Division 7 Special Projects Group

“The Coast Guard is less ready than at any other time since the end of World War II. The service is fragile, in crisis, and on a path to failure. It has a significant enlisted workforce shortage, without enough people to operate its assets. Its cutters, boats, aircraft, information technology, and shore stations are on the verge of collapse because of a long-term lack of maintenance. Its organizational structure and force design are outdated. The service is in a downward readiness spiral that is unsustainable. Without change, the Coast Guard will fail.” - Kristi Noem, US Secretary of DHS, 2025.

Compounding the staffing and logistical challenges this manpower crisis alone has created, the concurrent additions of post-9/11 assignments to ports and waterways security, the redirection of assets to our domestic maritime borders, the enforcement of exclusive economic zones in the Indo-Pacific, ongoing developments in the Middle East, the emerging realities in the Arctic, and, most recently, the interdictions and seizures of vessels on the high seas have resulted in notable additional stresses and strains on the world’s premier maritime law enforcement agency, which now finds itself an overworked, undermanned, and underfunded force that is expected to continue its legacy domestic duties while accomplishing all of these new and emerging worldwide assignments, all while basically remaining no larger than the New York City Police Department.

As a result of this confluence of seemingly unrelated events and taskings that our Coast Guard is now experiencing, the Auxiliary, for the first time since its creation in WWII, again finds itself needed to assist and backfill the Coast Guard in its domestic lifesaving operations. The reason is the same as it was 87 years ago: a shortage of vessels and manpower.

Only this time, instead of being tasked with assisting and backfilling the Coast Guard in the safety and protection of convoys and their crews supporting the war effort in Europe, the Auxiliary is once again needed to assist in the safety and protection of recreational vessels and their crews and guests during this unprecedented crisis of manpower and vessel availability.

This is where the Division 7 Special Projects Group (SPG) concept can assist, by mining its membership's intellectual properties and knowledge bases to identify new ideas and solutions to maintain the traditional, long-standing levels of recreational boating safety and security that Western Long Island Sound has historically enjoyed, both now during this manpower crisis and into the future.

Following the establishment of the U.S. Coast Guard Innovation Program, the mandates in Force Design 2028, and the Commandant’s directive to foster a culture of continuous innovation and learning, the SPG has been formed to provide, maintain, and support a collaborative, open-invitation environment where skilled and talented people can share their personal and professional expertise on issues that affect the safety and security of recreational boating.

In support of this Coast Guard-wide effort to increase the efficiency and accelerate the process of turning innovative ideas or solutions into mission results, the SPG provides an environment and structured framework that encourages subject-matter experts to contribute their experience and know-how to small, single projects with clearly-defined beginning and end points, thereby protecting volunteer participants from the all-too-common occurrence of being “volunteered” later to run an entire program because a single project they worked on previously was so successful.

By bringing together creative and imaginative subject-matter experts in a decentralized, open dialogue framework that fosters collaborative brainstorming and the cross-pollination of ideas, the SPG ensures that the path from initial idea to meaningful impact remains clear and achievable by maintaining a nexus where leadership can directly request ideas from the group and the group can directly share ideas with leadership.