A Cook Shortage Threatens To Sink U.S. Coast Guard Operations

In a reminder that high-tech militaries are only as strong as their weakest supporting link, a long-standing cook shortage threatens to sideline the U.S. Coast Guard.

Newly recruited to the high-tech, great-power struggle in the Western Pacific, the Coast Guard is in a struggle for trained workers. But rather than focus solely on waging a bare-knuckle labor fight to keep elite operations specialists, electronics technicians, cyber operators, and other glamorous workers in the fleet, the Coast Guard is also paying big money to recruit and retain cooks, or, in Coast Guard vernacular, “culinary specialists.”

The Coast Guard’s cook shortage is a full-fledged readiness crisis.

Chronically underfunded, the Coast Guard is always struggling to address mission shortfalls. And while military combatant commanders request more Coast Guard help, more cutters are heading to sea without a full complement in the kitchen. Normally a routine matter, kitchen staffing shortfalls have made ship galleys into worrisome “single points of failure.”

Without cooks, the Coast Guard’s multimillion-dollar ships are effectively “sunk,” and unable to operate effectively.

Recognizing the old military adage that “an army travels on its stomach,” the Coast Guard is pushing hard to fill the gap. An enlisted recruit with a culinary degree can get a $50,000 bonus, jumping the recruit and apprentice ratings to enter the Coast Guard as a full-fledged Third-Class Petty Officer. A culinary certificate holder gets $45,000. An untrained Coast Guard recruit with an interest in tending a kitchen can go to culinary school, and, upon completion, get a $40,000 reward.

And that’s not all. To keep cooks in the service, the Coast Guard will pay $30,000 as a re-enlistment bonus.

The Coast Guard’s “culinary specialist” shortage is a cautionary readiness tale for Congress. America’s high-tech military is only as good as their most basic and most mundane foundations. But after years of cost-cutting, privatizing and other “rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul” schemes, those humble foundations are far less resilient than they should be.

Coast Guard culinary specialists are critical afloat. But, on bases, contractors have taken away many shore billets culinary specialists need to recharge after a stint at sea. Lacking spots at kitchens ashore, Coast Guard culinary specialists have little choice but to spend their career constantly at sea, struggling to keep old or under-designed ship kitchens operational. And when they are lucky enough to find a shoreside job, they’re usually snatched away to temporarily fill in for an understaffed vessel.

Coast Guard figures say it all. For a cook to promote from Second Class Petty Officer to a First Class Petty Officer, the Coast Guard requires two years of rated sea time. With the average time to advancement of five years, promotion-minded cooks spend about half their time at sea, often in ships whose galleys were designed and built in the 1950s or ‘60s.

Faced with those types of demands, few culinary specialists stay on.

A Ship Sails On Its Stomach

Too many Coast Guard cutters are going to sea without a full complement of cooks.

This summer, as the Sentinel-class Fast Response Cutter USCGC Oliver Henry (WPC 1140) cruised out of Guam, a base crew of 24, boosted by a linguist, corpsman, and various ship riders, was fed by a single cook, a First Class Petty Officer. The Coast Guard simply didn’t have junior culinary specialist available to round out the small ship’s normal two-person kitchen staff.

The staffing shortfall was unusual, as the 43-day cruise of just over 8,000 nautical miles was a high-profile deployment. Unaccompanied, the little cutter traveled to Papua New Guinea, Australia, and the Federated States of Micronesia. The ship made headlines when it was turned away from the Solomons Islands and barred from making a port call at Honiara.

It was no gentle little pleasure cruise. The small, 353-ton ship took on missions more typical of a far-larger Medium Endurance Cutter, handling a range of Illegal, Unregulated, and Unreported Fishing (IUU-F) enforcement work for the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission. It worked with Australian partners, honing shared skills, and scouted out logistical support stops suitable for use by other busy Fast Response Cutters.

Through it all, the ship’s ultimate success depended upon a single, hard-working cook. In a post-cruise interview, the cutter captain, Lt. Freddy Hofschneider, noted that the hard-pressed culinary specialist “prepared over 3,000 meals while managing all the port provisioning.”

“Preparing meals on a cutter is never easy,” remarked Hofschneider, “so doing that during a 43-day patrol on an FRC is quite the feat.”

The cutter captain was right. Fast Response Cutters were not originally envisioned as long-cruising ocean greyhounds. They were built to support a nominal endurance of five days, and their kitchens are not designed for long deployments. The USCGC Joseph Gerczak (WPC 1126), on a similarly long cruise, “had extra freezers and reefers on the bridge and out of the mezzanine deck.”

USCGC Oliver Henry was no different. Hofschneider continued, “we procured an extra freezer that we kept outside.”

But the cook on the Oliver Henry had to do more than just prepare food. He had to serve as an ersatz supply officer, helping the ship find supplies as pulled into ports that American ships hadn’t visited since World War II. “This patrol was challenging,” Hofschneider said, “because we pulled into some places where food stores were minimal.”

Despite the lengthy and short-staffed patrol, the culinary specialist rose to the occasion. “He kept the crew happy and well fed,” remarked the cutter captain. The cook wasn’t totally alone. “As a crew, we also helped in the galley to schedule designated days for others to prepare meals,” and the little ship “had some great amateur chefs aboard who assisted” regularly.

But the experiences aboard America’s long-deploying Fast Response Cutters emphasize some of the challenges facing critical but oft-overlooked members of the Coast Guard team. Fancy capabilities are good to have, but, ignore cooks and kitchens, and multi-million-dollar ships will spend a lot of time pierside, useless.

If the cook shortage shows signs of being a systemic problem, resistant to financial incentives and other enticements, the Coast Guard should put more energy and innovation into designing optimal galley spaces. In government ship design, kitchens can be relative afterthoughts, kludged in after all the design money and extra space has gone towards gee-whiz combat systems and other fancy things. If the Coast Guard is asking culinary specialists to do the impossible, then help should be designed in, up front.

Personnel As Strategy

Of the maritime services, only the Coast Guard Commandant, Admiral Linda Fagan, has made talent management a central focus of her Service. Her new strategy is refreshingly blunt, saying “the total end strength of our workforce is challenged,” and, if not addressed, shortfalls “will lead to reduced capacity and mission effectiveness.”

While many of Admiral Fagan’s personnel proposals are focused on keeping the Coast Guard a competitive employer in a world full of flexible, high-tech employment opportunities, Fagan is also laying the foundations to grow the Coast Guard’s mundane-but-critical support staff.

To do that, Admiral Fagan has prioritized shore infrastructure investments, and, by better integrating the shore-time needs of the Coast Guard’s hard-pressed culinary specialist cadre, the Coast Guard has an opportunity to open up more opportunities for enlisted staff to provide culinary services ashore. If Fagan’s investments in shoreside infrastructure can redirect some meal hall contracting support that should, in a modern Coast Guard, be done by Coast Guard cooks, the entire Coast Guard fleet will benefit. Sometimes, the pursuit of low-cost base operations must be put aside for the good of the fleet.

Afloat, cooks are critical crew members, enabling an enormous amount of capability. It is time to treat the humble culinary specialist career path with the equivalent respect accorded to Coast Guard pilots, rescue swimmers, and special operators—Coast Guard “elite” who would not function if left unfed.