The USCGC Active (WMEC-618) was commissioned in 1966 and is still serving--a tribute to the Coast Guard's culture "can do" culture.
What’s in a motto? Can a few words set the tone for an organization? Or summarize its culture? The Coast Guard motto—Semper Paratus or “Always Ready”—supposedly does both. It is an aspirational slogan that also describes an ethos engrained in every Coast Guardsman. The Coast Guard prides itself on being ready for any and every task and mission.
According to past Commandant Admiral James Loy, however, the motto is a curse, “a description of an operational readiness level that we refuse to let slip.”[i]If an organization is “always ready,” it is hard to argue that it cannot meet its missions, that it needs more funding, more people, or more support. As Admiral Loy concluded,
Instead of saying, “We can’t do that job,” we take a perverse pride in performing our missions with no money, old equipment, too few people, and seat-of-the-pants training. The extension of the “do more with less” logic is doing everything with nothing.[ii]
Many Americans do not realize the Coast Guard is an armed force or that it struggles for funding in ways different from its sister services. From what the public sees, the service appears to live up to its motto. Whether on shows such as “Coast Guard Alaska” and “The Deadliest Catch,” or in press coverage of the historic and awe-inspiring response to Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria in the fall of 2017, the Coast Guard seems reliable, especially for a modern government agency. Perception is often viewed as reality, but the United States cannot and should not rely on uninformed perception when judging the readiness of one of its five armed forces.
Looking beyond the media’s depiction of the service and its carefully cultivated image, it is easy to understand the challenges it faces. The Coast Guard has a unique role in the government—it is the only armed force that is also a law enforcement and regulatory agency. It attempts to accomplish 11 statutory missions with a workforce smaller than that of the New York City Police Department. The complexities of those missions continue to grow despite a relatively stagnant budget and force size. The world is rapidly evolving, but in many ways the Coast Guard is stuck in the past—operating old cutters and aging aircraft while relying on antiquated computers and technologies. The Coast Guard strives to be Always Ready, but perhaps such a high standard perpetuates the inadequacies that drain the service.
Unofficial mottoes abound in the Coast Guard; for example: “You have to go out, but you don’t have to come back.” Generations of Coast Guardsmen have been trying to live up to Semper Paratus for more than a century. Unfortunately, as Admiral Loy noted, it only creates a race to the bottom, an experiment to see how much more the Coast Guard can do and with how much less. Leaders have long rowed against this current, trying to articulate why the service needs more funding when it responds to any contingency, interdicts record-breaking amounts of illicit narcotics, and operates in more of the globe than ever.[iii]Unfortunately the motto makes for too good a soundbite and too compelling a narrative for the Coast Guard to say it is not Always Ready.
In the other U.S. armed forces, a slang phrase has developed that summarizes how the Coast Guard is able to operate at such a high level in the face of adversity: “Embrace the S*ck.” It is not a new phrase and did not originate in the Coast Guard. It appears to have first joined the military lexicon sometime in late 2001.[iv]The phrase became ubiquitous in the military, to the point that there is an entire handbook of military jargon with that title. Today, there are “Embrace” patches, mugs, shirts, stickers, and more.
Rather than singing Semper Paratus, should the service be crying “Embrace the S*ck” from the rooftops? Obviously not. While it is important to market the service, the Coast Guard does not take the easy way on anything, so why should the motto be different? Semper Paratus describes the Coast Guard’s aspiration, but it does not describe what Coast Guardsmen do every day.
Every Coast Guardsman’s inclination to “do more with less” is evidence of an inherent willingness to suffer. Finding a way to get the job done is just accepting each adversity that comes along. When a coxswain is exhausted but people need to be saved, is she really “ready” or just willing to do what is necessary? Can a crew confidently say that their cutter is always ready when it is 50 years old and they are scavenging parts from junkyards? No, they simply have chosen to do anything and everything to ensure they can meet mission demands.
In some ways, “Embrace the S*ck” calls on the power of positive thinking. By resigning one’s self to living with a tough situation and deciding you nevertheless will do your best, you make the situation less bad and more solvable. As Sir Winston Churchill wrote, “The positive thinker sees the invisible, feels the intangible, and achieves the impossible.”[v]A person’s passion and desire to perform well can overtake a situation, become contagious, and make the entire team perform better. Coast Guardsmen focus on the positives because they have no choice if they want to solve the problem, repair the casualty, and meet the mission—as they have done for more than 200 years.
That being said, the Coast Guard does not need to change its motto. The service forever will aspire to be Always Ready. It would be hard to find a Coast Guardsman who does not want to be Always Ready—each man and woman in the fleet works tirelessly to uphold the motto.
Instead, Coast Guard leaders should recognize that the unofficial slogan developed by its sister services is a truism that every Coast Guardsman is proud of and that the Coast Guard and the nation could celebrate. Senior leaders regularly brag about the capabilities and effectiveness of the service’s newest assets. During his 2018 State of the Coast Guard Address, Admiral Paul Zukunft talked about the new ships in the fleet:
When I take a look back, not long ago, our piers were chock full of tired and aging cutters. Today, you’ll smell fresh paint and see new National Security Cutters . . . Fast Response Cutters . . . on the way are Offshore Patrol cutters . . . we’re closer than we’ve ever been to new Ice Breakers . . . and we’re working to field new Waterway Commerce Cutters that will replace our oldest fleet on the water today—some of which are over 70 years old![vi]
While he also celebrated the Coast Guard workforce, his speech did not describe the lengths to which Coast Guardsmen go on a daily basis to meet mission demands.
In addition to celebrating record drug interdictions by brand new national security cutters, the Coast Guard should celebrate the crews that enable the 210-foot medium endurance cutters (MECs) to get under way and be effective—the youngest of these ships is 49 years old![vii]For comparison, every MEC is older than every ship in the U.S. Navy (except for the USS Constitution). Coast Guard leaders must tell the public and Congress that resource constraints force it to fly its helicopters three times longer than any other military service and applaud the grunt work necessary to do so.
In trying to position the Coast Guard to win big on Capitol Hill and increase the budget, commandants and their teams advocate for new assets. Unfortunately, once those new assets start rolling off the production lines and sailing out of the shipyards, they focus on the great things they do rather than on the old assets that crews are still trying to keep operational. Do Congress and the American people know that Coast Guardsmen go to sea every day in ships that are more than 50 years old and fly aircraft that are older than most of their pilots? This is a story that must be told.
The Coast Guard also needs to focus on its most important asset: its people. The crews of the new fast response cutters work hard for their operational successes, but so do the men and women maintaining the obsolete Paxman engines in the six 110-foot patrol boats operating in the Persian Gulf. By admitting that Semper Paratusis an aspiration, the Coast Guard can allow itself to celebrate the truth that while the service is not Always Ready, Coast Guardsmen embrace every task to meet their mission. That might not be the service’s aspiration, but it should be its inspiration.
[i]Admiral James Loy, “The Curse of Semper Paratus”, speech at the Military Order of the Carabao Luncheon (January 19, 1999).
[ii]Loy.
[iii]Rear Admiral Terry McKnight, USN (Ret.), “Opinion: Doing the Most with the Least; the Coast Guard Dilemma,” U.S. Naval Institute News (March 9, 2017), https://news.usni.org/2017/03/09/opinion-doing-the-most-with-the-least-the-coast-guard-dilemma.
[iv]Ben Zimmer, “Nancy Pelosi Told House Democrats to ‘Embrace the Suck.’ Where Did That Phrase Come From?”, Slate (December 13, 2013), http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2013/12/13/embrace_the_suck_nancy_pelosi_used_a_slang_military_phrase_when_urging_house.html.
[v]Winston Churchill, My Early Life, 1874-1904.
[vi]Admiral Paul Zukunft, “State of the Coast Guard 2018” (March 01, 2018), https://www.uscg.mil/Portals/0/seniorleadership/SOTCG/2018_State_of_the_Coast_Guard_Address_linked.pdf.
[vii]“Reliance Class Cutter,” Military.com (last visited June 29, 2018), https://www.military.com/equipment/reliance-class-cutter.
Commander Petersen enlisted in the Coast Guard at age 18 and later attended the U.S. Coast Guard Academy and law school. He has served on cutters, at the Coast Guard Legal Service Command, and the Office of Budget and Programs. He is currently a Congressional Fellow in the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation.
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