Building a U.S. Coast Guard for the 21st Century - Center for ...

Coast Guard organizational
restructuring
Another critical aspect of the Coast Guard’s ongoing modernization effort is its
program to transform its organizational structure. The Coast Guard maintains that
reorganizing its command structure is necessary to promote effective allocation of
resources and assets across the organization and to respond more adeptly to 21st
century threats. In fact, Adm. Allen has argued repeatedly that the service will fail
to sustain its operational effectiveness without a bold reorganization of the Coast
Guard’s support and logistics functions. 77
Currently, the Coast Guard is organized into two separate geographic regions with
the Atlantic command, or LANTAREA, headquartered in Portsmouth, VA, and
the Pacific command, or PACAREA, in Alameda, CA. The service has sought to
unify these commands because the Coast Guard’s bifurcated command structure
creates redundancies, such as duplicate requests for forces and logistical support,
which have in the past created inefficiencies during Coast Guard operations.
Additionally, training methods for operations in the PACAREA can differ greatly
for operations in the LANTAREA, opening the possibility for confusion due to
this lack of standardization.
The proposed restructuring would bring the Coast Guard’s force structure more
closely in line with that of the Department of Defense. In its 2007 Cause for
Action Brief, the Coast Guard noted that the “status-quo is a sub-optimal structure
and we knew it when we created it in 1987—it is not that it is broken, it was
never constructed correctly to begin with.” 78
The National Academy of Public Administration, which endorses the Coast
Guard’s organizational restructuring effort, found that another key reason for
restructuring the service’s organization was the fact that each command was
optimally interoperable only within its geographic area of responsibility, 79 meaning
that components of each command were not adequately able to operate with
those of the other command.
39 Center for American Progress | Building a U.S. Coast Guard for the 21st Century