Innovation & Imagination

The United States Coast Guard has been assigned dozens of additional missions, taskings, and responsibilities following the terrorist attacks of 9/11. 

With its transfer to the newly created Department of Homeland Security (DHS), these assignments now include protecting the US domestic maritime borders, enforcing our territories' exclusive economic zones in the Indo-Pacific, adapting to new Arctic challenges, conducting vessel interdictions on the high seas, and, most recently, addressing issues in the Middle East.

Over the past 25 years, in its ongoing efforts to maintain the same levels of safety, protection, and Search & Rescue capabilities it has historically provided domestically, the U.S. Coast Guard has had to continually reassign and reallocate its critically limited resources to meet all these post-9/11 demands, resulting in the world’s premier maritime law enforcement agency being overextended, short-staffed, and underfunded.

This is where the Auxiliary's CGD-NE-SR’s Division 7 Special Projects Group (SPG) was envisioned as a resource group of subject-matter experts available to offer their expertise and guidance in support of service improvements, vessel or manpower logistics, or any other issues that may arise related to the safety and security of the recreational boating community in Western Long Island Sound and elsewhere.

In support 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 established to provide, maintain, and support a collaborative, open-invitation think tank environment where skilled and talented people can share their personal and professional expertise on issues affecting recreational boating safety and security.

To promote this Coast Guard-wide effort to increase efficiency and accelerate the process of turning innovative ideas or solutions into mission results, the SPG was created to provide an environment and structured framework that encourages the imaginative and resourceful experts and specialists among us to feel comfortable contributing their experience and guidance to identifiable, individual projects that have well-defined goals along with clear start and completion endpoints.

By bringing together creative and imaginative members into a decentralized, open dialogue framework that fosters collaborative brainstorming and the cross-pollination of ideas, the SPG concept has been created to ensure that the path from and 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.