No Service chief likes to see a run-of-the-mill budget hearing turn into a brutal and public beat-down. But that’s what happened to the two top leaders of the U.S. Coast Guard.
On July 13, members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation took turns raging at the Coast Guard’s “heartbreaking, maddening, frustrating and intolerable” record of handling sexual assaults at the Coast Guard Academy. Furious legislators slapped the embattled Service with an Inspector General investigation and demanded greater accountability from a Coast Guard that is struggling to reconcile a demanding, zero-defect culture with an imperfect reality.
Fouled Anchor Fouls Up:
In the hearing, Committee members dropped a far-too-infrequent opportunity to support a larger Coast Guard budget to focus on Operation Fouled Anchor, a closely-held, years-long Coast Guard investigation into how the Coast Guard Academy handled sexual assault cases between 1988 and 2006.
In 2014, just as the Navy began working through their sprawling “Fat Leonard” scandal, the Coast Guard began digging into some long-buried allegations of sexual assault at the Coast Guard Academy, the college that trains most of the Coast Guard’s top leaders. The investigation snowballed, and, by 2020, investigators had uncovered more than sixty substantiated incidents of rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment. Few of the accused perpetrators—who had, by then, moved into top leadership posts—received more than light administrative punishments.
Unlike the Navy’s painful effort to hunt down potentially corrupt officers, Coast Guard leaders hid the Fouled Anchor report. It only revealed the scandal and investigation after CNN reporters, earlier this year, learned of the allegations and started asking questions. Even Admiral Fagan, the Coast Guard Commandant, was kept in the dark, apparently unaware of the “totality” of the Fouled Anchor investigation.
Senators were livid.
To her credit, Admiral Linda Fagan, the current Coast Guard Commandant, was contrite, recognizing the Service’s systemic failure to address sexual misconduct in the Service.
Fagan used the hearing to announce the start of a 90-day “accountability and transparency” review of the Service, led by a Flag Officer, aimed at understanding “what are the aspects of the culture that have allowed this to occur.” But the review, focusing predominantly upon sexual assault and harassment, is far too limited.
Culture Of The USCG Academy Is Coast Guard Culture:
If Coast Guard culture is what drove the Fouled Anchor scandal, then similar accountability and transparency challenges are percolating throughout the rest of the Service.
Fagan hinted at the scope of the Coast Guard’s problem with its corporate culture, telling the Senators, “It is clear to me that we’ve got a culture in areas that is permissive and allows sexual assaults, harassment, bullying, retaliation, that’s inconsistent with our core values. It is not the workforce that I want or expect.” When pressed, Fagan walked her statement back, redirecting her focus towards rooting out sexual assault and improving management of sexual assault allegations.
Fagan was wrong to back away and limit her concerns about the Coast Guard’s corporate culture. In a service that reassigns employees every two years, it is tough to believe a single facility is a behavioral outlier. If the Fouled Anchor scandal reflects wider Coast Guard culture, then similar behaviors reach well beyond the Coast Guard Academy gates.
And it isn’t just sexual assault. If, over a period of years, leaders at the Coast Guard Academy put their concerns for the Coast Guard’s image above the safety of Cadets, those same pressures are, in other commands, justifying the quashing casualty reports, the misrepresentation of estimates of completion, or the gaming of platform availability rates. If the Coast Guard is unable to acknowledge a major scandal, hiding the scope of the problem from senior officers, what else is the Service refusing to acknowledge to itself?
Chair of the Committee, Senator Maria Cantwell, bore down on the problem, wondering why the Commandant might not “have the ability to hold somebody accountable if they didn’t inform you or kept information from reaching the highest ranks.”
On the rare occasion Senators broke away from raging over the Fouled Anchor scandal, the Coast Guard’s ongoing struggle for accountability and transparency were on full display.
Fagan, when asked about the Offshore Patrol Cutter program, admitted some problems, saying, “There was a shafting issue that’s resulted in a delay of several weeks and we believe Argus will be launched by the end of this year and that’s a likely year delay in delivery date.”
That is, at best, an understatement. The Argus, the Coast Guard’s first Offshore Patrol Cutter, has been delayed for far more than “several weeks.” Last year, when Forbes.com broke news of the shafting issues, the Coast Guard stated the Argus launch ceremony “was originally scheduled to occur” in the third quarter of Fiscal Year 2022, between April 1 and June 30, 2022.
Today, the Argus is still high and dry, with no launch date in sight.
Fagan also failed to relate that the Argus was contractually due to deliver in June of 2023. Until the ramifications of the apparent contractual breach with the Argus are understood, and the vessel construction schedule is re-baselined, the Coast Guard has no real idea of when the first Offshore Patrol Cutter will leave the shipyard and enter service.
A Service that aspires to transparency and accountability should say as much. A failure to relate such problems eliminates any opportunity for Congress to intervene, either to help shipyards do better, or shaping future Coast Guard contracts to better align with best procurement and shipbuilding practices.
A discussion of Coast Guard personnel offered a similar story. While the Coast Guard is observing a welcome growth in recruitment numbers, Fagan said retention was “good” but then noted that the Coast Guard “have had a slight uptick—or sort of decrease—in retention in this past year.” Rather than provide details, Fagan stated, “I am satisfied with where our retention numbers are.”
In aggregate, the retention numbers may well look good. But some of the details are disturbing. Mid-level Coast Guard leaders, necessary to grow and guide the Service, are leaving the Coast Guard in enormous numbers. According to observers with access to Coast Guard personnel data, traditionally, only about 10% of Coast Guard Commanders file for retirement before being vetted for promotion to Captain. That retirement rate doubled during the COVID-19 epidemic, only to double again this year. Today, over 40% of the class of promotion-ready Coast Guard commanders decided to quit before even facing their promotion board.
That’s not a good sign, and, if it continues, it will be very hard for the Service to recover the lost pool of senior-level talent.
Coast Guard’s Corporate Culture Needs Reform:
The Academy scandal is likely not a one-off thing. When the Coast Guard cannot move accurate information up through it’s own Command Chain, and the assorted pressures of the Coast Guard’s zero-defect culture show signs of bending the Coast Guard’s core values of honor, respect and devotion to duty until those values break, it’s a problem.
Given the Senate’s response to the Fouled Anchor cover-up, Fagan has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to move the Coast Guard away from the pointless pursuit of a zero-defect culture, and towards a Service that acknowledges reality. It is important to teach every Coast Guard stakeholder that, in an underfunded, overtasked government agency, things can—and do—go wrong. Things break. Accidents happen.
And that is OK. Public confidence in the Coast Guard is a result of the Coast Guard’s core values. It doesn’t rest in sortie rates, or availability numbers or some other metric. For a Service that enjoys a well-deserved boost in public confidence after every big storm, the Coast Guard has a unique ability to acknowledge and ride out and fix big problems with little fear of long-term consequences. Nobody questions the Coast Guard’s efforts or devotion to duty, and greater openness and transparency that reflect the Coast Guard’s real challenges are a route to a bigger and better Coast Guard.
With the IG Investigation, Congress has given Fagan the needle gun she needs to go after what she characterizes as “pockets of rust that need to be eliminated from the organization.” But Fagan needs to look beyond sexual assault and use the IG investigators to examine information flows from major procurements and operations up into the Coast Guard headquarters. Too many Coast Guard leaders are hiding their problems. They shouldn’t. There is nothing wrong with airing problems and letting the public see how the Coast Guard fights to do good at sea. A stronger overall Coast Guard focus on public accountability and transparency will resonate for this overtasked and underfunded Agency.
Put bluntly, openness is good for the Coast Guard. There’s nothing the American public loves more than an underdog that, when faced with failure, reorients to confront and overcome big challenges.
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