Admiral James M. Loy USCG Ret.

There are three sea services in the Armed Forces of the United States, and two of them have official mottoes containing the word Semper. Marines are Semper Fidelis, Always Faithful, and the Coast Guard is Semper Paratus, Always Ready.

However, there are two important differences between the Marine Corps’ Semper and the Coast Guard’s Semper. They underscore the point I want to make about the Coast Guard’s readiness.

The first difference pertains to the application of the mottoes. When I reminded you of the two mottoes a moment ago, did you notice how natural it sounded to hear that Marines are Semper Fidelis but the Coast Guard is Semper Paratus? Semper Fidelis is most often applied to individuals. Semper Paratus is most often applied to the service as a whole, or at least to units

That’s not to say that Coasties aren’t individually "ready" or that the Marine Corps isn’t corporately "faithful." They indeed are. It’s just that normally the references are as I stated.

It has pretty much always been that way. The first association of Semper Paratus with the Coast Guard hasn’t been absolutely fixed in time, but one diligent historian has traced it back to one Ezekiel Jones, captain of the Revenue Cutter Ingham. The Ingham became the only United States naval vessel to fire a shot in support of the Texas Revolution when it engaged a Mexican war schooner in 1835 in a brief attempt to recover two merchant vessels that had been seized for avoiding Mexican customs.

When Captain Jones was relieved of command the next year, a New Orleans newspaper wanted to express local gratitude both for Ingham’s action against Mexico and for other operations to support commerce, such as suppressing mutinies on merchant ships. Accordingly, the New Orleans Bee bestowed the sobriquet Semper Paratus not on Captain Jones—but on his ship. So it is that from the very beginning, Semper Paratus has been a description of the organization and organizational elements, not of individuals.

The second difference between the two Semper mottoes grows from the first. Because fidelity is an individual attribute, it can be maintained on a personal level. Fidelity is a fire that is fueled from within.

Consider a Marine platoon commander who has no artillery support, has taken heavy casualties, and is running low on ammunition. Despite the desperate circumstances, this officer can nevertheless make an independent decision to honor Semper Fidelis, and this resolve can be maintained regardless of the extent to which the operational situation deteriorates. For marines, fidelis is a manifestation of individual character and, as such, is beyond the reach of external factors and unassailable by adversaries.

Being ready, especially at an organizational or a unit level, is an entirely different proposition. Individual seagoing officers can be ready in the sense of maintaining proper vigilance and making thorough preparations, but for a ship to be ready and for a service to be ready, external resources must be supplied.

The sum of these differences is this. The Marines have a personal standard that they aspire to uphold. The Coast Guard has a description of an operational readiness level that we refuse to let slip.

This expectation of perpetual readiness has had real consequences in shaping the culture of our service.

Please don’t get me wrong. Semper Paratus has rendered extraordinary service to America by fostering a mission focus that has saved countless lives and property. But it has also exacted a cost. And that cost is the reason that the title of my remarks today is "The Curse of Semper Paratus."

Semper Paratus has inculcated such a "can do" spirit within the Coast Guard that we refuse to accept any operational outcome other than success. Our missions grow and new ones are added without a proper matching of increased resources to the resultant mission profile. Sound familiar?

Instead of saying, "We can’t do that job," we take a perverse pride in performing our missions with no money, old equipment, too few people, and seat-of-the-pants training. The extension of the "do more with less" logic is doing everything with nothing.

If you doubt that a name or a motto can have such a great effect in shaping individual or organizational identity, let me make the point by taking you back to 1969, when Johnny Cash came out with "A Boy Named Sue," an amusing little song despite the fact that it makes some assumptions about gender roles that don’t hold true today.

Early in the song, Johnny Cash explains the expectations that the name created, and he describes the sequence of events that the name repeatedly set into motion. Listen carefully to the words:

PRIVATE
Well, he must o' thought that it was quite a joke
And it got a lot of laughs from a' lots of folk,
It seems I had to fight my whole life through.
Some gal would giggle and I'd get red
And some guy'd laugh and I'd bust his head,
I tell ya, life ain't easy for a boy named 'Sue.'

I can tell you also, life ain’t easy for a service called Semper Paratus, either.

Just as Sue’s name invariably sparked dramatic sequences that ended in fist fights, Semper Paratus creates a dynamic of its own.

You’re called Semper Paratus, so people expect you to be ready. They expect you to perform difficult, dangerous work, and they expect you to deliver favorable results every time.

And once you’ve been called Semper Paratus and have taken pride in being Semper Paratus, there’s really no graceful way to say, "No, thank you. I can’t do that job," when someone asks you to take on a new mission.

Even as traditional missions grow and new ones are piled on, the Semper Paratus mental block doesn’t let us acknowledge our limits or even submit a bill for the real cost of our services. Reflexively, the Coast Guard salutes smartly, tightens the belt another notch, and plugs away.

Johnny Cash sang about how that dynamic shapes who you are. Listen again:

PRIVATE
Well, I grew up quick and I grew up mean,
My fist got hard and my wits got keen,
I'd roam from town to town to hide my shame.
But I made me a vow to the moon and stars
That I'd search the honky-tonks and bars
And kill that man that give me that awful name.

Unlike Johnny Cash, I’ve taken no vow to kill that editor of the New Orleans Bee who gave us our motto—it wouldn’t do any good here in 1999—but there are times when I wouldn’t mind having a heart-to-heart talk with him.

Incidents arise all too often that forcibly remind me how our commitment to maintaining Semper Paratus is driving up the operational tempo, driving up the costs of maintaining our aging fleets of cutters and aircraft, and, most alarmingly, driving our crews beyond reasonable limits.

Without external support, commanding officers can resolve to be as ready as they want, but if they are below their authorized strength of non-rated personnel, their resolution will not erase the shortfall. Faced with the moral impossibility of not performing their missions, they will work the resources they have—both people and equipment—as hard as necessary to get today’s job done.

Later in the song, Johnny Cash sings about how he found his dad one day, had a chance to make good on his vow to kill him, and engaged him in a brutal bar-room brawl.

Sue eventually gained the upper hand by being a little quicker on the draw when he saw his dad reach for a gun. Staring into the barrel of his son’s weapon, the dad desperately tried to convince Sue that the hardships imposed by the name were necessary for his survival and growth. Listen again:

And he said: "Son, this world is rough
And if a man's gonna make it, he's gotta be tough
And I knew I wouldn't be there to help ya along.
So I give ya that name and I said good-bye
I knew you'd have to get tough or die
And it's that name that helped to make you strong."

PRIVATE
He said: 'Now you just fought one hell of a fight
And I know you hate me, and you got the right
To kill me now, and I wouldn't blame you if you do.
But ya ought to thank me, before I die,
For the gravel in ya guts and the spit in ya eye
Cause I'm the son-of-a-bitch that named you 'Sue'.'

The dad’s desperate appeal worked, and Johnny Cash concluded the song by telling about their reconciliation and his coming to terms with his name.

PRIVATE
I got all choked up and I threw down my gun
And I called him my pa, and he called me his son,
And I come away with a different point of view.
And I think about him, now and then,
Every time I try and every time I win,
And if I ever have a son, I think I'm gonna name him . . .
Bill or George! Anything but Sue! I still hate that name!

I understand how old Sue felt. He knows the pain that the name caused, and he would never hang it on any son of his. But he was secretly proud of the toughness that the name helped him attain.

I sort of feel that way about Semper Paratus. I know the burdens it has imposed, but I am proud of the maritime, multi-mission military service it has allowed us to become.

There is no doubt in my mind that Semper Paratus has helped make us lean and efficient . . . that it has galvanized the resolve of our ship, boat and air crews . . . that it has inspired them to perform rescues that otherwise wouldn’t have been attempted . . . and that it has been responsible for many of the extraordinary contributions we make to America.

But I also know that a modern Coast Guard cannot sustain itself entirely on the resolve it draws from its motto. Taking your resources to the wall every day is no way to prepare for the future.

However well it has served us up to this point, a Semper Paratus attitude by itself will not see us through the missions we will face in the first third of the next century.

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Revised: 10/23/06.