Group #1 Strategy Statements



Executive Overview

|From our robust foundations … |Faced with a startlingly complex future operating environment characterized by new or unfamiliar |

| |security threats, competing environmental pressures, challenges to national borders and concepts of |

| |sovereignty, and the continuing demand for efficient and safe transport, the U.S. Coast Guard will |

| |enhance its capabilities and competencies in four enduring mission areas: |

| | |

| |Enforcing laws and treaties in the maritime environment, |

| |Defending national security interests, |

| |Protecting the marine environment, and |

| |Promoting safe and efficient maritime activities. |

| | |

| |To these ends, the Coast Guard will pursue ten strategic initiatives. We will: |

| | |

| | |

|…we will embark on a new journey … |Take a leadership role in defining and developing an integrated maritime management system. |

| | |

| | |

|… with the knowledge, agility and |Shift from a program-focused approach to mission planning and execution to an integrated |

|competencies that come from an |cross-programmatic approach that better serves the nation. |

|integrated organizational structure, | |

| | |

| |Institute a geographically based unified command structure that can plan and execute diverse missions|

| |simultaneously. |

| | |

| | |

|full spectrum awareness, |Acquire full maritime domain awareness. |

| | |

| | |

|expansive partnerships and alliances, |Identify, prioritize and energize strategic partnerships and alliances in line with organizational |

| |needs and emerging mission requirements. |

| | |

|highly skilled and adaptable people, |Develop a flexible, dynamic human resources system that provides the capabilities essential for |

| |complex, diverse and multi-mission operations and management. |

| | |

| | |

| |7. Acquire or cultivate the ability to manage information, create knowledge, design effective |

| |business processes, use decision support tools, optimize resources and manage risks in order to |

| |create and balance successful mission outcomes. |

| | |

| | |

|leading technology, |8. Develop a philosophy of information management and an information technology acquisition approach|

| |that leverages the best capabilities of the marketplace and the best practices of successful agencies|

| |and firms, and seek wherever possible to purchase the best systems the market has to offer rather |

| |than develop systems in house. |

| | |

| | |

|and an unshakable sense of the Coast |9. Maintain critical focus on core Coast Guard missions by outsourcing non-core functions where |

|Guard’s purpose, mission and enduring |justified by analyses of all costs and benefits. |

|values. | |

| | |

| |10. Cultivate and manage a clear and commanding public image of the Coast Guard’s identity, missions,|

| |and the value the service delivers to U.S. citizens in the performance of its missions. |

Preamble: Core Missions

No matter how the future unfolds, the Coast Guard will face a complex operating environment characterized by new or unfamiliar security threats, competing environmental pressures, challenges to national borders and concepts of sovereignty, and a continuing demand for efficient and safe transport. The Coast Guard therefore will enhance its capabilities and competencies in four enduring mission areas: enforcing laws and treaties in the maritime environment; defending national security interests; protecting the marine environment; and promoting safe and efficient maritime activities. The precise activities performed in these mission areas will evolve in anticipation of changing security and law enforcement threats and in response to the shifting direction and nature of maritime commerce and transportation needs.

Enforce Laws and Treaties in the Maritime Environment

Through superior technology, information/intelligence, strategic alliances and training, the Coast Guard will achieve a significantly higher level of flexibility, agility, and effectiveness to meet or exceed externally established performance expectations in the conduct of its law enforcement missions.

Moving into the 21st Century, law enforcement will be the premier mission and core competency of the Coast Guard; however, the mix of laws to be enforced and their relative emphasis will shift. The Protection of Living Marine Resources (LMR) mission will increase in importance no matter how the world evolves in the next twenty years. On the other hand, the level of effort associated with the Coast Guard’s drug and alien migrant interdiction missions is contingent more on conditions outside Coast Guard control. In some scenarios, these missions would be enhanced, in others they would decline or perhaps even disappear. The Coast Guard’s required core law enforcement competencies and capabilities will be essentially unchanged no matter which missions have priority at any given time.

Defend National Security Interests

The Coast Guard will enlarge its national defense role by acquiring the resources and developing the core competencies to provide homeland defense within the maritime domain, to include, among other things, border control, port security and anti-terrorism.

The nature of national defense is expanding beyond conventional military tasks to include a growing set of non-conventional threats, such as economic and information warfare and terrorism. Unlike conventional warfare, where forward deployment can distance the threat, these new forms of warfare can strike the U.S. homeland directly, creating the need for responsive homeland defense capability. The Coast Guard will devise and acquire the operational capability to conduct homeland defense, including obtaining access to the required intelligence information and C4ISR necessary to support this and other deepwater missions, while retaining the mobility to forward deploy with DoD assets.

Protect the Marine Environment

To meet national expectations for a clean and sustainable environment in times of increasing environmental stress, the Coast Guard will serve as steward of a fragile marine environment, engaging in a broad spectrum of activities—from education, surveillance and inspection to response, investigation, and enforcement.

The first decades of the 21st Century are expected to be a time of increasing environmental stress no matter how the world evolves, yet the American public will expect a clean environment. The Coast Guard will work to preserve healthy stocks of fish and other living marine resources and to keep the Nation’s waters free of oil, chemicals, plastics, and invasive species. In pursuit of these goals, the Coast Guard will enforce maritime environmental laws and regulations, protect the Nation’s living marine resources, aggressively respond to high-impact threats to the marine environment, and foster the development of new technologies for prevention and remediation of marine disasters.

Promote Safe and Efficient Maritime Activities

The Coast Guard will be the guardian of safe and efficient maritime system by advocating for and leading in the development of an integrated systems approach to managing the maritime domain.

The future maritime environment presents the Nation with challenges and opportunities across a wide range of private and public enterprises. The complex interactions among activities like seabed mining, oil drilling, fishing, merchant shipping and pleasure boating will demand integrated planning and execution, and a balance of prevention, facilitation, and response capabilities across the maritime domain. The Coast Guard will lead the effort in this area.

Technology increasingly is reducing—but will not eliminate—the search aspect of the Coast Guard’s Search and Rescue mission. At the same time, passenger vessel capacity is rising dramatically, greatly increasing the number of people to be rescued in the event of a cruise ship or passenger ferry disaster. The Coast Guard therefore will maintain its search expertise while enhancing its capability to both conduct and coordinate complex at sea rescues.

As the Coast Guard moves forward into the next century, we will take charge of our destiny by creating the knowledge, expertise and capability to professionally execute enduring and emerging mission areas. To these ends, the Coast Guard will pursue ten strategic initiatives….

Strategy Statements and Implementation Considerations

1. An Integrated Maritime Management System

The Coast Guard will take a leadership role in defining and developing an integrated maritime management system.

The Coast Guard will lead, and advocate for, the development of an integrated systems approach within America’s maritime domain. America’s "maritime domain" includes intermodal connections, ports, waterways, territorial waters, EEZs and the high seas, as well as those natural resources found within and below the water column. In examining maritime domain issues, an integrated systems approach considers the interests of all affected parties to achieve solutions that yield the greatest public value. It is a holistic approach that balances transportation, law enforcement, national security, natural resource management, maritime safety, and environmental protection perspectives.

Implementation Considerations:

1. The potential services of an integrated maritime management system include dispute adjudication; user advocacy; resource utilization; access management; transportation facilitation; law enforcement; national defense; critical information and intelligence; passenger, crew, and cargo tracking; safety; and emergency response.

2. Additional legislative authority would be required for the Coast Guard to become the advocate for the nation's maritime domain and to actively promote U.S. maritime interests--functions currently residing with other federal agencies.

3. Public and private sector partnerships and alliances with all key users, service providers, regulators and constituents will be required for success (see strategy #5).

4. A methodology for evaluating proposed solutions to problems affecting the maritime domain would need to be devised (see strategy #7).

5. There is an inherent tension between the need for transportation efficiency in a growing global economy and the requirement to protect the nation from external threats, such as terrorism and smuggling. (Note: This is but one example; numerous other such challenges exist that will make developing (and leading) the integrated maritime management system difficult.)

2. Integrated Mission Planning and Execution

The Coast Guard will shift from a program-focused approach to mission planning and execution to an integrated cross-programmatic approach that better serves the nation.

Until recently, the M & O Directorates tended to plan and execute missions in isolation. This has begun to change as Coast Guard missions increasingly cross program boundaries. Fisheries

boardings involve not only checking for compliance with NMFS regulations (O) but also Commercial Fishing Vessel Industry Safety Act regulations (M). Container inspection program personnel need to be aware not only of the hazardous materials regulations (M) but also evidence of smuggling (O). Search and rescue cases (O) regularly evolve into environmental response cases (M). COTPs deny entry to Special Interest Vessels (M) to protect national security, based on intelligence gathered by national assets tasked by the ICC (O). With global trade, transnational threats, and environmental pressures creating increasingly complex interactions within the maritime domain, the need for cross-programmatic communication, mission planning and execution will become ever more important. The Coast Guard therefore will integrate M & O mission planning and execution at all levels.

Implementation Considerations:

6. This strategy depends for its success on implementation of a cross-programmatic approach to strategy, policy, and doctrine formulation, and on a similar approach to resource planning--not just between M & O but across all Directorates.

7. Unification of the organizational processes and command structure of G-M and G-O from top to bottom. Consider unifying the Headquarters organization before unifying the Areas and Districts, and unify the Areas and Districts before unifying front-line field units (see strategy #3).

8. This strategy has enormous cultural and human resources implications; it should be approached in deliberate, concrete steps over a number of years.

3. Organizational Structure

The Coast Guard will institute a geographically based unified command structure that can plan and execute diverse missions simultaneously.

As discussed in strategy #2, to meet the challenges of the future the Coast Guard must integrate M & O mission planning and execution at all levels. This integration ultimately must extend to the field organization; limited budgetary resources and an increasing public desire for government efficiency and one-stop shopping demand it. The Coast Guard therefore will evolve a geographically-based unified command structure that provides agile, timely and effective response across the entire spectrum of Coast Guard missions.

Implementation Considerations:

• Geographically proximate MSO, Group and District operations/communications centers should be combined into integrated command centers staffed by personnel from both commands as soon as possible, regardless whether the commands themselves have been combined.

• While logical to array Coast Guard forces operating in the coastal zone on the basis of geography, advances in transportation and communications technology will permit greater

dispersion than at present without compromising effective response. Integrated operations commands should be sited and assigned AORs with this in mind.

9. Integrated command centers, integrated operations commands and their assigned units will require timely and accurate intelligence information and a state-of-the-art C4ISR system capable of providing a common real-time operating picture.

10. Commanders of units with integrated command centers will require the ability/authority to direct all assets within their AOR when required, even if the M & O units providing the assets being directed have not been combined. .

• To effectively respond to changes within their AORs and provide the best level of service to the public, field commanders need the ability/authority to reprogram resources within their AORs.

11. Strong consideration should be given to developing one or more specialized regional response forces (combining existing strike teams, PSUs, LEDETs, etc.) with the capability to deploy anywhere in the maritime domain in response to high impact contingencies/incidents (e.g., SONs, WMD incidents, very long range SAR).

4. Maritime Domain Awareness

Acquire full maritime domain awareness.

Because many of the challenges facing the Coast Guard in the next century will be best met as far from America’s shores as possible, the Coast Guard must achieve the ability to acquire, track, and identify in real time any vessel or aircraft entering America’s maritime domain. A combination of present and future technologies will make this possible. The Coast Guard must gain access to these technologies and then meld them into a system capable of integrating aircraft, cutters, boats, stations and regional command centers to meet mission requirements. The Coast Guard need not develop its own "stand alone" system; rather, the Coast Guard can and should use existing and future systems developed by other agencies to achieve this objective.

Implementation Considerations:

12. The Coast Guard will need to evaluate what resources are available and what will need to be procured/developed in order to establish full maritime domain awareness, as well as to provide a common operational picture for all Coast Guard assets.

13. The Coast Guard should review the desirability for implementing a 24-nm contiguous zone and moving port state control regime out to 200 nm. If it is concluded that either or both of these actions are desirable, proper legislative authorization will have to be sought.

14. The implementation of this strategy should take into account the current state of the integrated maritime management system (see strategy #1).

• The development of unified regional commands (see strategy #3) and the Integrated Deepwater System will help with the implementation of this strategy.

15. The Coast Guard should explore the possibility of becoming a full-time user of U.S. intelligence community assets and of establishing collection priorities for the Coast Guard.

• The Coast Guard should evaluate the benefits of forming or strengthening partnerships or alliances with other intelligence gathering organizations (see strategy #5).

16. The development of a global transportation information and analysis system would assist the Coast Guard in obtaining full domain awareness.

17. The Coast Guard should consider the core competencies that will be needed to manage and effectively use the technologies associated with full maritime domain awareness (e.g., collection/analysis and risk-based decision making).

5. Partnerships and Alliances

The Coast Guard will identify, prioritize and energize strategic partnerships and alliances in line with organizational needs and emerging mission requirements.

The future will require the Coast Guard to strengthen existing relationships and forge new relationships not only to increase the service's ability to perform its assigned missions, but also to broaden critical political support for Coast Guard missions and diversify the service's funding sources. The Coast Guard will develop strategic partnerships and alliances with other federal agencies and employ them to best serve the American public.

Implementation Considerations:

• The Coast Guard will need to identify all of its existing relationships and develop a comprehensive system to realistically evaluate the strength and benefits of these relationships. Part of the process should be to identify whether or not the relationships are formalized (e.g., by statute, MOU/MOAs, etc.) or informal.

• A process needs to be developed to identify areas where relationships could strengthen the Coast Guard and then a comprehensive plan for developing or strengthening relationships should be developed. The importance of relationships at the local level must not be overlooked; they are critical to the success of the Maritime Transportation System initiative as well as the imperative of raising the visibility of the Coast Guard with the American public.

• The Coast Guard should seek to place liaison officers at agencies of strategic value to the service and should employ personnel exchanges when these exchanges would benefit the service... Sponsoring Directorates should actively employ these officers to further the Coast Guard's needs.

• All partnerships or alliances should be pursued with the Coast Guard's "brand image" strategy in mind (strategy #10).

6. Human Resources

The Coast Guard will develop a flexible, dynamic human resources system that provides the capabilities essential for complex, diverse and multi-mission operations and management.

Changing population demographics and the need to develop new core competencies require the Coast Guard to modify its human resource system to ensure the service's ability to meet its obligation to the American public. Key to successfully modifying and then maintaining the system will be collaboration with unit commanders, the chain of command, program managers, and other stakeholders to determine requirements expressed in terms of knowledge, skill, and experience. The system must manage the flow of skills to meet those requirements, and anticipate and adapt to future HR demand. The system will maximize flexibility in the following areas:

• Component mix (active and reserve military, civilian, auxiliary, and contract)

• Location (rapidly shifting resources across regions)

• Size (permanent, short-term surge/recovery levels)

• Skills (re-skilling)

• Culture (ethnic, gender, background, interests, education, etc.).

The system will focus on the following areas of skill content:

• Increasingly technical skills

• Systems thinking vs. event thinking

• Professional skills, knowledge management, and learning to learn

• Project and team management, risk assessment, analytic skills

• Core leader skills and personal (self) management-

Implementation Considerations:

• Design a flexible HR system allowing the Coast Guard to guarantee the flow of appropriate people and skill sets to meet anticipated requirements (e.g., component mix, mobility).

• Develop a better way to determine the demand for people and to specify skill requirements (e.g., aggregate unit skill sets vs. individual billets/positions with assigned skill-sets or qualification codes).

• Establish consultative network from unit commanding officer level to the program manager level (integrate PC, QPC, FOT, other assets):

• To understand the structure of work requirements; and

• To diagnose current performance discrepancies and anticipate future ones (i.e., discrepancies between customer skill set needs and current/likely future CG skill set portfolio) and resolve them.

• Develop appropriate mechanisms to attract, train, retain, reward, compensate and develop all Coast Guard people, challenging existing systems and methods as needed (e.g., compensation system, benefits, “up or out” promotion system, lateral entry, permeable component barriers, de-coupling from DoD, labor market interaction, hiring vs. growing more skills, job design, career paths, etc.).Establish a measurement mechanism to determine system success; must be useful at all levels in the chain of command, across programs.

7. Intellectual Capital Development

The Coast Guard will acquire or cultivate the ability to manage information, create knowledge, design effective business processes, use decision support tools, optimize resources, and manage risks in order to create and balance successful mission outcomes.

While twenty-first century Coast Guard men and women will still need to be well-grounded in maritime competencies, the future high-technology world will require Coast Guard personnel to have additional skill sets in order to efficiently accomplish all of the Coast Guard's missions. The Coast Guard must ensure that its personnel receive the proper tools and training to effectively run the future Coast Guard.

Implementation Considerations:

• Imbed systems thinking at all organizational levels.

• Invest in the development of new core competencies, particularly knowledge management, risk management and analysis, and project management.

• Develop or acquire decision-making and evaluation tools that clearly describe the impacts of shifting resource allocations for both tactical and strategic resource management.

• Develop or acquire risk-based modeling and simulation capability.

• This strategy is intertwined with the human resources strategy (strategy #6) and the information management and technology strategy (strategy #8); they must be coordinated.

8. Information Management and Technology

The Coast Guard will develop a philosophy of information management and an information technology acquisition approach that leverages the best capabilities of the marketplace and the best practices of successful agencies and firms, and will seek wherever possible to purchase the best systems the market has to offer rather than develop systems in house.

The Coast Guard of the 21st Century will operate in an increasingly information intensive environment with a greatly reduced decision cycle. To keep pace with these trends and the pace of technological advance, the Coast Guard must develop a philosophy that encourages the rapid deployment of existing, state-of- the- art technology rather than developing its own systems.

Implementation Considerations:

18. The Coast Guard's information management doctrine should cover systems architecture, data ownership and management, applications ownership and management, and the maintenance of policy histories to link policy to subsequent results.

19. This strategy must be coordinated with the strategies regarding development of an integrated maritime management system (strategy #1), the integration of operations (strategies #2-3), acquiring full maritime domain awareness (strategy #4), human resources (strategy #6), and intellectual capital development (strategy #7).

20. Consider leasing and other innovative alternatives to purchasing IT systems.

21. Seek acquisition partnerships and interoperability with other agencies (see also strategy #5).

22. Scale chosen systems across the Coast Guard.

23. Optimize systems architecture for integrated knowledge management tools (see strategy #7).

9. Outsourcing

The Coast Guard will maintain critical focus on core Coast Guard missions by outsourcing non-core functions where justified by analyses of all costs and benefits.

Costs and benefits include direct (e.g., bidding), indirect (e.g., training), incidental (e.g., structural adjustments) and other quantifiable, non-quantifiable, financial or non-financial inputs. Examples of non-core requirements to be evaluated for outsourcing include support, training, logistics, maintenance, and IT solutions.

Implementation Considerations:

Obtain organization-wide commitment.

Define success and establish goals.

• Identify best practices.

• Establish criteria for outsourcing.

• Design process – method, skill requirements, training, and data/information.

• Embed outsourcing as an ongoing process (vs. one-time project).

• Include field involvement.

• Ensure savings-reinvestment sharing.

• Measure success through an appropriate evaluation mechanism.

10. Public Outreach

The Coast Guard will cultivate and manage a clear and commanding public image of its identity, missions, and the value it delivers to the U.S. citizen in the performance of the its missions.

Two elements of the Coast Guard’s future operating environment that appear clear are a difficult budgetary climate and demographic changes suggesting that the Coast Guard will have to aggressively recruit to achieve its desired workforce. Overcoming these challenges will take more than good works alone. The Coast Guard must identify those key enduring characteristics that make the United States Coast Guard “The Coast Guard.” We then must consistently articulate this image to the public. The ultimate goal of this “brand management” strategy is to so ingrain the Coast Guard’s image in the mind of the public that the mere mention of a Coast Guard mission area invokes a positive image of the service.

Implementation Considerations:

24. Proactively project, and then actively manage, an accurate, compelling and positive image of the Coast Guard to all potential maritime industry, U.S. public and international constituencies.

25. Devise and conduct a focused, aggressive, and effective communications program targeted at internal Coast Guard alignment and execution.

26. Devise and conduct a focused, aggressive, and effective communications program targeted at maritime users, service providers and constituents.

27. Acknowledge the responsibility and authority of the “brand manager” to enhance and protect the Coast Guard’s image and resource that office accordingly.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download