Adm.
Paul Zukunft, the US Coast Guard commandant, with the crew of
Coast Guard Cutter Stratton in San Diego in
2015.
REUTERS/Mike
Blake
Adm. Paul Zukunft, a 1977
graduate of the US Coast Guard Academy who is now the Coast Guard
commandant, assumed command of the 88,000-strong force on May 30,
2014, overseeing a military branch that patrols from Guam in the
Pacific to Puerto Rico in the Atlantic and from north of the
Arctic Circle to south of the equator.
Business Insider sat down with Zukunft at the Coast
Guard's Washington, DC, headquarters at the end of December to
discuss his time as commandant, how his approach to leading the
service changed during his tenure, and how the force had adapted
to new threats. The partial transcript below has been edited for
length and clarity.
Christopher Woody: The Coast Guard is a military
branch but is also a member of the intelligence community. It has
law-enforcement responsibilities, but it also does first-response
and humanitarian efforts, and in its day-to-day activities it
interacts with the public a lot. So that range of
responsibilities, how does that align with the other military
branches and how does it distinguish the Coast Guard?
Adm. Paul Zukunft: Certainly we're aligned with
the other military services. When you look at just our fleet
alone, 40% of our capital ships are serving in direct support of
geographic combatant commanders — Pacific Command, Africa
Command, Central Command, European Command, Southern Command, and
Northern Command. So those are all led by four-star generals or
admirals, and the Coast Guard works in direct support of those
Department of Defense combatant commanders.
But at the same time we interact daily with the public we serve —
probably the one most people relate to is search and rescue, but
we have broad responsibilities in our ports. We have over 37
captains of the ports in all of our major ports who work with the
maritime industry ... I represent the United States at the
general assembly of the International Maritime Organization. Many
countries look to the United States Coast Guard for setting
maritime standards across the world as well, not just on safety
but also on security and also on environmental issues, so very
unique in that regard. You almost might look at [it] as a member
of State Department, having impacts on foreign policy as well.
A
Coast Guard crewman during Fleet Week in New York in
2016.
US Coast Guard/Petty Officer 3rd
Class Frank Iannazzo-Simmons
And then we're a member of the intelligence community — we're a
member of the Department of Homeland Security, and so as the
department looks at illegal migration being a big concern right
now and can we stop every illegal migrant at the border, we look
at the maritime border, which doesn't have a fence line, and in
years past the United States often looked at itself as
geographically isolated because we're surrounded by water. Well,
in the 21st century we're no longer isolated, and certainly those
bodies of water connect us to other countries for maritime trade,
but also for illicit activity as well.
Woody: When it comes to addressing those broader
responsibilities in terms of resources, how are you balancing and
apportioning them? You have a big project like the icebreakers
that you've been trying to get off the ground for a while, but
this season hurricane activity has been particularly intense, so
what's the give-and-take there with your long-term projects and
those short-term requirements?
Zukunft: So as a member of the intelligence
community ... first we looked at, so what are all the threats
destined toward the United States? Why are people leaving Central
America and trying to find, really, refuge here in the United
States? They're leaving countries, particularly the tri-border
region — El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras — Mexico now has its
worst murder rate in over a decade, and many people are just
trying to get out of there. Why are they leaving? Well, you've
got transnational criminal organizations trying to smuggle
commodities into the United States, and so they use Central
America as their initial destination to move commodities into the
United States.
So we looked at where do we have resources around the world?
Where do we have unique authorities? We have over 60 bilateral
agreements that allow the Coast Guard to take enforcement action
in the high seas or even in the territorial seas of other
nations, to basically be their maritime police, if you will, and
we have these agreements in many of the drug-source and transit
zones here in the Western Hemisphere.
In 2014, we knew where about 80% to 85% of the activity was
taking place, to include when a go-fast [boat] was leaving
Colombia or Ecuador or somewhere in Central America with a
shipment ultimately destined for the United States, but on the
best of days we could probably put a ship over next to and a
plane above maybe 10% of that 80% to 85%. We're basically giving
all of this illegal activity a free pass.
Zukunft,
then a rear admiral, reviewing oil-containment work in Louisiana
from a Coast Guard helicopter after the Deepwater Horizon rig
explosion and subsequent oil spill in 2010.
(AP Photo/Kerry Maloney)
At the same time, we're doing enforcement activity in our remote
[exclusive economic zones] to make sure that there's not illegal
fishing activity taking place, and we were not seeing that
activity, but it was peeling off a lot of our resources toward
what I would consider a relatively benign threat, and then we're
providing other resources to do exercises with the military in
the remote parts of the world but with really no strategic
outcome that I could discern where the Coast Guard was providing
a unique capability. So we swept up all of those resources and
then we doubled down to address the threats in the Western
Hemisphere.
At the same time, the Perry-class frigates — which would
routinely carry Coast Guard law-enforcement teams to contribute
to the drug-interdiction mission — were taken out of service and
decommissioned, so it left a huge vacuum in this part of the
world, and so we filled that vacuum with Coast Guard resources,
knowing that we had put other mission areas at risk but weighing
what the priorities were in terms of what is the most
considerable risk — those are the trade-off decisions that we're
able to make.
The Arctic is a whole new ocean that's opened up. We've been
working over the last five to six years with the United States
Navy. We've worked with the past administration. We're working
with this administration. We do have a strategy for the Arctic,
and at the same time we're looking at Russia increasing its
presence, and now we have China increasing its presence. Russia
has gone as far as to claim most of the Arctic Ocean as theirs.
That claim has not been reconciled, but it clearly demonstrates
that Russia wants to own this domain, and they look at the United
States, that we really don't have a dog in this fight because we
really don't have any meaningful presence up in the Arctic as
well, which is why it isn't just about building ships, but why
you need to build those is to be able to exert sovereignty in an
area that's opened and has, really, vast riches that have yet to
be exploited but certainly will be at some point in time in the
future.
Woody: You've been in this position for four
years. In your time as commandant, what kind of changes have you
seen in your own management style, your own approach to
leadership of the force?
Zukunft: Well, the first is you think beyond the
tyranny of the present, and you need to think at least five to
six years out, and you can't just think of what's going to happen
during your four-year tenure and then just truncate it and just
say it's going to be somebody else's problem four, five years
from now. What I look at right now is our growing national debt,
what the impact of that's going to be to future budgets. When I
came into this job, we thought: 'Well, hey, we can wait a while
before we address icebreakers. Maybe we can wait another four or
five years.' Well, if we wait another four or five years, as
difficult as it is to find an appropriation today, it's not going
to get easier any time in the future, at least when I look into
my crystal ball. So really to think long-term about not just what
we do but why we do it in the first place.
A
crew from Coast Guard Station Port Canaveral in Florida enforces
a safety and security zone during a rocket launch in
2016.
US Coast Guard/Petty Officer 2nd
Class Anthony L. Soto
When I came into this job, everyone of us could cite what our 11
statutory missions are, but no one could articulate why we need
to exercise these 11 statutory missions. So we would say: 'Hey,
we do maritime law enforcement. Why?' Well, we have this problem
with transnational criminal organizations. They generate $780
billion of commerce. They corrupt other governments. They're
causing regional instability in Central America, and we're
already seeing the second-order effect of that in terms of
illegal migrants now arriving at our border, unaccompanied
minors. We're also seeing a loss of confidence in foreign
investment in these economies, and so if the security environment
is faltering, the economies are failing, you've now planted the
seeds for long-term drivers for not only illegal migration but,
if it undermines rule of law, do these become the future
Venezuelas of the world as well, where they go from democratic to
autocratic regimes right here in our backyard and perhaps
sympathetic to a Russia, to a potential adversary, as well?
So really looking long term, not what we do but why we do it. We
would explain we maintain our inland waterways — that's a
mission. And we do it with ships whose average age is over 50
years old. We could never articulate an argument of why you need
to recapitalize these 35 ships. Well, they move $4.6 trillion of
commerce every year. To replace one is less than $20 million a
copy. They can't accommodate a mixed-gender crew. They operate
with lead and asbestos mitigation — the ships are that old. Yet
we continue to slug on.
Zukunft
with Adm. Yuri Alekseyev of the Russian Federation at a gathering
of Arctic coast-guard leaders, in New London, Connecticut, in
2015.
(AP Photo/Jessica
Hill)
But it's part of our critical infrastructure. There's no good
priority if you look at our nation's critical infrastructure, but
$4.6 trillion is a big contribution toward GDP, and oftentimes we
don't appreciate what we have until you no longer have it. So if
you start losing that commerce for want of not making those
investments — so that's the 'why' piece there as well.
So yes, we need to modernize, but you need to demonstrate why you
need to, and you need to demonstrate what is that return on
investment. We're asking for a greater appropriation — and that
increase is a rounding error in the other military services — but
I'm looking for a 5% annualized growth in our operating and
maintenance account, a floor of $2 billion that will see some
slight modulation, depending on what we're building at the time,
particularly icebreakers.
But just to do that, that 5% growth and a $2 billion floor, buys
me out of a $1.6 billion-short infrastructure backlog, allows us
to bring 5,000 more active-duty people on board. It allows us to
build out our program of record, move into unmanned aerial
systems, and then recapitalize our icebreaker fleet, our inland
fleet, as well as complete the buildout of our offshore patrol
cutter fleet — the first one of those will come online in 2021.
But you can't look at these programs myopically, of, "I need a
new ship." You really need to be able to articulate well with our
authorizers, with our appropriators, and with our department,
with [the Office of Management and Budget] why you need to make
this investment. On that note, we've opened our books for five
years running to a third-party auditor, and they checked our
debits and credits, and we had five consecutive clean financial
audit opinions. There's not another military service that has one
— yet we as a military service have five consecutive clean
financial audit opinions. Our acquisition program has matured.
Our growth rate is under 2%, and so that's a good investment in
what we're delivering will be in service at least 30, if not
more, years from today. So it's a good investment, not just for
today but for the future of the nation as well.
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