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The security policy situation has led to a paradigm shift to a world with a higher threat level. Defense must again be made dangerous as it was in the 80s and be able to participate in a great power conflict. At the same time, civil society demands a higher quality in the task solving of the civilian coast guard tasks, which is put to the fore when 160 men and an expensive frigate are sent to hunt pirates who are armed with handguns. Is the time ripe for the Armed Forces to separate the coast guard tasks, so that the navy can concentrate on the military, and a new coast guard organization can focus on the coast guard tasks? Can it ensure a better quality in the task solution? I will try to investigate this in two blog posts. The first is about the challenges of the current organisation, and the second will be about what a coast guard might look like in a Danish context.
The discussion is brought to the fore by the fact that you are faced with a number of major investments. Both frigate classes must go through their mid-life update (MLU) , new environmental ships must be purchased, and as mentioned, you can begin to see the end of the Thetis class. At the same time, the general development has put the Swedish Navy under pressure because higher demands are placed on the military task solution.
When you send an anti-submarine frigate on a pirate hunt for 5 months, that's time it can't spend training for its primary mission. Fighting pirates with frigates is at best a waste of money due to the frigate's large crew, and the ship itself is expensive due to the many military systems on the ships. In addition, capacity is taken up which cannot be used for its primary purpose. Finally, the scarce resources of the special forces can be better used in more demanding tasks. In the end, it was found that it is not so easy to fight pirates, but that it is a mission that takes time to become good at.
If the solution is to be resource-efficient, a capacity that is more targeted for the task could be used here. Then you don't have to take the frigates away from their primary missions for long periods of time. If the task could instead be solved with a coast guard ship in the same class as the Thetis class, then it would not draw on SVN's military resources.
Sea rescue exercise Dynamic Mercy 2019. Photo: Lærke Weensgaard, Defense Gallery
It will solve the problem that when the frigates are loaded with more and more expensive sensors and missiles, it becomes a very expensive platform to have to do pirate hunting. The pirates have reappeared in the Gulf of Guinea, so the need is still there. But it can go a long way to cover it with a deployed coast guard ship with a helicopter and possibly a small group of Marines or a specially trained boarding team of Coast Guard personnel. The latter can ease the pressure on the special forces for maritime tasks.
Instead, they have focused on solving the military tasks, while the civilian ones are solved if and when there is time. It is not satisfactory in a society where you have to get better and better at solving the tasks set, and there is a growing expectation from civil society for the quality of how these tasks are solved. This means that civil society today suffers from the lack of prioritization, just as the administration suffers.
The endless history of purchasing replacements for pollution control ships is one of the consequences of the lack of priority. You should be happy that there has been no serious pollution in the last several years. These ships were already old back in 2005, so the problem is not new. The ship commander for Mette Miljø resigned back in 2012, because it was already known there that the ships cannot solve the task and that they can be downright dangerous for the crew who have to operate them. It's been nine years.
As Anders Puck Nielsen also points out in his article in Ræson, the governments of the Faroe Islands and Greenland are not particularly interested in the ship days being spent hunting Russian submarines. On the other hand, they are – in the same way as civilian Denmark – interested in a high quality solution to the civilian coast guard tasks.
The patrol vessel Freja and the environmental vessel Mette Miljø. Photo: Mads Juul Jørgensen, Defense Gallery
Today, a number of Coast Guard authority tasks are spread over a number of different agencies, etc., namely fisheries control, hydrographic surveying, SAR, buoys, environment, ice and patrol vessels. Some of these are stand-by functions such as environment and SAR, while others are continuous such as fisheries control, patrols, buoys and surveying. There could therefore be synergy in that they are solved by the same vessels. It also means that all these functions should have ships that can cover the sea from the inland waters to the North Sea to some extent, but that they do not because they are spread over different agencies. This results in us e.g. does the Diana class, which is not, have the necessary endurance and seaworthiness to cover the Danish area 24/7. Could you combine any of these functions, so that they could be shared between both the small and the large vessels and thus provide better coverage. A civilian supply ship costs down to DKK 150 million, so it is not because they are out of financial reach.
In 2017, 2 people lost their lives in Copenhagen's harbor when they were run over by some jet skis . Fortunately, the culprits were caught, but this is far from always the case. You can see the problem as that there are too few vessels, and that the Police is reactive, i.e. they only come after something has happened. You can also choose another angle, namely that it was the organization of authority responsibility that failed and cost the two people their lives. Who is responsible for people's safety at sea? They were unlucky and fell between the two chairs, and on another day we had not caught the perpetrators. If we had had an active patrolling Danish coast guard with fast boats close to the areas where it is popular to sail and swim, then it is not certain that the unhappy situation would have ever arisen.
The current Joint Rescue and Coordination Center is a really good idea, but it has come against a dull background due to the accident at Læsø. Here is another example of things happening in the background when it comes to rescue tasks, rather than being driven forward by an organization whose sole purpose is to be the best at sea and air rescue, and which is therefore at the forefront. Here is also a task that is better solved by someone who is a specialist in that part, rather than people specializing in the naval-military and air-military domain. You want rescue specialists and a well-oiled machinery to take care of that task, because when it comes down to it, you don't get a second chance.
Fortunately, major and serious accidents at sea are getting longer and longer, and one of the reasons for this is that there is more focus on it and on how they can be avoided. But they can still happen. Here one should consider whether it provides the best solution for the coast guard tasks with a military-trained staff or with a staff that only deals with rescue, as is the case with, for example, the American coast guard. While a military trained staff will be able to solve the task, it is likely that it will leave much to be desired compared to a coast guard that does nothing else and is therefore specialized in that part. For them, it will be their primary mission, while it does not naturally belong in a military education.
The underlying cause of these problems is lack of prioritization and lack of specialization. It is a bit extreme, but it shows what happens when you want too many things with the same organization and organizational culture. It has a cost in the quality of the civil task solution and the civil society gets a bad task solution, which ultimately can cost lives, but which can also show itself in a major pollution that is not prevented because the equipment is not ready.
What has happened in the last decades is that the professionalism in the fleet has increased significantly. While in the old days you could turn on the sonar and throw some depth charges - roughly speaking - today, submarine hunting requires a completely different dedication of the platform and the crew. Maintaining the desired quality in hunting submarines means that you cannot simultaneously solve coast guard tasks for half of the sailing days. Being a submarine chaser or anti-aircraft frigate in the class required by NATO is a full-time job for the crew and the ship, with training and participation in exercises etc. In addition, the Norwegian Navy prioritizes the frigates participating in the escort of aircraft carriers and international exercises. You won't get to that if the level isn't up to it, both of the crew and the ships.
At the same time, there has been a break between the primarily civilian coast guard platforms and the dedicated military platforms. A coast guard ship can have a high degree of automation, cheap sensors and a minimal crew to operate the ship's functions. This concept can be seen, for example, on the offshore industry's standby ships. A warship, on the other hand, must have a crew that is large enough to solve many tasks at the same time in a crisis situation, and here the benefit of automation is not that great, as the systems can break down. Therefore, on a warship there is a risk that there will be too few hands if the crew is made too small. With the frigates' expensive sensors, expensive weapons, high manning and military training, etc., it is also a very expensive capacity to have to solve coast guard tasks, and that price will only increase in the future when the frigates are equipped with more and more expensive equipment. The two requirements therefore result in conflicting wishes for the vessels.
In the Arctic, civilian tasks take up the most space - so much so that the Arctic patrol ships will not have much importance in a high-intensity conflict, e.g. because neither manpower, sensors nor weapons are suitable for it. And due to the large proportion of civilian tasks, it would not make sense to turn them over to the military side, if at all possible.
The inspection vessel Ejnar Mikkelsen P571 near the Faroe Islands, 2019. Photo: The media group on the frigate Peter Willemoes, Defense Gallery.
If you can separate the four Arctic patrol ships into, for example, two dedicated military ships and, for example, three dedicated coast guard ships for roughly the same price and crew, then they would probably be able to solve the two tasks better than if all ships and their crews have to be able to do both.
Another and equally important dimension is the crew's motivation and interest. You actively choose the navy, choose the military, because that is the part that motivates you and where you want to serve. Although you can solve coast guard tasks on the side, it is not where your heart is, and therefore it is not where you become good. Those who, on the other hand, actively choose a career with the coast guard choose that maritime security is the mission that motivates, and you want to be good at what you do. Therefore, if you also want to ensure that the tasks are carried out by highly motivated people, then you should divide the two missions in each of their organizations, so that both the people and the organization can become world champions in solving the two different tasks.
Today, the defense has problems recruiting enough personnel. When at the same time you have to use the personnel you have to solve the coast guard tasks, then there will be fewer hands to solve the fleet tasks. If instead the coast guard tasks can be solved with civilian employees, then it will free up the navy's personnel to solve the military tasks. You also promote officers who are good at solving their military tasks, and this creates a motivation to solve them on a high and professional level, and that's how it should be in a military organization. With regard to the coast guard tasks, there is not that motivational factor, because being skilled at solving that type of tasks in a military organization does not give promotion in the same way.
When a small fleet can concentrate on being a fleet, this means that it becomes better at solving its military tasks, because it no longer has to straddle two very different domains and missions with very different types of associated knowledge. Instead, it can concentrate on becoming good in a single domain and area of knowledge. It is also necessary if we want to assert ourselves in the NATO auspices, where there are high requirements for the training level and the ships' equipment in particular.
Rasmus Dahlberg nicely points out that it is due to inertia or rather internal resistance to change, while the former head of the Navy's Operational Command, Rear Admiral Nils Wang, more directly calls it territorial pissing. He is probably not quite right, because if a new organization is needed, then the money and the manpower have to come from somewhere, and it is typically from those who solve the tasks today. In Denmark, one can hope that the defense budget will be increased further so that it will be able to co-finance part of the establishment without taking away from the existing budget.
The paradigm shift in the security policy situation means that the threat level has increased so that today we need to solve the military tasks in a completely different class than 10 years ago. At the same time, you are faced with a number of investments that will set the direction for the future Navy, including for solving the coast guard tasks.
If you therefore want to be able to increase the level of both civilian task-solving and military task-solving, then you will need to separate the two in each organization, so that they get the necessary opportunity to specialize in their two different missions. I will look at how this can be done in a Danish context in more detail in the second part of this blog series.
source: https://krigskunst.dk/2021/03/29/skal-danmark-have-en-separat-kystvagt/
________________________________
This is a debate on the need for Denmark to establish a Coast Guard. I think it's very much necessary, and the content of the debate is pretty solid.
The greatest threat for this to be realized is the cost since past governments have neglected and hallowed out the capabilities of the Navy. So getting back to scratch will cost, and the government has erased a single holiday using the lack of funding to the armed forces as an excuse to do so.
Part 1 of 2: The challenges of the current organization
Anders Puck Nielsen asks in this post in Ræson whether the Defense has received fewer military resources because the coast guard functions have not been separated, and it has therefore not been made visible how much the Navy was actually cut. As an organisation, would you have been more successful in attracting more resources if the coastguard had been separated, because you could then see how thinly manned the fleet really was? That is one side of the question. The other side is that the Navy's seven Arctic ships today primarily solve coast guard tasks, while the military tasks do not take up so much. One can sense the end of the four inspection ships of the Thetis class, and therefore we are faced with deciding what will succeed them. Should it be highly specialized and expensive e.g. submarine chasers, or should it be several cheaper almost civilian ships, which is built for coast guard duties with a small crew? Should we establish a Greenlandic coast guard that is good at solving civilian tasks, and then let the warships be fewer but built and trained only to solve sharp military tasks?The discussion is brought to the fore by the fact that you are faced with a number of major investments. Both frigate classes must go through their mid-life update (MLU) , new environmental ships must be purchased, and as mentioned, you can begin to see the end of the Thetis class. At the same time, the general development has put the Swedish Navy under pressure because higher demands are placed on the military task solution.
Brexit means that Denmark has got an EU border in the North Sea
Brexit means that the EU's external border has been in the North Sea since 1 January 2021, as Great Britain has left the EU. Although we will still be allies, the UK is leaving the EU's passport and customs union and the common fisheries. There will therefore be a need for us to be able to enforce our rights in relation to e.g. fisheries and border control. Although the threats have now been withdrawn, it has been mentioned from the English side that approaching fishermen could be rejected with armed fisheries control. The current Danish fisheries control is not at all suitable for this kind of confrontation, as it is unarmed. If you send the Navy's gray ships, you send an unintended signal that escalates the situation, and that is not always desirable. If you can instead send a lightly armed white-painted coast guard ship, then you make it possible to enforce your economic zone without increasing the level of conflict.Anti-piracy is an orphaned task
Denmark has been fighting pirates abroad for a long time, but has stopped that effort as we lack resources, and the priorities have shifted to military task-solving . Denmark has the 5th largest merchant fleet in the world, which earns Denmark 40 billion kroner every year. This means that the politicians have a certain responsiveness to the shipping companies' needs, and the current Minister of Defense has also shown this by adopting the new mission to West Africa. In the past, we have sent the frigates off, but they are now busy training and participating in tasks that sharpen them in relation to the military mission.When you send an anti-submarine frigate on a pirate hunt for 5 months, that's time it can't spend training for its primary mission. Fighting pirates with frigates is at best a waste of money due to the frigate's large crew, and the ship itself is expensive due to the many military systems on the ships. In addition, capacity is taken up which cannot be used for its primary purpose. Finally, the scarce resources of the special forces can be better used in more demanding tasks. In the end, it was found that it is not so easy to fight pirates, but that it is a mission that takes time to become good at.
If the solution is to be resource-efficient, a capacity that is more targeted for the task could be used here. Then you don't have to take the frigates away from their primary missions for long periods of time. If the task could instead be solved with a coast guard ship in the same class as the Thetis class, then it would not draw on SVN's military resources.
It will solve the problem that when the frigates are loaded with more and more expensive sensors and missiles, it becomes a very expensive platform to have to do pirate hunting. The pirates have reappeared in the Gulf of Guinea, so the need is still there. But it can go a long way to cover it with a deployed coast guard ship with a helicopter and possibly a small group of Marines or a specially trained boarding team of Coast Guard personnel. The latter can ease the pressure on the special forces for maritime tasks.
Migrants in the Mediterranean
The navy has deployed two small vessels to Greece in support of the EU's border agency, Frontex. Here it has also been experienced that there is a big difference between this type of tasks, and if the Norwegian Navy normally takes care of them, why were you not really prepared for it. As with the effort against pirates, the law is behind another. As the pressure on the EU from Africa only increases, it is likely that there will be more tasks of this type, and here it is an advantage to have personnel who are specialists in coast guard tasks and the international law that applies to these kinds of situations.The down-prioritization of the Coast Guard tasks has meant unsatisfactory solutions to the tasks
Here at home, we have also experienced how the civilian coast guard duties have not been given high priority. Unfortunately, it is nothing new that the civil task solution suffers, which you can also read in the Engineer's leader from 2014 .Instead, they have focused on solving the military tasks, while the civilian ones are solved if and when there is time. It is not satisfactory in a society where you have to get better and better at solving the tasks set, and there is a growing expectation from civil society for the quality of how these tasks are solved. This means that civil society today suffers from the lack of prioritization, just as the administration suffers.
The endless history of purchasing replacements for pollution control ships is one of the consequences of the lack of priority. You should be happy that there has been no serious pollution in the last several years. These ships were already old back in 2005, so the problem is not new. The ship commander for Mette Miljø resigned back in 2012, because it was already known there that the ships cannot solve the task and that they can be downright dangerous for the crew who have to operate them. It's been nine years.
As Anders Puck Nielsen also points out in his article in Ræson, the governments of the Faroe Islands and Greenland are not particularly interested in the ship days being spent hunting Russian submarines. On the other hand, they are – in the same way as civilian Denmark – interested in a high quality solution to the civilian coast guard tasks.
Today, a number of Coast Guard authority tasks are spread over a number of different agencies, etc., namely fisheries control, hydrographic surveying, SAR, buoys, environment, ice and patrol vessels. Some of these are stand-by functions such as environment and SAR, while others are continuous such as fisheries control, patrols, buoys and surveying. There could therefore be synergy in that they are solved by the same vessels. It also means that all these functions should have ships that can cover the sea from the inland waters to the North Sea to some extent, but that they do not because they are spread over different agencies. This results in us e.g. does the Diana class, which is not, have the necessary endurance and seaworthiness to cover the Danish area 24/7. Could you combine any of these functions, so that they could be shared between both the small and the large vessels and thus provide better coverage. A civilian supply ship costs down to DKK 150 million, so it is not because they are out of financial reach.
In 2017, 2 people lost their lives in Copenhagen's harbor when they were run over by some jet skis . Fortunately, the culprits were caught, but this is far from always the case. You can see the problem as that there are too few vessels, and that the Police is reactive, i.e. they only come after something has happened. You can also choose another angle, namely that it was the organization of authority responsibility that failed and cost the two people their lives. Who is responsible for people's safety at sea? They were unlucky and fell between the two chairs, and on another day we had not caught the perpetrators. If we had had an active patrolling Danish coast guard with fast boats close to the areas where it is popular to sail and swim, then it is not certain that the unhappy situation would have ever arisen.
The current Joint Rescue and Coordination Center is a really good idea, but it has come against a dull background due to the accident at Læsø. Here is another example of things happening in the background when it comes to rescue tasks, rather than being driven forward by an organization whose sole purpose is to be the best at sea and air rescue, and which is therefore at the forefront. Here is also a task that is better solved by someone who is a specialist in that part, rather than people specializing in the naval-military and air-military domain. You want rescue specialists and a well-oiled machinery to take care of that task, because when it comes down to it, you don't get a second chance.
Fortunately, major and serious accidents at sea are getting longer and longer, and one of the reasons for this is that there is more focus on it and on how they can be avoided. But they can still happen. Here one should consider whether it provides the best solution for the coast guard tasks with a military-trained staff or with a staff that only deals with rescue, as is the case with, for example, the American coast guard. While a military trained staff will be able to solve the task, it is likely that it will leave much to be desired compared to a coast guard that does nothing else and is therefore specialized in that part. For them, it will be their primary mission, while it does not naturally belong in a military education.
The underlying cause of these problems is lack of prioritization and lack of specialization. It is a bit extreme, but it shows what happens when you want too many things with the same organization and organizational culture. It has a cost in the quality of the civil task solution and the civil society gets a bad task solution, which ultimately can cost lives, but which can also show itself in a major pollution that is not prevented because the equipment is not ready.
Competences, coast guard, small fleets and the Arctic
Anders Puck Nielsen writes in the article about small fleets that these prioritize the task of waging war over other tasks. Here he mainly uses the pirate mission as an example of a task that the Swedish Navy has solved, and which is now on the table again. The chapter can just as well be read with the coast guard mission in mind instead of the pirate mission, and you come to the same conclusions. The security policy situation has changed, so that today we are faced with military threats such as Russia, and the Navy's focus and priority have shifted there.What has happened in the last decades is that the professionalism in the fleet has increased significantly. While in the old days you could turn on the sonar and throw some depth charges - roughly speaking - today, submarine hunting requires a completely different dedication of the platform and the crew. Maintaining the desired quality in hunting submarines means that you cannot simultaneously solve coast guard tasks for half of the sailing days. Being a submarine chaser or anti-aircraft frigate in the class required by NATO is a full-time job for the crew and the ship, with training and participation in exercises etc. In addition, the Norwegian Navy prioritizes the frigates participating in the escort of aircraft carriers and international exercises. You won't get to that if the level isn't up to it, both of the crew and the ships.
At the same time, there has been a break between the primarily civilian coast guard platforms and the dedicated military platforms. A coast guard ship can have a high degree of automation, cheap sensors and a minimal crew to operate the ship's functions. This concept can be seen, for example, on the offshore industry's standby ships. A warship, on the other hand, must have a crew that is large enough to solve many tasks at the same time in a crisis situation, and here the benefit of automation is not that great, as the systems can break down. Therefore, on a warship there is a risk that there will be too few hands if the crew is made too small. With the frigates' expensive sensors, expensive weapons, high manning and military training, etc., it is also a very expensive capacity to have to solve coast guard tasks, and that price will only increase in the future when the frigates are equipped with more and more expensive equipment. The two requirements therefore result in conflicting wishes for the vessels.
In the Arctic, civilian tasks take up the most space - so much so that the Arctic patrol ships will not have much importance in a high-intensity conflict, e.g. because neither manpower, sensors nor weapons are suitable for it. And due to the large proportion of civilian tasks, it would not make sense to turn them over to the military side, if at all possible.
If you can separate the four Arctic patrol ships into, for example, two dedicated military ships and, for example, three dedicated coast guard ships for roughly the same price and crew, then they would probably be able to solve the two tasks better than if all ships and their crews have to be able to do both.
Another and equally important dimension is the crew's motivation and interest. You actively choose the navy, choose the military, because that is the part that motivates you and where you want to serve. Although you can solve coast guard tasks on the side, it is not where your heart is, and therefore it is not where you become good. Those who, on the other hand, actively choose a career with the coast guard choose that maritime security is the mission that motivates, and you want to be good at what you do. Therefore, if you also want to ensure that the tasks are carried out by highly motivated people, then you should divide the two missions in each of their organizations, so that both the people and the organization can become world champions in solving the two different tasks.
Today, the defense has problems recruiting enough personnel. When at the same time you have to use the personnel you have to solve the coast guard tasks, then there will be fewer hands to solve the fleet tasks. If instead the coast guard tasks can be solved with civilian employees, then it will free up the navy's personnel to solve the military tasks. You also promote officers who are good at solving their military tasks, and this creates a motivation to solve them on a high and professional level, and that's how it should be in a military organization. With regard to the coast guard tasks, there is not that motivational factor, because being skilled at solving that type of tasks in a military organization does not give promotion in the same way.
When a small fleet can concentrate on being a fleet, this means that it becomes better at solving its military tasks, because it no longer has to straddle two very different domains and missions with very different types of associated knowledge. Instead, it can concentrate on becoming good in a single domain and area of knowledge. It is also necessary if we want to assert ourselves in the NATO auspices, where there are high requirements for the training level and the ships' equipment in particular.
Everyone else has a coastguard – Denmark is nothing special
In Denmark, for historical reasons, we have the navy to take care of the coast guard duties, but there is no rational reason for this. The countries we usually compare ourselves to all have separate coast guard functions: Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Canada and the United States. There shouldn't be a particular reason why Denmark stands out. In 2014, the Swedish coast guard had a budget of 2.5 billion SEK and the Norwegian one of 1 billion NOK, to give an indication of the size of their budgets, and this is for a somewhat longer coastline. If you look at the Commonwealth's coastline, it's strange that we don't have a coastguard, because we have lots of coast and lots of sea in all three parts of the Commonwealth.Rasmus Dahlberg nicely points out that it is due to inertia or rather internal resistance to change, while the former head of the Navy's Operational Command, Rear Admiral Nils Wang, more directly calls it territorial pissing. He is probably not quite right, because if a new organization is needed, then the money and the manpower have to come from somewhere, and it is typically from those who solve the tasks today. In Denmark, one can hope that the defense budget will be increased further so that it will be able to co-finance part of the establishment without taking away from the existing budget.
Summary and recommendation
Over the last three decades, there has been a great development in knowledge of the two primary areas, namely the military and coastguard tasks respectively, and there is no natural overlap between the two areas. Being an officer in a coast guard will not have very much overlap with being an officer in a navy. Both parts today require a dedication of personnel and platforms so that they can solve the tasks to the level required. Training, exercises, education on the one hand and their equipment on the other. If you want to be able to cope in NATO and against Russia, there is no room for you to be only 50% or 75% dedicated to the task. Here you have to be 100% dedicated. At the same time, civil society demands that the coast guard tasks are not only solved with the left hand, but that they are solved professionally and with high quality in the task solution and without it going beyond the military mission.The paradigm shift in the security policy situation means that the threat level has increased so that today we need to solve the military tasks in a completely different class than 10 years ago. At the same time, you are faced with a number of investments that will set the direction for the future Navy, including for solving the coast guard tasks.
If you therefore want to be able to increase the level of both civilian task-solving and military task-solving, then you will need to separate the two in each organization, so that they get the necessary opportunity to specialize in their two different missions. I will look at how this can be done in a Danish context in more detail in the second part of this blog series.
source: https://krigskunst.dk/2021/03/29/skal-danmark-have-en-separat-kystvagt/
________________________________
This is a debate on the need for Denmark to establish a Coast Guard. I think it's very much necessary, and the content of the debate is pretty solid.
The greatest threat for this to be realized is the cost since past governments have neglected and hallowed out the capabilities of the Navy. So getting back to scratch will cost, and the government has erased a single holiday using the lack of funding to the armed forces as an excuse to do so.
