Dinner with Arnold Palmer

I was extremely fortunate and honored to have dinner with Arnold Palmer this evening at the Navy Memorial Foundation's Lone Sailor Awards. Arnold was cited for his career achievements after he served a tour in the Coast Guard. We discussed his boot camp days at Cape May and I offered to have him returned for a graduation. He has promised to work on a date. We are excited. He is an extraodinary person who cherishes his time in the Coast Guard as a major factor in the success he has had in life.

ADM A

BZ to Congress

BZ to Congress for passing Senate bill 3598 and identical House bill 7099.

Back in July I described the increasing threat of the SPSS in the DHS Leadership Journal. Then, two weeks ago we had the interdiction of two separate vessels, carrying approximately 15-tons of cocaine. Just yesterday, CDR Naron participated in the DoD Bloggers Roundtable to discuss this topic.

This new legislation enhances our enforcement options in dealing with the increasingly significant threat posed by self-propelled semi-submersibles (SPSS). Rather than having to collect evidence in order to prosecute, a particularly dangerous and daunting requirement when dealing with SPSS vessels, now it is illegal to operate one of these crafts if it is not registered or documented with a nation. The potential penalty is 15 years in prison and $1 million.

This is a great step forward and the entire counter-drug community is committed to keeping the pressure on the smugglers.

I just ended a busy day meeting with our people in Ballston, VA: The Coast Guard Criminal Investigative Service, the Deployable Operations Group, the National Pollution Funds Center, and the Personnel Command. I held an All Hands for all the units and met individually with their leadership teams. I spoke at the National Cargo Bureau Luncheon about the progress we have made in the last year with outreach to our Marine Safety partners. Tonight I am headed to the Lone Sailor Awards Banquet where Arnold Palmer will be honored for his service in the Coast Guard in World War II. I appreciate all the comments received thus far and will be posting later this evening or in the morning with some feedback. Keep the comments coming, they are important.

Evergreen Stakeholder Workshop

Update:
This was a terrific event with wide participation. We were anxious for feedback on our Evergreen process and received excellent participation. More to follow in the future on our Evergreen effort.
ADM A

Taking a stab at real time blogging to test our new system.

I first became involved in scenario based planning when I was Resource Director under Chief of Staff VADM Jim Loy. That work evolved into the Evergreen Process whereby we test potential strategies against a range of future worlds.

The current Evergreen effort has been expanded to include stakeholders and tonight I am meeting with them to kick of their workshop. The group is very diverse and includes maritime industry, environmental NGOs, rail industry, port operators, think tanks, and CG field commanders.

They just received their in brief: The "7 Revolutions" presentation from the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a primer on scenario based planning.

At dinner I will talk about Maritime Policy, International Maritime Governance, and Partnerships.

Will provide an update tomorrow.

ADM A

Sentinel-Class Media Roundtable

I was joined today by RADM Blore (Acquisitions, CG-9), RADM Justice (Requirements, CG-7) and RDML Ostebo (Engineering/Logistics, CG-4) in briefing interested media in the award of the Sentinel-Class FRC to Bollinger.

My portion of the round table is available for viewing here:
or click here.

(It is hard to hear the questioners or answers from people away from the mics...new approaches here, please be patient with us.)

Coast Guard Facebook Pages

Today we published two new Facebook pages. One is for my position as Commandant the other is for the Coast Guard as a whole.

Become a Fan, invite your friends and family, let us know what would be useful for you to see.

Introducing Commandant's Corner 2.0 and iCommandant

Welcome to Commandant?s Corner 2.0 (CC 2.0)! Hopefully you immediately noticed that the content available through my website is now more prominent. It is also multi-media friendly to broaden the methods we use to communicate so that you the user can choose the medium that best serves your purpose.

While this site is on the .mil domain, it leverages the power of several social media features. The most noteworthy feature is iCommandant. This is a journal/blog feature, powered by blogger, which allows me to communicate thoughts, ideas, issues and events in near real-time. It is fully mobile, mutli-media capable and RSS enabled so that you can subscribe for automatic updates. To be honest, I am not yet sure exactly how this feature will be used. We will experiment together and try a few things to see what sort of effect they have. Your feedback will be helpful in shaping its use and value.

My photo feed will now be fed through Flickr. This will make updates more frequent and make the photos more available for use, sharing and comment. This central photo site will also feed my new Facebook page. Yes?you heard right, we now have an official Facebook page. In fact, we now have two pages, one for me as Commandant, and one for the service in general (Yes, I know you can?t get to Facebook on the CGDN). We hope you will sign on as fans to stay better informed on all things Coast Guard.

In addition to these features, you will still be able to access the traditional information available on this site. We are attempting maximize access within the security requirements of our .mil domain.

If you haven't already seen it, here is my philosophy on social media and the Coast Guard:

If you cannot see the YouTube video, it is available on CGVI here.
Stay tuned!