Happy 236th Birthday, U.S. Coast Guard
Last week on August 4th marked 236 years since the Coast Guard’s founding, continuously older than the Navy, older than the Marine Corps as we know them today, born not out of war but out of a young nation’s need to protect its own interests, its coastlines, and its people.
Alexander Hamilton pushed the Tariff Act of 1790 through the first Congress, authorizing ten small ships called “cutters” to stop smugglers and collect duties at American ports. That handful of boats, first known as the Revenue-Marine and later the Revenue Cutter Service, is the direct ancestor of today’s Coast Guard.
In 1915, Congress merged the Revenue Cutter Service with the U.S. Life-Saving Service, creating the branch we know now — one built equally on enforcement and on saving lives at sea. It’s the reason the Coast Guard has accumulated one of the most diverse mission portfolios in the federal government, carrying out everything from search and rescue and law enforcement to national defense, environmental protection, and maritime security.
That dual identity, civilian agency and military branch, has shaped where the Coast Guard sits on the org chart. It spent nearly a century under the Treasury Department before moving to the newly formed Department of Transportation in 1967, and it stayed there until 2003, when it was folded into the Department of Homeland Security. But on paper, the Coast Guard has never fully belonged to any peacetime department. By law, it shifts to operate as part of the Department of the Navy whenever the country is at war or the President directs it — a Coast Guardsman can go from chasing drug runners under DHS to driving a landing craft under naval command almost overnight.
That’s exactly what happened on D-Day. Of roughly 800 Coast Guardsmen who took part in the Normandy landings, 15 were killed, driving the very boats, many of them Higgins boats and LCIs, that put Army and Marine infantry onto Omaha and Utah beaches under machine-gun fire. Fifteen out of eight hundred sounds small next to the thousands of soldiers lost that morning, but it’s still nearly 2 percent of every Coast Guardsman on the water that day, men whose entire job was to get someone else safely to shore, not to fight themselves.
But the history is only half of it. The other half is the romance, and the Coast Guard has always had more of that than it gets credit for. There’s no Coast Guard equivalent of a victory parade, no famous battle etched into the national memory. Its glory is quieter than that. It lives in a rescue swimmer jumping out of a hovering helicopter into black water he can’t see the bottom of, in a cutter running dark through a hurricane to reach a sinking freighter, in the motto: Semper Paratus, Always Ready. Yes, it is a great slogan but it’s also just the description for the job. Nobody joins the Coast Guard for glory. They join for the moment someone else has given up hope, and an orange helicopter or a boat with an orange stripe shows up anyway.
Semper Paratus
If you’ve read my biographies, you know I am a proud daughter of a Coast Guard officer. My father, Captain Lincoln D. Stroh, attended the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, before serving thirty years on the Marine Safety side of the USCG. In Texas, he commanded the Coast Guard base in Corpus Christi, then went on to serve as Captain of the Port in New Orleans. He also served three tours at USCG Headquarters in Washington, D.C., and a fourth tour in D.C. where he wrote a foreign policy paper at the prestigious think tank, the Brookings Institution.
Early in his career he served on the USCGC Boutwell, a cutter based in Seattle, the place of my birth. A month later, we moved to Boston, where my father earned two master’s degrees at MIT, one in engineering and the other in polymers. I moved eight times at the behest of Uncle Sam. My parents moved 13 times.
Recently, my father and I spent a day in Richmond. After circling the historic courthouse, and before scouting places for Baker and me to move into, we grabbed a bite at Sandee McGee’s, where our conversation turned to the flooding in the Hill Country and the Coast Guard’s response.
I’m a question-asker at my core, so I started asking where the rescuers would be based out of, what kinds of helicopters were used, how many people fit, and so on. Every question had an exact answer. But then my dad veered off topic, a rare occurrence.
He’s a Hero
My dad told me about a man he served with. A man he highly regarded. He told me about Aviation Survivalman First Class Michael Odom, a Coast Guard rescue swimmer who, on the night of January 23, 1995, was flown into a winter storm 300 miles east of Savannah, Georgia, to save the crew of a sinking 40-foot sailboat called the Mirage.
The Mirage had left St. Augustine, Florida, three days earlier, bound for the Virgin Islands, when a winter front overtook it. The engine had failed, the batteries were dead, and the crew, inexperienced sailors taking turns at a wheel that no longer had autopilot, were exhausted from steering through building seas. Then a wave, cresting near 50 feet, rolled the boat onto its side and swept everything off the deck, including their life raft. By the time a Coast Guard C-130 spotted them hours later, the crew had already sent a Mayday and lost their only means of escape if the boat went down.
Odom’s Jayhawk helicopter arrived overhead with barely fifty minutes of fuel to work with. The plan was simple in theory: the sailors would jump into the water one at a time, and Odom would grab each of them and get them into a rescue basket lowered from the helicopter. In practice, the ocean made every part of it brutal. The boat’s captain refused to abandon ship, throwing off the entire rescue, and before the crew could sort out a new plan, one sailor jumped anyway, into 25-foot seas, with no swimmer waiting for him. Odom went in after him. Twice, waves ripped the rescue basket out of his hands just as he reached it. It took twenty minutes to get that first man to safety.
Two more sailors followed, one at a time, each hoist its own fight, a wave burying a survivor mid-basket-ride, cable strands beginning to snap and jam the hoist mechanism, the crew calling out “six minutes ’til bingo” as their fuel ran out. After the third rescue, with the helicopter’s hoist damaged and out of usable fuel, Odom was still in the water. There was no way to bring him up.
The helicopter dropped him a life raft and had to leave. Odom watched its lights disappear into the storm, alone at night in the open Atlantic, certain he was not getting out alive. For nearly five hours he was swept from the raft again and again, wrestling his way back into it each time as his body temperature dropped and hypothermia set in. He eventually lost the ability to hold his own radio. Believing he wouldn’t survive, he tied himself into the raft face-up so his body could at least be found.
As dawn broke, a relief C-130 crew spotted what looked like a lifeless body in the raft. A second helicopter, with rescue swimmer Jim Peterson aboard, reached him nearly five hours after he’d first gone into the water. Peterson dropped into the raft, checked for a pulse, and Odom’s arm rose, reaching for him. He was still alive, though his body temperature had fallen to 92.5°F. He was flown to the guided-missile cruiser Ticonderoga for treatment and made a full recovery.
He went back to work two days later. Three days after that, he was flying another rescue mission.
That’s the Coast Guard. Not the most famous branch, not the biggest budget, but the one that goes out when everyone else is coming in. Odom later received the Distinguished Flying Cross for what he did that night.
The story got me thinking…
What If We Only Had The Coast Guard
You can’t. You cannot even imagine it.
We’re conditioned to believe that war is inevitable, that peace is unattainable. I’ve posed this question to people recently, and it’s almost impossible for anyone to picture a world without war. The objections come fast: But Iran. But China. But Russia.
Go with me anyway. Go with me to a place where scarcity, crime, political extremism, and conflict have been removed from the equation. In that world, the idea stops being about replacing militaries with a different security force and becomes about reimagining what humanity believes protection means. The Coast Guard stops being a law enforcement agency and becomes a symbol of civilization’s relationship with the planet.
A planet with only coast guards might look like this:
The Age of Protection
Humanity no longer organizes itself around the question “How do we defeat those who threaten us?” Instead, the question becomes “How do we protect life?” The world’s fleets become guardians of the oceans, the atmosphere, and the people who live on Earth.
A global Coast Guard might:
– Rescue people from storms and natural disasters
– Maintain global ocean health
– Monitor rising seas and climate change
– Protect marine ecosystems
– Conduct scientific exploration
– Assist communities after earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods
– Maintain navigation routes and maritime safety
– Explore the deep ocean and polar regions
Ships would not carry weapons of war. They would carry scientists, engineers, doctors, rescue specialists, and environmental experts.
Strength Would Be Measured Differently
In our current world, nations often measure strength through the number of aircraft carriers they field, the size of their armies, their missile capabilities, and their ability to project force.
In this world, strength might be measured by how many lives you can save, how quickly you respond to disasters, how much of the planet you can restore, how well you understand Earth’s systems, and how much suffering you can prevent.
A powerful nation would not be the one that can destroy the most. It would be the one that can protect the most.
The interesting thing about the Coast Guard is that it already blends multiple identities. It is military discipline in structure but humanitarian in purpose. It protects borders but also rescues strangers. It enforces laws but spends much of its existence preventing tragedy.
In this imagined future, that identity expands until it becomes the model for all organized service. The warrior archetype fades. The guardian archetype takes its place. Hey! That’s a Coast Guard movie…
A Different Relationship With the Ocean
Historically, humanity has viewed the ocean as a battlefield, a trade route, and a resource to exploit. A Coast Guard-only world would see the ocean as a shared life system. The world’s vessels would form a network like a planetary circulatory system, always moving, always monitoring, always responding.
A storm forms in the Pacific? Ships are already nearby. A coral reef begins collapsing? Scientists are already studying it. A coastal community faces rising water? Engineers are already there.
The Deeper Philosophical Shift
The biggest change wouldn’t be technological. It would be moral.
Armies are built around the assumption that humans will eventually compete over resources, territory, or power. A Coast Guard civilization begins with a different assumption: life is the resource worth protecting. The question is no longer “Who wins?” The question becomes “How do we keep the whole system alive?”
In that sense, the Coast Guard becomes more than a service. It becomes a philosophy, humanity as caretaker rather than conqueror.
It Starts With Imagining It
Here’s the harder truth: getting to a place where there is only a Coast Guard begins with the ability to imagine it. And we’re bad at that. We’ve been trained since childhood to accept war as a fact of nature rather than a choice, something closer to weather than to policy. I grew up just accepting I’d be sending a man off to military training, to war, to aircraft carriers. And then I did.
We’ve been desensitized to violence in small doses for so long that the large doses stop registering. And we’ve gotten very good at keeping it far away, in places most of us will never see, so it costs us nothing to look past it.
The numbers are hard to look past, though. The world spent nearly $2.9 trillion on militaries in 2025 alone, the eleventh straight year that figure has gone up, a 41% increase over the past decade. That works out to roughly $350 for every person on the planet, spent not to grow anything, feed anyone, or cure a single disease, but to maintain the capacity to destroy. Imagine that money moving instead toward the things the Coast Guard already stands for: search and rescue, safer coastlines, a healthier ocean, land worth handing down. Imagine it spent on keeping families whole, on getting a father home to his kids, on the world our grandchildren inherit still being one worth inheriting. A world where we invest in our people instead of the war machine.
I don’t have all the answers. I don’t know how you dismantle something this large, this old, this normalized. But I’m going to imagine and work towards a world where we protect instead of defend. Somewhere along the way we stopped believing peace was obtainable and the powers that profit from war want you to believe it will always be with us. It doesn’t have to be.
And I guess, if we’re going this far, we’ll need a Space Guard too. Not a Space Force. Because whatever we carry off this planet, it should be the guardian archetype we bring with us, not the warrior. We get to choose that now, before we’ve already decided what’s up there is something to conquer.
Call me a hippie, call me a dreamer, call me delusional. I’m a proud American, I’m a proud military daughter, and I LOVE me a man in uniform… I just want all those uniforms to be Coast Guard or Space Guard. So yeah, I’m proudly imagining a world without war. It is the only way we can get there.
All my love,
All my light,
All my best,
Jess