Q&A: Admiral Robert J. Papp Jr.
Written by Mark Fitzgerald
CGF 2010 Volume: 2 Issue: 3 (July)
Admiral Robert J. Papp Jr. assumed the duties of the 24th commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard on May 25, 2010. As such, he leads the largest component of the Department of Homeland Security, comprised of about 42,000 men and women on active duty, 7,000 civilians, 8,000 reservists and 30,000 volunteer auxiliarists.
Papp previously served as commander of the Coast Guard Atlantic Area (LANTAREA), where he was the operational commander for all Coast Guard missions in the eastern half of the world. LANTAREA ranges from the Rocky Mountains to the Arabian Gulf and spans an area of responsibility including five Coast Guard Districts, 42 states with over 14 million square miles, and serves with more than 51,000 military and civilian employees and auxiliarists. During that time, he also served as commander of Defense Force East and provided Coast Guard mission support to the Department of Defense and combatant commanders.
Prior to these capacities, Papp served as the chief of staff of the Coast Guard in Washington, D.C., overseeing all management functions of the Coast Guard. From 2004 to 2006 he served as commander of the Ninth Coast Guard District, with responsibilities for Coast Guard missions on the Great Lakes and northern border.
Papp was promoted to flag rank in October 2002 and appointed to the position of director of reserve and training, where he was responsible for managing and supporting 13,000 Coast Guard ready reservists and all Coast Guard training centers. He served in six Coast Guard cutters and commanded Red Beech, Papaw, Forward, and the Coast Guard’s training barque, Eagle. He also served as commander of a task unit during Operation Able Manner off the coast of Haiti in 1994, enforcing United Nations sanctions. Additionally, his task unit augmented U.S. Naval Forces during Operation Uphold Democracy.
Papp’s assignments ashore have included the commandant of cadets staff at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy; aids to navigation staff in the Third Coast Guard District; chief of the capabilities branch in the Defense Operations Division; chief of the Fleet Development Team; director of the Leadership Development Center; chief of the Coast Guard’s Office of Congressional Affairs; and deputy chief of staff of the Coast Guard.
He is a 1975 graduate of the United States Coast Guard Academy. Additionally, he holds a Master of Arts in national security and strategic studies from the United States Naval War College and a Master of Science in management from Salve Regina College.
Papp is the 13th Gold Ancient Mariner of the Coast Guard, an honorary position held by an officer with over 10 years of cumulative sea duty who is charged with keeping a close watch to ensure sea-service traditions are continued and the time-honored reputation of the Coast Guard is maintained.
Admiral Papp was interviewed by CGF Editor Mark Fitzgerald.
Q: To begin with, can you comment on your nomination? Did you see this coming, or were you a bit surprised?
A: I’ve approached every job in the Coast Guard as doing the best I can, and I’ve tried to take on jobs that I’ve enjoyed doing, most of which were going to sea. I always figured one thing would take care of another, but you get to a certain point in your career where you have a string of assignments—as I experienced as a district commander, chief of staff and the Atlantic Area commander—where it becomes clear to you that at least you’ll be considered to be the next commandant. It’s a tremendous honor, something that I never thought I’d be in a position to do.
On the other hand, I have picked up the experience and I was one of the people who were offered the opportunity to submit a resume to the secretary. I went through the interview process, and everything seemed to click in speaking both to the deputy secretary and the secretary. So I had a pretty good feeling about it, but you never can be too confident about anything like that. I was tremendously thrilled, honored and humbled to get the call from the secretary to tell me she was putting my name forward as the recommended nomination for the president to go to the Senate.
Q: You’ve had some big responsibilities in your former positions—do you see them as strong building blocks for the role of commandant?
A: My entire career has focused on field operations. I wanted to be a sailor. I wanted to be ship captain. And this is the direction I took my career. At a certain point, you get to a rank where you can’t go to sea actively anymore, so you turn to other things.
For me it was coming to Washington in 1999 and taking on something completely foreign to me, which was chief of the Coast Guard’s Office of Congressional Affairs. This exposed me to the other side of the Coast Guard and to another side of the government, which quite frankly I thought might be a career for me after the Coast Guard. I never really expected to make admiral, or expected to stay in beyond being captain, so I looked at Congressional Affairs as something to prepare me for my next career.
But then after 9/11 happened, I was very motivated to work as hard as I could and for as long as I could within the Coast Guard to try to prepare us for the new challenges that we faced. I was very fortunate to be selected for admiral and each position has seemed to pile on top of the next. I’ve had some operational assignments as an admiral, as the Ninth District commander and then as the Atlantic Area commander, and I think both of them have exposed me even more broadly to things that go out in the field.
So I’ve got a pretty good understanding of field operations for the Coast Guard, but it’s also flavored by my Washington experience, which helps me understand that we also work within a policy and resource environment that allows us to carry out those operations.
Q: And how would you compare your background to your predecessor, Admiral Allen?
A: Well, I would say Admiral Allen has a heavy policy, budgetary background with some good exposure to field operations. I’ve got a heavy field operations background with some exposure to policy and resource work. So I think people can expect that my focus will be on how we deliver outstanding performance across all our mission sets as we go into the future with what looks to be constrained budgetary requirements.
Q: Given the Coast Guard’s current capacity, how challenging will it be to meet its wide range of maritime security missions, from the interdiction of illegal immigration, drugs and human trafficking to environmental protection, safety initiatives and defense support?
A: I believe that if our budgets remain constrained in the out years, then, yes, it will become increasingly more challenging for us to perform at the same level that the citizens in the U.S. depend on and really deserve.
Our challenge will be to take the scarce resources we have, assess risk, assign our resources to the highest priorities, and then attempt to mitigate the remaining risk by either working with partners or going to our seniors in the administration and telling them that there are certain things that we just aren’t able to do. They can then make decisions either on increasing resources or helping us find other ways or other means to meet our responsibilities. Q: Were you at all surprised with the speed and agility of the Coast Guard’s response efforts in Haiti?
A: There’s nothing that surprises me in terms of these responses, because I know what Coast Guard people are capable of and I know the assets and resources that we have.
The fact that we can take Coast Guard cutters that are doing drug interdiction operations and migrant operations and immediately transfer them to humanitarian response does not come as a surprise because we train our people to be flexible and agile, and we design our resources to be flexible and agile so that we can use them across multiple mission sets.
Q: Are you satisfied with the Coast Guard’s response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill?
A: I am. The Coast Guard responded to the initial explosion on the Deepwater Horizon well on April 20 and rescued more than 100 people, and after the well capsized and sank, shifted gears into a spill response mode. We have been there since the beginning and continue to support an “all-hands-on-deck” response. The scope of the response is huge, spanning four states, an area of the Gulf of Mexico that is bigger than many U.S. states, and is ongoing due to an uncontrolled source that leaks large quantities of oil and gas into the water on a daily basis. This is the largest environmental response effort in U.S. history.
We have pulled Coast Guard buoy tenders that hail from ports as far away as Honolulu, Hawaii; San Francisco, Calif.; and Newport, R.I., into this response to skim oil, and they are having a positive impact. We also have patrol boats serving as flotilla commanders for groups of privately owned vessels that have been outfitted for skimming oil, medium endurance cutters serving as commanders of task units, aircraft around the nation conducting over flights, and Coast Guard personnel supervising boom and cleanup operations over hundreds of miles of coastline. Additionally, we provided significant staffing to the Unified Area Commands in New Orleans, La., and Miami, Fla., and Incident Command Posts in Houma, La.; Mobile, Ala.; and St Petersburg, Fla., as well as many other staging areas and logistics facilities. There are thousands of Coast Guard personnel involved in this response including about 1,500 reserve members and a large number of auxiliarists.
This is our top priority. We must help save a way of life for people who live on the Gulf Coast.
Q: Do you have any concerns about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill response?
A: Three items definitely come to mind. First is the sustainment of Coast Guard personnel in this response. We have a large number of people in the response, who are working 12, 15 and even 18 hours a day. This is required, but hard to maintain. We are sending people from around the country for temporary duty and then bringing them back home for down time. Since we do not have a garrison to pull these people from, these people return home to their assigned duties and many are sent back for a second period of temporary duty. Reservists are serving on 60-day orders. The sustainment effort is very fluid and requires continuous oversight.
Second is the risk what we have imposed on other missions in order to provide our robust response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. This is the summer boating season, which is always a very busy time for the Coast Guard. With assets moved from their normal areas of responsibility, those that are left behind must cover more territory. We have balanced this risk across mission areas in a way that I believe we are adequately covering our critical duties.
Third is the threat of hurricanes. While I served as the Atlantic Area commander between 2008 and 2010, there were 30 named storms that threatened the southeast United States. I believe we are ready as we have a plan and the experience of responding to hurricanes each year. My concern lies in the unpredictability of the storms and their potential for damage.
Q: Would you say that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill incident is unprecedented?
A: Yes, I would say so, because of the complexity and difficulty in stopping it. Once you have a finite amount of oil on the surface of the water, we pretty much know what to do—skimming operations, burning it, letting it dissipate, or dispersing it with chemicals. That’s the easier part of the solution. But in this case, the problem is how do you stop it at its source? It’s like a sinking ship; you want to plug the hole before you start to figure out how to pump the water out. In this case, we’ve got to stop that leak.
Q: How do you think the Coast Guard has strengthened its relationship with DHS in recent years, and how will it continue to keep up with the growing demands of homeland security?
A: First of all, I think the placement of the Coast Guard within the Department of Homeland Security was a good move. It’s very difficult to place the Coast Guard because the breadth of our mission set could place us in a number of places: the Department of Justice, Treasury, Transportation and Defense. So there’s no real good solid fit anywhere, but I would say that the Department of Homeland Security, given the vast responsibilities that it has, whether it’s disaster response, day to day sovereignty issues, counterterrorism and other security concerns, is a good place for us to be.
I think the Coast Guard is an even better fit here than some people might think at this point. When you look at things like aids to navigation you might think, how do these responsibilities fit into the construct of the Department of Homeland Security? Well our buoy tenders are out there right now helping to respond to the oil spill disaster by skimming operations. When you have a Hurricane Katrina, or an Ike or Gustav come through the Gulf Coast, you need to reconstruct channels to get the commerce flowing again. We have a fleet that we can bring to bear like that, and that’s why we build this multimission capability into the ships and aircraft and the people that we produce for our service—so they can be versatile and adaptable and be used for multiple things that confront our country.
Also, the can-do culture that the Coast Guard has is good for the department and our ability to work across partnerships to bring people together has also been very helpful. The department is still young and has come a long way in short amount of time. I believe that will continue, and I can tell you from personal experience that our secretary and deputy secretary appreciate all of these capabilities that we have.
Q: Overall, are you satisfied with your fiscal year 2011 budget? Any thoughts on what the budget might look like in the coming years?
A: The 2011 budget is going to be a tough one for us because the president’s budget calls for us to reduce a number of things, particularly the five maritime safety and security teams and five of our major cutters. It calls for us to decommission them. As an operator, there’s no way you ever want to give up people or assets because of the challenges you face out there. But what was done, and what Admiral Allen worked with the secretary on, is a reasonable tradeoff between losing some short-term capability in order to get some new ships and new aircraft and other resources coming into the service to replace these aging assets that are costing us so much to maintain.
So that’s probably the best way to characterize the 2011 budget: it’s trading off some short-term capability for long-term gain in terms of getting new assets.
We’re now in the process of looking at the 2012 budget. We’re working with the department on that particular budget. It’s in the really early stages right now, so it’s not appropriate for me to comment yet on where we’re going, but I’m hopeful that we won’t see any reduction in capabilities in this next year’s budget, and that we’ll be able to come up with sufficient funds within our acquisition accounts to be able to maintain our momentum on some very important projects that we’ve got.
Q: What are some of the most pressing tasks for the Coast Guard in the next few years?
A: Well the thing that I’m dealing with right now is modernization and the organizational structure of the Coast Guard. We proposed a new organizational structure four years ago, and of course, we’ve called it modernization in shorthand. It really depends on a completion of an authorization bill by Congress, and we’ve been waiting close to four years now to get that authorization bill.
I’m very hopeful now that we may see it completed, because both the Senate and the House have passed versions, and I’m hopeful that they will get into conference on the bill fairly soon. We’ve started making some of those organizational changes, but in the absence of this legislation, we’re unable to complete them. So we find ourselves between our old organization and what we hope to be our new organization, and we’re experiencing some challenges and problems because we’re trying to maintain both at the same time.
The other thing is that we’ve learned some lessons over the last four years, and perhaps if we knew those lessons four years ago we would’ve made adjustments to some of the modernization efforts as we went along. I think we’ve got the opportunity now, based on what we’ve learned, to maybe do some adjustments and nuances if we can work with our Congressional oversight committees before they do the final passage of the bill. This could probably make us be a bit more effective as we go into the future.
A lot of this goes back to the budget. We’re just like the any other federal agency right now. The president has asked everybody to tighten their belt. We know the economy is not as strong as it was. The discretionary authority within the congressional budget is contingently squeezed and the Coast Guard finds itself right in the middle of it all. So when you’re confronted with little or no growth and costs are continually increasing, you find it difficult to maintain the level of performance that you’ve done in previous years. The challenge for me and the Coast Guard as we go forward is how do we balance the resources we have across the entire mission set that we’re responsible for without creating any gaps or shortfalls. As I said, that’s where we start looking at partnerships and turn to our federal agencies within the department to see if we can gain any synergies there.
Q: Is there anything particular, as far as technologies, products and resources, that you think industry could offer to help the Coast Guard perform more efficiently?
A: I think there are a lot of people in industry that could help us. We continue to reach out for technical solutions, particularly in C4ISR and data management systems. What we need to do is capture all those things that we’re doing and find out where there are some redundancies and simplify things.
We end up spending a lot of money on IT solutions. People go out with good intentions but encourage us to spend some of our discretionary budget on things that may be duplicative or redundant in regard to other systems that are used in the service. I’ve had a lot of folks that have come forward to me out of industry to make those suggestions. I think we ought to start listening to them and see if there are perhaps some solutions to at least get rid of some of those redundancies and more effectively use the resources that we have.
Also, as we look across the department and see some of the programs and technologies that are being used there, perhaps there are some things that we can leverage and build off of instead of going out and testing something new on our own. That can be expensive. We’re looking at some of the technology used on propulsion control devices on some of our newer ships, and finding that probably the driving force in terms of obsolete technology on our ships right now is software, rather than steel, because of the refresh time and how rapidly these systems become obsolete and unsupportable.
So it’s a new world for us, but we want to work with industry to come up with some solutions to some of the challenges that we’re facing in trying to work within our budget.
Q: Do you think the United States needs a new class of icebreaker or can you sustain your mission with the fleet that it has?
A: Whether you build new icebreakers or whether you restore the ones that we have now, either option requires some significant investment of resources and there just does not seem to be a consensus within the government on what we ought to be doing up in the Arctic. So we need to get that validation of what we as a country should be doing up there.
If we decide that action is required, then there’s the question of what agency is appropriate to carry it out. The Coast Guard has the experience. We’ve been going up to the Arctic and Antarctic for years, so why recreate that capability in some other agency? We can do it, but the challenge for us is that the equipment that we have to perform that mission is old, obsolete and in need of restoration.
And whether you restore the ones that we have or build new ones, the challenge is that there are responsibilities, mandated missions that the Coast Guard has that are very difficult to perform up in our sovereign territory above Alaska.
Q: As the Coast Guard has performed cutter-based flight tests with unmanned aerial vehicles like the Fire Scout, how close is it to making an acquisition commitment in this regard?
A: We understand that for our Deepwater system to be effective, we need some form of maritime patrol in aviation, whether manned or unmanned. We had developed a combination of unmanned aerial vehicle and ship launched systems, but the problem is that it’s an expensive proposition for the Coast Guard to go it alone in this regard.
I think whatever we come up with in terms of a shipboard system, we’ll need to coordinate with the Navy. We are continuing testing with the Navy and in terms of quantity discounts and the ability to leverage technology and research, we’re pretty much obliged to go along with the Navy on this one. So we’ll wait and see how those tests come out before we make a firm decision on how we’re going to proceed.
Q: How does Coast Guard recruitment and retention look in comparison to recent years?
A: What we’ve got is the highest retention and the best recruitment we’ve ever had. We’re going have to reduce recruitment and reduce accessions right now because our retention is so high. We really are in a difficult position right now because we’ve found ourselves having more people in uniform than we have billets to pay for, and so we’re going to have reduce ourselves through personnel management policies and work force management policies.
Whether this happens through selection boards for officers or some sort of management policies for our enlisted people, first and foremost you’ve got to either let people flow out or you’ve got to restrict the people that are flowing in. So we’ve immediately put some restrictions on the people that are flowing in.
I believe we were averaging somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 people a year coming in through our recruit training center in Cape May, N.J. Now we’re dropping that down to 2,000 people, because you have to keep some flow coming in and bring some new people in. Plus, you don’t want all of your recruiting contacts to dry up completely, because at some point the economy might change or other conditions might dictate that you’ve got to start ramping it back up again.
So right now I think we are booked for the remainder of the year in terms of recruits coming in, and what we’re doing is re-evaluating what we do with that recruiting force that we’ve got out there and how to keep our training center fully employed when we’ve reduced the numbers coming through by just about half. So the good news is that we’ve got plenty of good people in the Coast Guard. They want to be here and they’re enthusiastic, and the longer they stay the more experience they build up.
So we get a more mature, experienced work force—that’s the good thing. But the bad thing is that it doesn’t offer a lot of opportunities for new flow to come in to the organization. At some point you have to start to let some good people go home to make room for some new people to come in or those within the service to be promoted or advanced.
Q: Does this reduction mean you might be asking more from Coast Guard reservists and auxiliarists?
A: Yes, our reservists and auxiliarists are invaluable across the Coast Guard, as is the civilian portion of our work force. When I talk to groups either within or outside the Coast Guard, I talk about the pride I have for Coast Guard people, and I refer to them as my family and my shipmates. I’m referring to everyone at once in no particular order: the reservists, auxiliarists, civilians and active duty Coast Guard members.
As former director of reserve, I know how valuable the 8,000 select reservists are, especially after 9/11. They played important roles in responding to the many challenges that came up in the couple of years afterwards, and it’s no surprise to me that we went from about 36,000 active duty members up to about 42,000. That’s about the range that the reserve was contributing during that time period.
We couldn’t survive without our reservists and many of them continue to fill in here and there throughout the operations that we conduct. Most recently we called up one of our reserve port security units to go down to Haiti to help out with security operations.
Also, if we didn’t have our auxiliarists to help out with security patrols, regattas, boating safety training and a whole myriad of activities, I don’t know how we could get our business done. And of course our civilian work force: they are usually the people that provide expertise and continuity when uniformed people are transferring from jobs every few years. We’ve got a great civilian work force to provide continuity and expertise in various subject matters.
So I really believe that the Coast Guard can’t survive without the talents that the reservists, auxiliarists and civilian work force bring to the table.
Q: Any closing thoughts?
A: As sailors, we talk about steadying the ship—well, I think my job as commandant is steadying the service. We’ve been through enormous change over the last eight years with the last two commandants: with Admiral Collins reorganizing the Coast Guard at the field delivery level in the sector concept and then Admiral Allen taking the sort of umbrella organization of the Coast Guard and forming it up under modernization. We’ve not completed either one of those efforts right now and I think it would be unfair for me to interject additional change on top of that as commandant.
So what my administration of the Coast Guard will be about is steadying up the service, firming up the organizational construct so it’s understandable and effective for carrying out operations, and supporting the people and the resources that are needed to do those operations. I want to give people an understandable construct that will not be changing at least in the near term so that they can get used to it. ♦