Author Description

The U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) carries out 11 different statutory missions and must address immediate requirements and future contingencies, both domestically and overseas. Various ongoing changes to, and new developments in, the physical, economic, social, political, and technological domains place additional stresses on service resources, as well as affect the composition of the service itself. Being ready for the spectrum of challenges that the future might bring requires leaders to be mindful of how change will affect USCG in both the near and long terms. Evergreen was established in 2003 to address this overarching goal of readiness, and it includes Project Evergreen, a scenario-based strategic foresight planning process. Evergreen activities seek to identify emerging challenges and future trends that may alter the volume and types of demand for USCG missions, as well as its ability to perform them. These activities are based on a number of plausible future scenarios in which USCG's current plans, policies, and capabilities are stress-tested, and participants must determine the trade-offs that USCG needs to make today to be able to fulfill future demands. Evergreen thereby also supports effective decisionmaking under conditions of uncertainty. Prior to Evergreen V, there was no deliberate effort to publicize or publish Evergreen products. Long-term institutional knowledge about Evergreen has been a historical challenge because active-duty personnel are typically reassigned every one to three years. This report documents Evergreen work and insights into the current and future needs of USCG that have emerged from the program to date.