Cutter Forces News Today

Ship conducts counter-narcotic patrols

The U.S. Coast Guard needed new davits. Enter matchmaker Dirigo Strategies. “I love the challenges of seeing if there’s a better way to do things,” says founder Brian Perkins.

1 Viewed by many at the time as a doom-and-gloom prediction, a hypothetical situation in extremis, Smicklas’s projected reckoning is coming to pass. The Coast Guard does not have enough cuttermen volunteering for assignment to send its fleet to sea. Without dramatic, immediate action, it will have to select-and-direct cuttermen to serve afloat in six months’ time. The current lessening of standards signals a death spiral of underqualified officers afloat compared with today’s force; swif...