CNN iReport

[caption id="attachment_7359" align="alignright" width="199" caption="Mr. Jeffery G. Orner  Deputy Assistant Commandant for Engineering & Logistics US Coast Guard"][/caption]  This is Part 2 in a series - Read Part 1 in our series here

Right off the bat on Thursday morning one thing was made clear, Coast Guard modernization at the DCMS unit level was in trouble.  Many of the members on the Field Mission Support Integration team had very different opinions on what "bilateral support" meant.  Mr. Orner opened up Thursday morning by making his point of view clear, nothing is wrong.  His point of view fell on deaf ears in a room full of officers who knew all too well that something was very wrong.  Orner suggested that all the problems with mission delivery and customer support were communication issues.  "We need to do better at explaining modernization."  You can explain it all day long, and Coast Guard has done that at nauseum.  Service deliver at the unit and end customer level has been compromised.  Explaining the degradation service to operational units won't make them feel any better about dealing with multiple break away commands.  Orner insisted the team that "clarifying the dotted line relationships," will solve the problem.  When Orner said "We think this is the best structure, we're not interested in changing it," he stifled the discussion and set the tone.  We'll tell you later in this series that Orners thoughts may not have been articulated up the chain of command.  When Orner suggested that maybe Base Support Unit's (BSU) should be Det's without Commanding Officers you could have heard a pin hit the deck.  Orner suggested that officers shouldn't aspire to Command of a BSU, PSSU, or HSWL but that they instead should aspire to a staff job as Product Line Manager.  It sounds like Orner would like to completely remove the military hierarchy of Coast Guard and replace it with a more civilian structure.