A Conversation With Thad Allen

Editor-in-Chief Tony Munoz caught up with the former U.S. Coast Guard Commandant and National Incident Commander for Deepwater Horizon after his keynote address in early November at the Excellence in Government Conference in Washington, D.C.

Tony Munoz (TM): Tell our readers about yourself and your background. Who is Thad Allen?

Thad Allen: I’m the son of a retired Chief Damage Controlman, Clyde Allen, who lied about his age and joined the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) when he was 16 during World War II. I grew up in the USCG. He and my mom got transferred around quite a bit. I went to a number of schools mostly up and down the West Coast. Actually, I started grade school in Ketchikan, Alaska but graduated where my father retired in Tucson, Arizona, so I’m a native son of the Golden West. In my 39 years in the USCG, I spent most of them on the East Coast, so I’ve seen quite a lot of  this country. I’ve also been around the world and it’s been a great and glorious career.

 

TM: You mentioned your father was career Coast Guard. Is that what drew you to the service? 

Allen: This is a pretty funny story. I applied to several universities and had appointments to both the Naval Academy and Coast Guard Academy. In the end I chose the Coast Guard Academy because I thought I was too small to play Division I football, and I thought in a Division III school I’d have a better chance to play. And it worked. I walked on to the varsity as a freshman and was captain my senior year.

TM: What was your first command?

Allen: I was Commanding Officer of LORAN transmitting station, 500 miles north of Bangkok in Lampang, Thailand, right at the end of the war in Southeast Asia. In fact, when I retired I think I was the last person on active duty that served there. I was actually there when Saigon fell, and we dismantled the LORAN chain and brought it home. It was rather bittersweet when we started closing the LORAN chain, but it probably needed to be done because they were using the same technology in 2010 that they were using in 1974 and 1975.

TM: What was your role during 9/11?

Allen: I was Atlantic Area Commander. In fact, I was having a physical at our clinic in Portsmouth, VA, and they were drawing blood. I looked across the way in the break room and saw on television when the plane hit the tower. Of course, I went right back to work. While 9/11 was generally regarded as an aviation event, it was very significant for the USCG. First of all, we closed New York Harbor and Boston Harbor because some of the planes took off from Logan Airport. We also closed the Potomac River just north of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge. The attacks occurred on a Tuesday morning and by Thursday there was so much pressure to reopen the Port of New York that we had to do it because so much petroleum is shipped up the Hudson River to places around Albany and New England. There are no pipeline systems that go up there. We really saw the impact of what it was like to close New York Harbor and the impact on redistribution of oil and energy around New England. We also had the extraordinary and challenging task of coordinating the evacuation of people off Lower Manhattan. I’m not sure we’ll ever know how many. The estimates range from 400,000 to a million. As you know, the local cruise ships, tugboats, everybody was called in to help that day. Beyond that, we did a lot of resupply and logistical support because the easiest way to get in and out of Ground Zero was by boat. We actually tied a buoy tender up about a block away and used the boom on the tender to bring water, food and support supplies for the folks at Ground Zero. Probably a little-known fact: We sent all our USCG chaplains that we could muster to help administer to the responders and escorted some of the families in so they could see what was happening.

TM: You were appointed the 23rd Commandant of the USCG in 2006. What do you consider your most important achievements?

Allen: When I became Commandant in 2006, the next day I issued the “Commander’s Intent” action orders. Most of the time when there’s a change of command, the new commander issues a Commander’s Intent so everyone knows what they’re going to do. I wanted to create a more flexible, more agile Coast Guard that could respond more nimbly to changes in demand from our stakeholders. I issued ten orders and those orders laid out where I thought the USCG needed to go. I’d say probably the most important of those was the transformation and the re-creation of a logistics and maintenance system that could be used for aircraft, small boats and cutters. We’ll see what history has to say a few years from now, but I think when people look back they’ll probably say the most fundamental change was how we are organized in the USCG to support ourselves and that an integrated logistics system was created for the first time.

TM: As National Incident Commander for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf, you quickly distinguished yourself as a no-nonsense leader and became a familiar face to millions around the world. What lessons did you learn from that experience?

Allen: One of the significant challenges in the oil spill was that, under U.S. law, when there’s an oil spill of this scope the government oversees the response. That’s much different than the law under hurricanes or natural disasters, whereby pursuant to an emergency declaration local governments are given resources from the federal government and other places to run the response. I don’t think that was well understood by state and local governments. I’m not sure it was well understood by even our national political leaders. The challenge I had was to make everyone understand the preeminent federal role was to oversee BP’s actions as the responsible party. It was a pretty tough communications challenge, but in the long run we succeeded and we also contained the well. It was a huge engineering challenge, but BP put a lot of effort into it with oversight from the federal government. In the long run the response that was mounted was significant – the largest response in the history of this country. I believe the doctrine served us well. In the future, what we need to understand is there’s a way to do it out there. We spent a lot of time arguing about what BP’s role should have been when we should have been focusing more on how to clean the oil up.

TM: Any idea where all the oil went?

Allen: There’s been a lot of talk about oil blooms and the flow rate. I was more concerned about getting the flow rate right because it really impacted on how much response and skimming equipment we were going to need. I took control of that and set up a flow rate technical group. As far as the fate of the oil, I’m not sure if we really know for certain what the capability of the Gulf of Mexico is to absorb oil and how fast it biodegrades. We do know how much we skimmed and how much was burned. We have models for how much evaporates. One of the last things I did before turning over the national coordination response to Admiral Paul Zukunft was to issue an order that called for comprehensive testing of the water column in the Gulf for hydrocarbons to make sure there was no oil that we didn’t know about and to address the concerns of the American public that there were plumes of oil below the water. At this point they haven’t been found.

TM: You’re a member of The Maritime Executive’s LinkedIn group. What other social media do you use and do you find them helpful?

Allen: When I was Commandant I was pretty fully immersed in it. I had an official Facebook page. I had a blog. We had RSS feeds that linked all that together, and we were using Twitter. I wasn’t sure that blogging during the oil spill would have been the appropriate way to comment given the amount of scrutiny and the fact I was doing press briefs every day. Now that I’m retired, I have a Twitter account that I haven’t done much with and a personal Facebook account for the folks I deal with individually. I’m on LinkedIn and I continue to monitor blogs and I subscribe to a lot of different media widgets. I would call myself a pretty informed social media user.

TM: You’re a hero to many people, but who are some of your own heroes?

Allen: Mine go back pretty far. One of the people I admire most, he’s somewhat controversial, is Alexander Hamilton. He’s generally regarded as the founder of the USCG, the first Treasury Secretary and, arguably, the father of public administration in the country. He had some ups and downs, some public problems with a lot of different people, but generally a very forward thinking guy who set the terms and conditions on how to run the country and move it ahead. More recently, there’s a host of folks to be astounded at due to the type of work they do. It’s mostly the day-to-day people in the USCG who pull people out of the water and give them back their lives. They’re the public servants who go to work every day who aren’t really celebrated much. A lot of people work very hard in this country and it’s not often visible to the American public, but the people I’ve worked around in the USCG for the last 39 years are my inspiration.

TM: Tell us about your new role at the Rand Corporation.

Allen: We had some discussions at the first of the year before we knew this oil spill would occur. I wasn’t anxious to jump right into government consulting and defense contracting roles. I wanted time to think and contemplate, do some speaking and writing. I’m a big believer in lifelong learning, and Rand has an extraordinary reputation for academic research in a nonpartisan way. I thought if I could come up with the right relationship with Rand it would be a way to take a year to write, read and, more importantly, continue to learn from the extensive research that’s going on here. The position I have right now is termed a Senior Fellow. It’s not full-time, but I have a place where I’ve got computer connectivity and I can do internal consulting about the issues I’m concerned with, mostly in the areas of maritime security, intelligence issues related to border security, and things related to emergency response. So far it’s been a very interesting process.

TM: What books are you reading?
 

Allen: The last one I read is called The Imperial Cruise, written by James Bradley. He also wrote Flags of Our Fathers and Flyboys. He was curious about the antecedents of World War II and why we fought the war. He went back and did some research and his premise was that a lot of things that set the conditions for World War II occurred when Theodore Roosevelt was President and a lot of it centered around a cruise that William Howard  Taft took as Secretary of War from San Francisco to the Pacific  Rim, where he visited all the countries that would ultimately be  involved in that conflict. It is an absolutely fascinating book.

Allen: I haven’t found any yet. I’m still transitioning to Rand. Next spring I’m going to teach a graduate-level course at my alma mater, GWU, called “Leadership in Large Complex Organizations.”  For relaxation I usually hike or bike, and my wife and I walk a lot on weekends. We both really enjoy music, but the main center of activity are our seven and nine-year-old grandsons here in Fairfax County, Virginia. That’s the main reason we’re remaining in the D.C. area, but also because my wife is the Assistant Dean for the School of Management at George Mason University in Fairfax.

TM: Thanks for your time, Admiral. MarEx