Taking the helm at the Coast Guard

Adm. Linda Fagan, the new leader of the Coast Guard and the first woman in American history to head a military service, was, by her own account, not the most impressive cadet while coming up in the Coast Guard Academy. 

“When I went over for the interview” — for her current position earlier this year with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks — “one of them asked: ‘Hey, did you ever think as a cadet you could be here interviewing to be commandant?’ I laughed. I was like, I was kind of an unremarkable cadet, I was just kind of average academically. … It was a means to an end to serve as an officer,” Fagan told The Hill in a recent interview.

Those means have culminated in her position as the 27th leader of the Coast Guard, a role made official earlier this month in a change-of-command ceremony in Washington, D.C.

President Biden, who spoke at the ceremony and swore Fagan in as commandant, said when Austin offered Fagan’s name as his recommendation for the job, he replied, “What in the hell took you so long?”

Biden called Fagan “part of a generation of pioneer women in the force.”

Fagan, who had served as the Coast Guard’s vice commandant since last June, reached the highest position in the service after a lengthy and impressive career that saw her serve on all seven continents and become both the longest serving active-duty marine safety officer and the first woman promoted to four stars.

At 16, she announced her intent to enter the Coast Guard Academy, which she did in 1981, six years after the first female sailors were allowed there. 

Following her commissioning in 1985 — one of only 16 women to graduate the academy that year — her first assignment was aboard the Polar Star, the nation’s only heavy icebreaker. That first deployment almost didn’t happen when the ship’s executive officer was hesitant over Fagan being the only woman on his crew.

She went on to command the Coast Guard’s operations in the Pacific, as well as its Atlantic area, and work as deputy director of operations for the U.S. Northern Command headquarters, among other top assignments. 

Fagan takes the helm of the Coast Guard during a tumultuous period of history. 

In the past two years alone, the service has worked a vast range of missions, including the COVID-19 response, humanitarian aid following natural disasters such as hurricanes, assisting other nations in their maritime security efforts and enforcing drug and fishing laws. The service has also responded to migrants fleeing Cuba and Haiti and worked to ensure safe passage of ships for global trade to avoid further disruption of supply chains.

“We have never been more relevant [in] national security, homeland security,” Fagan said.

But all those lines of effort require talent, a necessity highlighted in Fagan’s speech at the change of command ceremony, where she said her highest priority as commandant “will be to transform our talent management system.” 

Speaking to The Hill later, she said Coast Guard leadership has “an aggressive agenda in front of us” and “all options are on the table” to posture the organization for the future.

“We are not unique as a military service, all of the services are in a competition for talent, [and] we’re competing with public and private companies,” she said. “If we don’t adequately recruit members into the service, the state-of-the-art equipment we’re getting will be unable to conduct front-line missions.”

The Coast Guard is made up of about 42,000 active-duty, 7,000 reserve and 8,700 civilian personnel, in addition to 21,000 auxiliary volunteers.

Though the Coast Guard’s demographics have changed significantly since she first entered the service, one figure that stands out to Fagan is this: 40 percent of the incoming class at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., is female, but women only make up 15 percent of the active-duty force.

Though each individual’s circumstances are different, often “it’s family pressure at that mid-grade point … with the rigid moves that are required that make it hard for people to stay in,” Fagan said.

She said leadership is “stepping into the details of work” to try to remedy that, with one possibility to find a way for personnel to take time off from the Coast Guard somewhere in the middle of their careers, when many prioritize family.

“Some of this flexibility will hopefully get people past that one- or two-year point where they’re just really challenged and prioritize family, and then allow them to continue to serve,” she said.

“Policies that are good for retention for women are just good for retention across the board,” including minorities as well, Fagan added.

The topic of being a parent while in the Coast Guard has come under national scrutiny after one former academy cadet, Isaak Olson, formally challenged the school’s policy barring parents from attending. Olson filed a lawsuit in December against the school for expelling him after it determined he had a child.

While the four other military service academies have eliminated their parental bans — a measure passed in the latest defense authorization bill forbade them — the Coast Guard Academy is under the authority of the Department of Homeland Security, not the Department of Defense (DOD), making it unaffected by the new law.

Fagan said she is aware of that conversation and conceded there must be a discussion internally, but she does not have a sharp view on whether “we need to look at amending that.”

The DOD has also been pressured over whether it will protect access to abortion for service women with the likelihood that the Supreme Court will soon overturn Roe v. Wade — pressure that has seen the Army and Air Force change policies to make leave for such a procedure easier. 

Asked whether the Coast Guard plans to follow suit, Fagan said she has not yet been part of that conversation but expects she will be soon. 

“As we recruit for talent, retain for talent, we generally look to be aligned with DOD counterparts,” she said. “But again, [it’s] just part of a policy conversation that we’re just stepping into, and I don’t know where we’ll end up with it.”

For now, Fagan is focused on the first whirlwind weeks as a service head. Over the weekend, she traveled to Southeast Asia to attend the 2022 Shangri La Dialogue in Singapore, visiting Coast Guard units along the way.

“It’s really a kind of journey that plays out a day at a time, a week at a time, a year at a time and you come up on the other end of it and all of a sudden you’re sitting in the corner office,” she said of her 37 years. “When I walked in here on Thursday, it’s like, ‘Oh, alright.’ I haven’t fully internalized it yet.”

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