commandant for mission support, acquisition, maintenance and logistics personnel will be under the same three-star officer. It will be single point of accountability under that officer. That was not present before in the Coast Guard.
Q: You were building that acquisition corps, not only around Deepwater, but around everything.
A: We took our existing acquisition office that was doing everything other than Deepwater and we took Deepwater and we put them together to create a brand new acquisition organization and structure. We actually came up with what we called a blueprint for acquisition reform and we’re on our third version of that. We keep refining it each year and fine tuning our organizational structure, how we’re handling human resources, how we’re hiring people, the relationship between the people who are actually acquiring the assets and the people who have to maintain them, those things are all being defined, continually refined and improved. We think we’re in a very good place now from where we were three years ago.
Q: Can you elaborate a little on the status of that acquisition corps?
A: Sure, a good example is: Under the Deepwater program we attempted to extend the length of our 110-foot patrol boats as a way to maintain them in service because we couldn’t build all the fleet out at once. But we had significant structural problems with that which caused us to remove eight of them from service. I removed them permanently and basically we terminated that part of the program.
Because of that we created a hole in Coast Guard capabilities because we had taken eight patrol boats that were previously being used and took them out of service. In the short term, we have taken the remaining patrol boats to South Florida and double-crewed them with the crews from those patrol boats that were laid up. But for the long term we need to move very quickly with the patrol boat acquisition. And with the recently-awarded fast response cutter contract award, we will in the next 12 to 18 months deliver the first ship of our new patrol boat fleet. We did that outside the Integrated Coast Guard Systems contractual relationship and we openly competed that.
There was a subsequent protest, both to GAO and federal court. Both of those protests were denied. We consider that to be a pretty good indication that we got it right and an indication that the organizational structure that we put in place to improve acquisition has matured to the point where we’re happy with where we’re at. There’s still some things that we need to do but we’re capable of executing; we just have overall responsibility for the Deepwater program but the entire acquisition process is in the Coast Guard now and in my view is in very capable hands.
Q: Going back to DHS, how are Coast Guard-FEMA operations at this point?
A: I have said that since the inception of the department, even before I was commandant, that the Coast Guard is a better agency because we are in a department with FEMA and they are a better agency because they are in a department with the Coast Guard.
There are significant synergies that we are able to achieve and are achieving with FEMA that would not have been possible if we were not in the same department.
Some of these include the use of Coast Guard organic aircraft for lift, FEMA advance teams or emergency response teams. It includes advance coordination on what we call pre-scripted mission assignments, so if you think you’re going to need the Coast Guard to do something it will be funded through the disaster relief fund. You basically fill out all the paperwork ahead of time with the exception of the date, the event and what the cost estimate is and you’re able to compute it much more quickly and we’re able to get the resources where FEMA needs them more quickly. Those are examples of how we coordinate very, very closely. Now, that could be done if we were not in the same department but it couldn’t be done nearly as quickly or with the minimum amount of friction that it is being done now.
And as far as Craig Fugate goes, there is no doubt about his credentials as a state emergency manager in the state that arguably has the most hurricanes of any state in the union; he is a very strong, forceful leader and we have met on several occasions since he became the director of FEMA and our working relationship is terrific.
Q: Even though we’re mid-point in the hurricane season, can you say anything about Coast Guard operations in that respect?
A: Well, I think that so far, at least in the Atlantic, it’s been a fairly benign hurricane season. That said, it only takes one to cause a significant problem. Many times the hurricanes don’t come until later in the season. We’re all reminded that Hurricane Andrew, one of the more devastating hurricanes in our history, hit in August in Miami and was the first true hurricane of the season. It began with an “a.”
Q: Isn’t this the anniversary of it today? I believe it is.
A: August 25th is the anniversary of the landfall of Katrina. So we need to be watchful, clearly into November but so far, at least in the Atlantic, there’s been less activity than in previous years. In the Pacific there’s actually been a good amount of activity but it’s been away from land.
Q: You were just up in the Arctic and I saw some of the press conferences from that. Is there anything you want to say about Arctic operations?
A: It was a trip up to the Arctic after I had a chance meeting with Carol Browner, who is the president’s advisor on climate change and energy. I met right after the inauguration at a social event and we began talking and I opined at that point that it might be a good idea to take a few members of the administration up and show them the implications of an ice-diminished Arctic and so we planned to do that and when we finally put the team together we finally had Heather Zichal, who is a deputy assistant to the president for climate change and energy, we had Jane Lubchenco, who is deputy under secretary of Commerce and administrator of NOAA, we had David Hayes, from the Department of the Interior and so it was a pretty good set of senior leaders in the administration to go up and take a look at the implications of an ice-diminished Arctic and what we are trying to do when we operate off the north slope of Alaska when we have open water there in the summer, which we’ve been doing for the last three summers, when that phenomenon started.
From the time we proposed the trip and started working on it something else happened and in June the president tasked the chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality—by the way, she went with us as well, Nancy Sutley, to the Arctic—Nancy Sutley was charged as the chair of CEQ, with convening the president’s interagency task force on ocean policy and that body has a 90-day timeline to deliver three products for the president. One is a national policy on oceans, the second one is how we will make and execute policy in the federal government—in other words, what will the governance structure be that will actually carry out policy? And third, an implementation plan for key actions that need to be taken as developed by the policy.
As part of that task force, which I represent the Department of Homeland Security on, in addition to meetings in Washington, I scheduled five meetings out in the field about various issues associated with ocean policy. Because we were traveling to the Arctic, that was a natural time to take advantage of our presence there and hold a field hearing on the new ocean policy, which we did last Friday in Anchorage. So the trip ended up being a bit of a two-fer, if you will, but there was a need to go up there and acquaint everybody with the needs and the challenges that we face in operating off the northern slope and at the same time it was the first field hearing of the Ocean Policy Task Force.
Q: What kinds of challenges will climate change present to your successors in the longer term?
A: I think in general we see the Arctic as a leading indicator. I think the implications of climate change will be visible there before they’re visible other places and the receding of the multi-year ice has been the first indication. Every year the Arctic freezes, freezes down through the Bering Straits and the limits of that ice have stayed relatively constant the last few years. But in the summer when that annual ice melts and retreats, the perennial ice, the ice that has been there for years and years and years, that is what is starting to melt, the permanent ice cap over the Arctic, if you will, and that is what is retreating.
The implications of that for our missions, specifically in the Arctic, are that there is open water, although there are pieces of ice floating around, which makes it kind of dangerous that there is access to water where there didn’t used to be and many of the same statutory requirements, or mission requirements that we have in the lower 48 or anywhere else, exist up there.
In other words, we have certain jurisdictional authorities in the territorial sea in the exclusive economic zone to the extent that there is water present there now, those authorities exist. So for the past three years we have moved resources up north of the Bering Straits, to Nome and to Point Barrow to be available for operations and to test the capabilities of our platforms there, because we have not traditionally operated up there extensively and we’re trying to do an assessment of how good our current platforms—aircraft, boats, cutters—operate up there for the purpose of identifying future requirements and see if we have to come up with something else.
I’ve found a couple of things up there that were cause for concern for sustaining future operations that should inform our decisions in the next couple of years about what kinds of equipment we buy.
Specifically, let’s take Point Barrow, the North Slope there. It is very, very difficult for us to launch and recover small boats up there. They don’t have traditional boat ramps as we know it and we’ve had to come up with things like laying temporary boat ramps across the beachhead to launch boats. Once the boats have been launched they’re operating sometimes in places where there is ice out there and our small boats aren’t that ice-capable, so that puts a limit on where they can operate.
We’ve deployed helicopters up there. The first two years we deployed our H-65 helicopters, which are short-range helicopters that traditionally operate off the back of cutters and close to the shoreline here in the United States. We have larger helicopters, H-60 helicopters, down in Kodiak. This year we brought H-60s up instead of H-65s because H-60 helicopters have de-icing capability and H-65s do not and while it is the summer up there, you still have icing conditions.
I was flying in an H-60 up there last week with some people and we were flying over some mountains and encountered icing conditions that would have been problematic for another helicopter. So that tells us we have only one helo in the Coast Guard that can operate up there so we’re looking at something else.
Beyond that we know other limitations up there regarding communications, especially communications with aircraft. We were airborne and had difficulty from time to time checking in with the base station and advising that our operations were normal and we were safe. We had to relay through several other aircraft to do that, so there’s an issue with infrastructure up there related to communications, which impacts command and control
So those are the types of things that we’re learning and we hope to, later on this year, actually come out with a requirements document—we call it the High Latitudes Study—that will be the first definition of requirements for what we need to do up there as far as looking at new platforms and new capability.
Q: What are the latest developments in maritime domain awareness?
A: I would address it under the overall rubric of trying to ascertain what constitutes an adequate maritime security regime in a post-9/11 environment, which MDA is a subset of that. And the reason I say that is if I could compare and contrast aviation and maritime for the purpose of framing the issue.
The advent of air transportation in the 20th century brought with it a significant amount of safety and surveillance capability with it, as a condition of being able to operate airlines safely. So you have pretty ubiquitous radar coverage, communications coverage, and in the aviation industry you’re in positive control once you get above a certain altitude when you’re clear from point A to point B and then you’re clear to land.
So there’s a lot of transparency and visibility of what is operating out there and because of that we’re able to exert air sovereignty as well. So if you approach the United States and you’re 200 miles offshore and you haven’t identified yourself and you don’t have a transponder on you’re going to get met.
That whole set of paradigms does not apply to the water. We have no bright lines nor do we have ubiquitous radar coverage around our coastline and if you look at the entire coastline of the lower 48—the Great Lakes, the rivers, where there’s maritime access in Alaska—we’re talking about 95,000 miles, which dwarfs the land border.
But we have not treated, over the years, the maritime transportation system the same as the air traffic system and so you won’t find 100 percent radar coverage, we do not require vessels to check in at 200 miles out from point A to point B to final approach into port. So the whole notion of maritime domain awareness is a subset of what constitutes an adequate maritime security regime is trying to create greater transparency and knowledge of what’s out there for the purpose of being able to sort legitimate from non-legitimate traffic and identify threats and deal with them as far offshore as we can.
So that’s where MDA sits.
Q: In terms of immigration: There’s speculation about comprehensive immigration reform next year. Is there any particular piece of legislation or measure that would particularly affect the Coast Guard that you yourself would want to see? Any legislative measure?
A: The main elements of immigration reform—which are: border control, interior enforcement, adjudication of the status of illegal migrants who are here right now and temporary worker programs—I think are the four large components. I think those don’t generally impact the Coast Guard on a day-to-day basis except to the extent that if more pressure is exerted on the southwest border, you have the potential for spillover and an increase in the maritime trafficking of illegal migrants and we’re seeing a slight uptick in the areas around San Diego and southern California and Corpus Christi. It’s not a mass migration, it’s not enough that I would call it a substantial trend at this point but we’re watching it very, very closely.
One thing I think we need and we’ve engaged the Congress in the last couple of years on it is additional statutory authority regarding people that are trying to smuggle migrants in by sea to the United States. Right now, a boat that is sitting, let’s say, 25 miles off of Miami has 30 people on board, obviously has been to Cuba and is headed back north; we have some challenges, legally, in making a case on their intent to smuggle migrants into the United States that doesn’t allow us to act until they’re almost right at shore.
What we would like to see is legislation that allows us to engage these vessels further out. There’s no legitimate reason to have 30 Cuban migrants in a boat going 40 knots in a boat in the Straits of Florida. We would like to be able to board these vessels at sea and then hold the operators accountable for migrant smuggling and have criminal penalties associated with that.
That is not directly related to immigration reform, but it is more related to the tactical issues we have to deal with in migrant interdiction on the water.
Q: That has to be legislative?
A: We did something very similar some years ago regarding drug interediction. If someone was carrying drugs and they were outside the legal limits where we could do a boarding, the 12-mile territorial sea and then the additional 12 miles customs waters, we would have to prove there was a conspiracy or an intent to import that into the United States to get a conviction. Somebody sitting 26 miles off Miami with four tons of cocaine by definition is attempting to import drugs and we actually got legislation passed that allowed us to board these vessels with drugs on board and then prosecute them under US law for even just having the drugs en route to the United States. That was a significant improvement in our enforcement effort. We’re looking for something similar in terms of legislative authorities in terms of migrants.
Q: Given the situation in northern Mexico, how do you see that affecting Coast Guard operations beyond just your normal interdiction of drugs and narcotics?
A: First of all, I would say this about Mexico: In our view, related to the Coast Guard mission responsibilities, the southern border that is most consequential to the United States, is the southern border of Mexico at Guatemala.
Most of the cocaine that is entering Mexico and this country is being moved from Colombia in non-commercial vessels to Latin America or Mexico and our ability to detect it at the border becomes monumentally harder to do than if we can interdict them at sea. So the majority of our effort that impacts the southwest border takes place much further south in trying to interdict those loads of cocaine as close to South America as we can.
For that reason, I think for three of the last four years we’ve had record drug seizures and there are indications that availability is going down and prices going up in certain drug markets in this country and we think that we may be close to having an impact on markets that we haven’t seen, at least in the time that I’ve been working on the Coast Guard.
So when we think Mexico, we think Mexico’s southern border.
Q: The actual conflict between the Mexican government and the cartels doesn’t really impact Coast Guard operations—or does it?
A: Well, when it relates to the tactical interception of drugs down from Mexico and our interaction with the Mexican government, it does. We have a terrific relationship with the Mexican navy and the secretary of the navy, Adm. [Mariano Francisco Saynez Mendoza], I have met personally, I have been to Mexico, he has been here, he’s had dinner at my house, we have a very close working relationship and our view, our part of the fight is putting waterborne smuggling out of business to the extent that we can choke off revenue for the cartels before it gets to Mexico.
A: When you hand off command to your successor, what are the three top priorities you’re going to give him?
Q: Well, when I was interviewed to be the commandant by Secretary Chertoff I told him—you have to come up with a value proposition when you do an interview—and I said: If you select me as the commandant there are some things that I’m going to do that haven’t been done for a long time that have needed to be done for a long time.
We kind of grouped that under the rubric of “modernization,” for lack of a better term, and it has to do with a wide-ranging set of initiatives that we’ve been working on for the last three years to create more effective command and control; one of those is doing away with our Atlantic and Pacific commands and going to a single, global synchronizer.
Probably the most impactful thing we’re doing right now is taking the entire Coast Guard and all of our operating assets to the same logistics and maintenance system to more effectively support the assets that are out there.
So my number one priority is to continue to modernize the Coast Guard to make it a little more change-centric, a little more flexible and agile to changes and command signals so that as we move, say, from pressure on the southwest border forces us to confront an at-sea migrant or drug smuggling threat from Mexico that we can reorient, react to that and do what we’re supposed to.
It’s probably manifested itself in some other ways related to the transportation system. Since 9/11 we’ve seen huge increases in offshore oil and gas development, significant increases in the size of cruise ships and cruise ships calling at the United States, significant expansion in the towing industry in this country, all of that are demand signals to us that we have to be flexible and agile enough to respond to and I don’t think we’ve been organized correctly to do that as well as we could, so after modernization what I’m trying to do is create a change-centric Coast Guard that adapts continuously as it needs to through the future and make sure there’s continuity across my chain of command.
If I were to give you one big one after that that will be on my successor’s plate, the demand for more rationale in how we allocate resources to our missions. We have 11 missions, anywhere from aids to navigation, to drug interdiction, to treaties enforcement. We get a lot of scrutiny on what are called “legacy missions,” not homeland security missions before 9/11 and these are things related to our role inside the Department of Transportation: We remain under the Transportation Committee’s authorizing jurisdiction and there’s tremendous interest in how we allocated resources to those 11 mission areas and we usually do that based on local conditions, managing risk, with the input of our field commanders.
As we move forward, we’re going to have to get better at articulating how we do that and informing everybody of the knowledge and information that we have to make those decisions. From a strategic management viewpoint I think that will be a significant challenge for my successor to be able to articulate how we do all the things we do and how we set priorities and how we manage risk. Because as budgets get depressed and more pressure is put on agencies to do more things people are going to want to have an explanation of why we had X-level of effort on drug interdiction, Y-level of effort on fisheries enforcement and Z-level of effort on migrant interdiction.
A: Any other points that you want to make?
Q: It is critically important now that we’ve restructured our acquisition organization—we’ve basically stabilized the baseline for the national security cutter, which is the lead, very big asset we are building—that we move as quickly as we can to recapitalize the Coast Guard. We’ve got ships that are over 40 years old and we’ve got some ships that are over 60 years old. The cost of maintaining these ships associated with operating them to our people and the mission are such that we need new ships as soon as possible.
So, we’ve got our acquisition house in order, we’ve stabilized the technical baseline for the national security cutter and I would like to see us build out the new fleet as fast as possible.
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David Silverberg |
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| Editor, is a respected Washington writer and editor with experience in defense, technology and congressional affairs.
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