So far the biggest news out of NACON is that they have h*t*t*p://sites.google.com/site/uscgauxnacon2009/coast-guard-auxiliary-restructures-national-organization once again.

The rearrangement apparently comes with the promotion of some of the deck hands and a gratuitous changing of a bunch of titles. Of course businees cards and letter head will have to be changed at some expense to the membership. Then the few webmasters that exist and do their jobs will have to 'volunteer' to change all the websitess.

At it will not stop there. After the creation of the NADCOs a few years ago, Nat pressured the districts and then the divisions and flotillas to create more bureaucratic levels at those levels. So expect this latest rearrangement to filter down the organization. No increase in a bureaucracy ever increased the real output of an organization - what it increases is more reporting and more meetings - meetings where the minutes are kept and the hours are lost.

This isn't about the alleged matching to the CG. If that were true then "M" would have been merged with RBS in Prevention years ago. Instead "M" has been allowed to claim sole use of the "Prevention" banner on the Aux side, but on the Gold Side, RBS is a key player in Prevention. It will be interesting to see where "M" and RBS end up in this latest rearrangement.

What this is really all about is:

1. Creating more stars, bars, chickens and leaves for the Best Buds.

2. Creating bullet points for the end-of-tour and end-of-year awards since there is a paucity of real achievement. I wonder how many and who will be in on the Team/Group Commendation for this brain "methane explosion".

3. Creating the semblence of progress and action when in fact nothing has changed or will change but boxes on an org chart.

If you don't believe 3 - then point out significant accomplishments since the NADCOs were created years ago, or the 'Chiefs' at district more recently.

Dance Band On the Auxtanic (apologies to Harry Chapin)

quote:

Dance band on the Auxtanic
Sing "Semper Unparatus” to me
The iceberg's on the starboard bow
Won't you dance with me

They were burnin' all the flares for candles
In the banquet they were throwin' in first class
And we were blowin' waltzes in the barroom
When the universe went CRASH!

"There's no way that this could happen"
I could hear NACO curse
He ordered lifeboats away, that's when I heard Hydra say
"NACO and NAVCOs and DCOs first"

Well, they soon used up all of the lifeboats
But there were a lot of us left on board
I heard the drummer sayin' "Boys, just keep playin'"
"Now we're doin' this gig for the Lord"

HYPERLINK REMOVED.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: JerryG,

I wonder when they will tell the general membership about the addition of all the new grandees... Only posting so far is this one blurb!

Possibly on the national web page, which is where FL got his information. Also in updates to various manuals, etc. Quite frankly, unless structures are changed at the local level as FL suggests will happen, how the national staff is organized doesn't make one lick of difference to the general membership.

Have you looked at the org chart below the press release?

Keep in mind that the whole purpose of the rearrangement of the deck chairs was to match the USCG organization. It doesn't and it doesn't even come close.

Compare the Silver Side abortion of an org chart to the clean lines of the USCG HQ organization. The latter is what the Silver Side is supposedly matching to. Only in some wierd alternative universe could they be considered close.

Some severe problems on the Aux side:

1. At the Deputy National Commodore level the Aux has apparently merged traditional staff functions (the old NADCO jobs) with line jobs (the old ARCO jobs), with the exception of DNACO-S who only does the old NADCO-MS job. You will not find this on the Gold Side.

2. As suspected, they did not follow USCG HQ organization regarding the placement of RBS with old "M". On the Gold Side you will find "M" and RBS under CG-54 Director of Prevention Policy. "O" is under CG-53, Director of Response Policy. So if the Aux is claiming to have done this to match the Gold Side, why is Aux "O" and "M" together under the ANACO-P (Asst Nat Commo Response & Prevention) and RBS is by itself under ANACO-RBS?

3. Unless the chart is incomplete the Aux has apparently eliminated the recently created Chief of Staff position. Only 3 members have held the position including the incumbent. It shouldn't be surprising it was eliminated since it didn't live up to expectations.

It was originally created to give a Best Bud of the then NACO some additional credentials to run for high level office without ever having been elected Auxie dog catcher. The idea was to first get the COS created (successful), get the designated Best Bud in the job (successful) and the get the GNat Board to approve an election change. The change being to allow high-level staffers to run for RCO (now DCAPT) without ever having been elected to anything. That failed - several times. The GNat Board saw this for the bit of cronyism and in-breeding it was and did not approve it.

The second incumbent scared them even more. After serving his tour as NACOCS he had the chutzpah to challenge the NAVCO for the position of NACO. He tied on the first vote. It was only by allegedly promising various and sundry high-level positions that the NAVCO was able to beat the NACOS for the position of NACO.

If you know anything about organizations and structure you know that plate of Auxie spaghetti cannot last long. Expect in a year or two yet another rearranging of the deck chairs to untangle the line/staff jobs at a minimum. Yet more stars, bars, chickens and leaves will be created - more end-of-tour awards will be handed out to reward the latest rearrangement of the deck chairs - since this one is so obviously off. And that is what counts for progress and mission accomplishment at the national level these days.

Possibly on the national web page, which is where FL got his information

The actual path was: http://sites.google.com/site/uscgauxnacon2009/, the link to which was posted here in another thread 5 days before it made it to the What's New page.

Within the Wiki click on the Restructure link in the left side menu.

HYPERLINK REMOVED.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: JerryG,

Annnnd the next Navigator won't have a word on it. We all recall the announcement of the PSI by our leaders don't we??

Just a small thought, after thnking about numbers. With 1,000 Flotillas, Division etc and the new National changes, we now have over 50% of the active membership servings as officers in the chain of communication.
Think about it, there is an elected/staff officer for every non-officer.
Hope this increases the communication along the chain of communication.

Exposing more of the fallacy regarding the rearrangement of the deck chairs. Remember this was done to supposedly mirror the Gold Side.

This one is real easy to expose.

Compare the USCG Unit Map to the h*t*t*p://www.cgaux.org/units.html.

The Auxie rearrangment keeps the number of areas at 3, although the CG has been at 2 for at least 10 years. If they Aux went to 2 areas then someone would lose 2 stars - can't have that.

The Aux has 16 districts each headed by a 1 star and 50 or so other elected and appointed chief, staff and assistant staff officers.

The full time military USCG gets by with only 9 districts.

Eliminating the excess 7 districts would also eliminate about 350 excess elected and appointed officers (assuming 50 each per district).

Of course 7 of those 350 would be one stars and the Aux cannot have that. You can just ignore the cost savings of not having to junket that many elected and appointed staff officers to national and district meeting. Ignore it since obviously GNat Aux does.

So if the Aux NHQ organization does not match the CH HQ organization as already shown and the Aux field organization does not match the CG field organization as just shown then how can the rationalization for the rearrangement of the deck chairs hold up? How could anyone, even the Commandant, claim that as the rationalziation with a straight face?

So what is the real reason for the change? Could it be more "stars, bars, chickens and leaves" for the faithful minions?

Note to research: the new Deputy National Commodores are a combination of the old elected ARCOs jobs and the old appointed NADCOs jobs. So are they elected or appointed in the new rearrangement? Need to find out before someone trips over a misplaced deck chair.

DOT.MIL AND DOT.GOV HYPERKLINKS ARE AUTHORIZED. DOT.ORG ARE NOT. Mods on the other boards automatically delete unauthorized hyperlinks and suspended posters for it.

Hopefully it won't start happening here..

This message has been edited. Last edited by: JerryG,

Think about it, there is an elected/staff officer for every non-officer.

It is worse then that. Your post reminded me of something I did a few years ago. I found an old spreadsheet I did it to check the status of the last rearrangement of the deck chairs. I just updated the number of elected and appointed officers to reflect the prior reorg (the creation of 'chief' at district, division and flotilla) - not this latest and greatest.

In the spreadsheet the elected officer category includes the immediate past. The number of national staffers is taken from a number posted a few years ago. Moving it up or down even a 100 or so isn't going to change the result much.

I also figured only 2 ADSOs per DSO. That is probably a low estimate. At district and down I added 3 staff officers to account for the new 'chiefs' at the various levels. Total district = elected + appointed + (2 * appointed).

As of today there are 30,671 active (AX, BQ, IQ) members.

Here is the spreadsheet.

Unit Number Elected Appointed Total District Total
District 16 6 19 63 1008
Division 205 3 19 22 4510
Flotilla 1032 3 17 20 20640
National 1 6 300 306 306 26464

Doing the math, 86% of the membership could be officers if each position was filled by a unique member. Toss in the fact that 'pasts' get to wear the mark of their 'pastness' and it is possible for every member, except really new newbies to wear 'officer stuff'. And that is before this latest expansion of the stars, bars, chickens and leaves.

You're right - with 86% of the membeship being officers - how could the Aux have a communication problem.

Aux Districts -- we have a lot more people in areas that they have almost nothing, so it makes sense to have some more Aux districts to make up for that fact.

Also, given that Auxies pay for most of their own travel to District-level meetings, cutting back on the number of districts would increase costs to members as most likely they would need to travel farther to get to those meetings.

That being said, I wouldn't oppose some consolidation since Districts really don't have any bearing on the deckplate.

The real bloat in the Aux org chart is our excessive number of divisions. That could easily be cut by 25-50% and allow a lot more members to concentrate on flotilla-level activities that matter.

I did get a email about NS getting moved somewhere from wherever it had been moved to last time. Since that information is of value only to those far above my pay grade, E-0, I erased the message.

quote:

Think about it, there is an elected/staff officer for every non-officer.
Hope this increases the communication along the chain of communication.

I can't tell you the number of times I've up-channeled a request for information to my SO counterpart (either OP or MT) and received a non-reply of the type "Look it up". I generally take this to mean the up-channel officer does not know the answer and doesn't want to forward the question for fear that the DSO or above may figure out the SO doesn't know squat. Once I fired off a missive to the Commodore and got a terse "follow your CoC" reply. I took that to mean "Chain of Confusion."

Robert Carr
FSO-OP/MT

The real bloat in the Aux org chart is our excessive number of divisions.

We are going to have to stop agreeing like this.

The original version of the spreadsheet I used was almost 2 years old. Back then the number of flotillas was 1,088 and today it is 1,032. A decrease of 58.

So how many divisions do you think were eliminated? The old ratio was a minimum of 5 flotillas to 1 division.

Da, da, da, da - give up?

OK.

No divisions were eliminated. After losing 58 flotiallas which would suggest a mathmatical lose of at least 5 to 6 divisions - the number of divisions went up, from 198 to 205. Basically the number of divisions increased by the amount they should have decreased.

More stars, bars, chickens and leaves (well no chickens at division level) and more sales of insignia and other what-not for GNat Aux and the district stores.

FL51D7
That increase in the number of Divisions is greater than you think. In 5sr we rearranged divisions to be along Sector sines and merged division together, Believe we have about half the divisions we had in 2008. If overall the number went up someplace had to go up a lot.


Bruce Becker

We merged a dead division with an active division to make a half-dead division.

Here's the text of a news release:

Coast Guard Auxiliary Restructures National Organization

Chicago - Coast Guard Auxiliary National Commodore Nick Kerigan announced major changes to Coast Guard Auxiliary National Organization. “The staff is being organized to mesh closely with Coast Guard organization to facilitate greater synergies and effectiveness as the Coast Guard moves toward
implementing Modernization”, Kerigan said. “This reorganization will enable the
Auxiliary to meet future needs and will facilitate performance and readiness.”

Deputy National Commodores (Two Stars) are established for Operations,Operations Policy, Mission Support, and Force Readiness. Assistant National Commodores (One Star) will oversee Response & Prevention, RBS, Operations
Policy & Resources, International Affairs, Mission Support, Chief Information Officer, Readiness Support, and Planning & Performance Support, Chief Counsel, and Strategic Analysis. Department Chiefs and Deputy Department Chiefs will now be Directors and Deputy Directors. There are no organizational or name changes below Deputy Director.

quote:

Originally posted by FL51D7:
Think about it, there is an elected/staff officer for every non-officer.

As of today there are 30,671 active (AX, BQ, IQ) members.

Here is the spreadsheet.

Unit Number Elected Appointed Total District Total
District 16 6 19 63 1008
Division 205 3 19 22 4510
Flotilla 1032 3 17 20 20640
National 1 6 300 306 306 26464

Doing the math, 86% of the membership could be officers
You're right - with 86% of the membeship being officers - how could the Aux have a communication problem.

So we do have more "Chiefs" than we do deckhands......... and now we have more staff chiefs and if they wear ODUs, we will not know they are staff, as the blue/red comes off the sew on, next year........We now have more layers of management.... just which officer is going to feel empowered to do something....?

quote:

We now have more layers of management..

Management and Leadership are not synonymous. Management is a course taught in schools by those who cannot lead.

Robert Carr

Maybe they might actually get that dreaded "selection board" passed through now...

I'm not sure which way would be less "cronyish" though...

Are we sure we're comparing to the new USCG Modernization org chart with FORCECOM, OPCOM, etc, the elimination of the areas, and such? The proposed silver is not that far off this org chart.