At the Coast Guard, diversity is an operational imperative

From Alaska to Haiti, the Middle East to the Gulf of Mexico and many points in between, uniformed and civilian STEM professionals are carrying out the Coast Guard's national security and humanitarian missions, working side by side on issues with national and international impact. The Coast Guard is open for business and looking to hire lots of smart minds in the STEM world; hiring is brisk in technical areas.

The U.S. Coast Guard is almost as old as the nation; it traces its history back to 1790. The service combines humanitarian and maritime safety responsibilities with a variety of national security duties which have become increasingly important since the service became part of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003.

The Coast Guard's most recent and visible activities have centered around the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon drilling platform explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Admiral Thad Allen, who retired from his post as Coast Guard commandant in May, spearheaded the government response to the oil spill.

Just a few days before the Deepwater Horizon explosion and a few weeks before the Coast Guard change of command, Diversity/Careers editor in chief Kate Colborn talked with Admiral Allen about the roles that technology and diversity play in the Coast Guard's current missions. Later in the summer she spoke with Rear Admiral Thomas Ostebo, assistant commandant for engineering and logistics, who is considered the Coast Guard's "chief engineer."

Both officers emphasized the Coast Guard's need for skills in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) disciplines. And both stressed the importance of diversity to the successful execution of the mission of today's Coast Guard. Here are some of their observations.

Kate Colborn: The Coast Guard has a long and distinguished record of inclusion and diversity. How important is active promotion of diversity and inclusion in today's Coast Guard? How does diversity in the uniformed and civilian sectors of the Coast Guard benefit its mission?

Admiral Thad Allen: Diversity is an operational necessity in the Coast Guard, a matter of operational readiness. We deal with people operating ore carriers on the Great Lakes, fishermen on the Bering Sea, folks protecting wild life in Hawaii, as well as with illegal migrants. The best way to be effective in conducting such varied operations is to be in tune with the operating environment, and in my view that means also understanding the diversity within the operating environment and how it interacts with the mission.

For example, say we're in a high-speed chase in Florida in the middle of the night where a smuggler may be trying to bring in illegal migrants. We have boats traveling in excess of thirty knots and we're trying to talk through loud speakers to get them to stop so we can conduct a boarding without anyone being injured. It's essential for us to have people who speak Spanish and understand the geographical, cultural and political underpinnings of the situation. This is not a diversity issue, it's an operational imperative.

Another example: with less ice in the Arctic every summer, we send units to the North Slope of Alaska because of the offshore oil and gas operations there. It's essential for us to understand the culture, the ways and traditions of the Inupiat Alaska Natives who operate in the same area, folks engaged in subsistence hunting and whaling.

We meet with the tribal elders to talk about the interactions of our operations, and we have been congratulated at several meetings for the humility with which we approach our mission. That's not a word used often about folks in the offshore oil and gas industry.

Rear Admiral Thomas Ostebo: Or take the oil spill: there is a very large Vietnamese fishing community in Louisiana and other parts of the Gulf Coast. These are first- and second- generation emigrants and we were able to bring in Vietnamese-speaking active duty people to work with them and help manage the technical work of oil skimming and support for the cleanup.

Allen: In nautical terms, if you take a navigational fix with lines of bearing, you can have just one line or two lines or more crossing. The more points you have on the same problem the more accurate your solution. We call that "cognitive diversity."

Now take a group of people. They may all agree on the goal of the mission they are trying to achieve, but each one will have a slightly different style or view to bring to it. If they can develop agreed-upon goals, more points on the same problem, the course of action is going to be much more robust. You get a better solution by involving different viewpoints.

Colborn: The Coast Guard has always treated women as operational equals with men. Is the presence of women part of your "cognitive diversity?"

Allen: Absolutely. We have had a number of women commanding patrol boats in the Persian Gulf protecting oil platforms in Iraq. One of our women commanders was the first female to win the Bronze Star. Another female officer won an award as the Department of Defense female STEM role model. She has served in our acquisition organization, and now she's at the Coast Guard Academy as a math professor.

STEM pros and technology

Colborn: Let's talk about the role that people with technical backgrounds play in the uniformed and civilian sides of the Coast Guard.

Ostebo: Never before in Coast Guard history has a STEM background been more important. The Coast Guard provides a rich environment for engineering grads as both civilian and active-duty military personnel.

Recently I have been hiring more and more civilians with STEM degrees. We have internships and opportunities for them to come directly into the Coast Guard as civilians. We feel that having competent civilian engineers long-term in our workforce provides important continuity within project and engineering businesses lines.

One of our ongoing projects is the National Security Cutter. This is a huge, multi-billion dollar shipbuilding project that will take fifteen years to complete. We have a growing need for professional, degreed STEM folks with project management training to work on projects like this.

Active duty folks would go through five different jobs in the fifteen years, but if I hire a civilian to be a deputy ship design manager I can keep him or her happy and growing on the hard-core engineering and ship design work for all fifteen years.

On the other hand, active-duty folks bring immediate operational experience. We may have engineers working to build a large cutter that they themselves will be operating in the next few years. The civilians provide the continuity and the active duty folks bring a sense of ownership.

Colborn: Which technical disciplines are the most essential?

Ostebo: Electrical and electronics, naval, civil and aeronautical engineering. We run one of the largest naval and air forces in the world, with approximately 2,000 cutters and boats and 200 aircraft. Our civil engineers run a twelve billion dollar plant on tens of thousands of acres worldwide.

Our electronic command and control and our cyber responsibilities are also large, so we're constantly looking for good folks there. And in addition to the big four, we need large contingents of environmental engineers, whether we want to build a new building or decommission a ship.

Allen: There's a big math, IT and financial component, too. Government agencies need to get the most bang for the buck. We need people with the technical competency to manage large contracts and systems integration work, and that need will be here for the foreseeable future.

Technology drives hiring

Colborn: What other technical innovations are driving your need for STEM talent?

Allen: Our new communications system, Rescue 21, is a significant change. Unlike an analog-based system, we receive RF signals, convert them to data packages and use voip so we can distribute the information more widely. We include direction-finding capability to find a line of bearing so we can see who has issued the Mayday call.

The National Security Cutter will have many innovations. We hope to be able to launch a vertical unmanned aerial vehicle off an automated flight deck that reduces the number of personnel needed for helicopter handling.

The cutter will also have an automated deck gun, more sophisticated communications and a highly advanced boat launching system with high-speed boats that can pursue over the horizon and still stay in contact with the ship. The first of those is already operating.

Over the last few years we've also developed a prototype to take biometrics at sea from people we find when doing boardings. We can check fingerprints against national databases while at sea. And we're working toward tracking devices for ships that operate like transponders on commercial aircraft.

In New Orleans and Haiti

Colborn: The Coast Guard has been involved in some very high-profile operations over the last several years: Hurricane Katrina, the Haiti earthquake, and of course the Deepwater Horizon incident. How did technology, analysis and program management come into play in those incidents?

Allen: In Hurricane Katrina we were responding within federal law and statute and in support of state and local government. New Orleans and Louisiana needed our help because of the magnitude of effects on the area. The city lost continuity of government. It took about ten days for us to put a stable structure in place, and that was what stabilized the situation down there.

Haiti of course is a sovereign government, so our support had to be offered through the ambassador. They also lost continuity of government as well as the ability to control assets. We created functionality for them, working with U.S. AID, FEMA and the Department of Defense.

Our Coast Guard ships were the first to get to Haiti. When we got there we used our radar to control aircraft because the tower was down at the airport. We did initial surveillance with our cutters and aircraft, made assessments and reported back, evacuated U.S. citizens and med-evacced critically injured Haitians.

As we moved farther into the response, we knew we had to open the port, so we brought a maritime transportation recovery unit to survey the channel and make it and the port serviceable so shipping could come in. Logistics and engineering were critical to all that.

Transferable skills, cool destinations

Colborn: Where do you look for the diversity and STEM skills you need? And where do you send the techies you hire?

Ostebo: We are seeing many people with little or no government experience in our applicant pool. Folks who have worked for some of the big industrial enterprises look to the Coast Guard for work. We also hear from people at smaller engineering firms or shipyards. We have no problem today putting together a robust candidate list for Coast Guard civilian engineering jobs.

We work in some really cool places. Our aviation logistics center is in Elizabeth City, NC. We have a large Coast Guard shipyard and a large footprint of naval engineers in Baltimore, MD. Our shore infrastructure logistics center, the civil engineering center, is down in Norfolk, VA.

We also have civil and naval engineering units and active duty stations all around the country, places like Alameda, CA; Honolulu, HI; Juno, AK; up on the Great Lakes, along the New England coastline.

Colborn: How much civilian hiring do you expect to do in the next twelve months?

Ostebo: Our overall recapitalization effort is providing a strong environment for people to work here. Every one of our logistic centers is hiring, and we are looking to increase our workforce across all the engineering disciplines. The current administration wants us to "insource" several hundred positions that have been done by contractors.

A mix of experience

Colborn: When you hire civilians, do you hire mostly new grads or are you looking for experienced people?

Ostebo: If we are hiring a ship design expert or a civil engineer at the officer-chief level, we look for acquisition, management and engineering experience. We sometimes hire these people from the other services and other agencies.

We also like to bring in technical people at entry level. We like to get new college grads who will make it a twenty- or thirty-year career and provide long-term value.

We've just put in place a partner agreement with North Carolina A&T, the number one STEM-grad-producing HBCU in the country, and we've set up summer internships at our aviation logistics center. We also have a college student pre-commissioning initiative at HBCUs and other minority-serving colleges, where the students join the reserve and get reserve pay.
That program has been around for ten years.

Humanitarian service

Colborn: It sounds as though you are attracting a wide range of STEM grads and pros. What do you think brings them to the Coast Guard?

Ostebo: The quality of the work we have and the quality of engineers we have in the Coast Guard is really fantastic! We have people working to clean up an oil spill, build the next generation of ships. It's a big group of projects, and most are directly tied to the humanitarian nature of this service. A lot of people are interested in that.

The Coast Guard is open for business and looking to hire lots of smart minds in the STEM world. We provide a great opportunity to work on projects that you might not find in other military services. That seems to appeal to a lot of people.

D/C

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