Resident Training

Naval officers and senior enlisted, along with some civilians, attend Coast Guard training through the sponsorship of the State Department Security Assistance Program, designed to provide them with the skills and advanced technical capabilities to advance the status of their home maritime capabilities.

Funding for individual students comes from about 50 sources, including countries that pay from their own budgets. Others use Foreign Military Sales (FMS) money, such as Bahrain, which sends three students a year through the International Maritime Officers Course (IMOC). And each U.S. Embassy is given a specific amount of money each year for host-nation training and determines how some of that is allocated.

IMOC is the keystone of the domestic program – 15 weeks of classroom work conducted twice a year at Yorktown. Each class averages about three dozen students, who also attend the Coast Guard Academy Command and Operations School and make field trips to the U.S. Naval Academy and major northeastern U.S. coastal ports.

“One of our primary charges is to develop and leverage strategic partnerships and relationships, and we believe we do that very well. We often are the first U.S. presence [in another nation], just because we are seen as a humanitarian agency, not part of the military,” Holt said. “The students who go through IMOC are the best and brightest from their nations. For example, graduates of our resident course include the current heads of the Chilean navy and Haitian coast guard.

For the past 10 years, Coast Guard Training Center Yorktown, Va., has averaged about 250 foreign students a year in resident training. Officials said numbers downrange are down somewhat, but going back 16 years, a total of about 19,000 international students have gone through Coast Guard training.

“Since IMOC began in 1995, we have graduated 1,001 students, representing 117 nations, giving them a look at USCG missions as applicable to small nation naval forces and illustrating the best practices we use. For lack of a better term, it’s the Coast Guard version of a war college, geared toward middle-grade officers, ideally the O-2 – O-4 [lieutenant junior grade to lieutenant commander] level, but we have had senior enlisted. And in the last class, we had a two-star admiral from Cambodia and a young ensign from the Dominican Republic with only one year of service.”

IMOC Class 50, the second and last of 2013, was of typical size, with 35 students, ranging from ensign (O-1) to commander (O-5), from 26 countries: Bangladesh, Bulgaria, Djibouti, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Georgia, Ghana, Guyana, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Lebanon, Mexico, Mozambique, Nigeria, Oman, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Thailand, the Bahamas, the Philippines, Tonga, Turkey, Uganda, and Vietnam.

For the past 10 years, Yorktown has averaged about 250 foreign students a year in resident training. Officials said numbers downrange are down somewhat, but going back 16 years, a total of about 19,000 international students have gone through Coast Guard training.

 

International Mobile Training

“We have a series of 18 to 20 mobile courses we offer, such as a basic boarding officer course that teaches them about the law, how to handcuff people, how to make inspections, etc., ideally to a couple of dozen people in their nation,” Holt said. “We then would identify about six of those we believe have the qualities to be instructors; then we teach them an instructor development course. The next course teaches another group of 24, with those new instructors doing the actual teaching; we’re there to mentor them as they do the training.

“The final level is instructor development-special project. In Vietnam, for example, we recently helped them develop a curriculum that takes into account their laws, culture, training facilities on hand, etc. That may sound simple, but to actually get to that fourth level sometimes takes years; we often have to go back to some nations and repeat the courses to get to that fourth level. The objective is when we finish a nation’s training, they are a self-sustaining organization, able to train themselves and no longer need us. The same model applies on the boat side – go in, start with the basics, and lead them toward becoming self-sustaining.”

Turner, who served two tours aboard ships and spent time at the command center, said a lot of foresight and planning goes into preparing the mission in each nation before Coast Guard personnel fly there to initiate training.

“For our smallboat courses, for example, we utilize the other nation’s platforms and train them on assets they will be using for their organization,” she said, noting while each mission begins with the basics, it also is tailored – so far as possible – to each individual nation’s needs, equipment, and potential capabilities.

The relationship of Coast Guard international training to the current or future ability of other nations to work with the U.S. Navy or Coast Guard in contingency operations is peripheral and largely serendipitous, rather than a specific part of the mission.

Holt, who served aboard surface warfare vessels in the Navy, added Coast Guard vessels are not used in any mobile training, although the service’s assets are employed for some domestic training and other parts of the Coast Guard send operational units to joint exercises.

The relationship of Coast Guard international training to the current or future ability of other nations to work with the U.S. Navy or Coast Guard in contingency operations is peripheral and largely serendipitous, rather than a specific part of the mission.

“Our training curriculum does not specifically address doing point contingency operations or how to work with the U.S. Navy or other agencies doing joint operations in or with other countries,” Lt. James Daffer, an MTB deployable team leader, explained. “However, a lot of the funding sources we use are intended to enable foreign maritime leaders to work with other naval forces, as a secondary goal, to support those operations.”