Cutting Edge Warriors: Coast Guard Sector Jacksonville

by Joe Snowberger U.S. Navy Mustang (Retired)

Photos courtesy of Coast Guard

While The Liberty Coast is often considered to be a Navy region, six of the seven military branches of service are represented here. One of Liberty Life’s missions is to share the diversity of the military assets and operations in our broad backyard.

Liberty Life is pleased to introduce you to Captain Mark R. Vlaun, Coast Guard (USCG) Sector Commander and Captain of the Port of Jacksonville. He is a designated Cutterman, Judge Advocate (a military attorney) and diving officer. His turf (a.k.a. Area of Responsibility (AOR)) ranges from the Port of Canaveral to St. Marys, Georgia, with Jacksonville and Fernandina Beach in between.

As you will discover, he and his 11 subordinate units with their 700 Coast Guardsmen provide very diverse services in defense of our nation, providing maritime safety, security, environmental protection and much more. We wager that many of you will experience the thought, “I didn’t know they did that.”

LL: Thank you for sharing your time and perspectives with Liberty Life. Most of our readers understand the basics of the Coast Guard role in Search and Rescue, Law Enforcement and Maritime Safety, as well as your role as a military commander, but what is the “Captain of the Port”?

There are a multitude of hats I wear, but Captain of the Port is probably the broadest and the strongest of all the authorities we have to ensure the safety, security and environmental protection of the port and water waste system. It affects the offshore environment, the port itself, river systems, harbors and facilities, as well as vessel traffic.

It is a set of tools that allow us to do things like apply limited access areas, safety and security zones, and establish a regulated navigation area. These are legal terms that allow me to control, slow down, or redirect vessel traffic, or to control facilities so if we have a situation we can put a safety bubble around that incident to allow responders to get in there and do what they need to do and also keep other vessels out. Captain of the Port authorities all fundamentally tie back to safety, security and environmental protection.

LL: Sounds like you are a jack of all maritime assets and trades as well as the master of the area’s waterways. That is a very diverse hat collection. Which role(s) are the most prominent, given Sector Jacksonville’s make-up?

Leader and Partner. In addition to the Captain of the Port hat, there is the role as the Officer in Charge of Marine Inspection, Search and Rescue Mission Coordinator, Area Maritime Security Coordinator and Sector Jacksonville Commander, which is the senior commander of Coast Guard forces in the region.

My job is far more about leadership than subject matter expertise. As a leader with a strategic and big picture view, I rely on hundreds of people to do their jobs effectively every single day. My job is to make sure they have the right tools to do it.

We do everything with our partners. This is a very busy port and a large AOR. Importantly and within that, almost my entire AOR is overlapping, providing us with concurrent jurisdiction with state, local and municipal divisions. That’s a huge force multiplier.

We rely heavily on JAXPORT, on our state and local and city partners, almost hourly. I can’t even tell you how reliant I am everyday on Chief Powers and Jacksonville Fire and Rescue (JFRD), and Sheriff Williams and the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office (JSO). We work with the St. Johns Sheriff’s Office (SJSO) almost every single day for search and rescue, law enforcement and waterways management.

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the first eyes on scene are going to be local. That helps us, through our command center, to determine what we need to bring, whether it turns into a federal case or a pollution incident. In some cases, we may have a lot going on and if I know that the JSO or JFRD is responding to an incident that happened over here, and there’s something we’re on over there, we can have a quick communication and we can go this way and they can go that way.

There are a lot of great partnerships here; our federal, state and local partners are superb. I’ve never been anywhere where teamwork really was job one.

The Coast Guard is very cutting edge here. We are heavily engaged in Liquid Natural Gas (LNG), space operations, JAXPORT’s deepening of the waterway, environmental regulation and facilitating greater commerce going forward. All of that probably makes us more relevant than we have ever been.

LL: So, is there a “quarter jar” for saying Sector “JAX” and not “Jacksonville?” Liberty Life readers love their acronyms.

It’s funny you ask. I follow the lead of my commercial entity here and as long as they are JAXPORT, I’m perfectly okay with Sector Jax. We actually use SECJAX as it fits better in our operational messages.

LL: While the USCG is organized under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), can you speak to the USCG being one of the seven military branches?

One of the biggest misnomers comes from there being a provision under the law in the pre-Goldwater-Nichols era where the Coast Guard can be transferred into the Navy during times of war. That happened during WWII.

Today, the commandant of the USCG is both an operational commander and a military service branch chief. He operates independently in daily operations, like search and rescue and law enforcement. But, like any other military entity, we flow—as part of the joint military force—into and around other operational entities and combatant commanders.

We are always a branch of the United States armed forces, by law, just wearing different colored uniforms. We don’t transition in and out ever— we are always military. We are also wearing all of our other (U.S. Authority) hats simultaneously. Most entities live in one authority, like Title 10. The USCG goes across seven or eight titled authorities, which makes us a valuable partner.

I believe we are very much in the era of the Coast Guard to some extent, with our value to the joint world, to our Department of Defense (DoD) colleagues, within DHS and partnership with Customs and Border Protection and Transportation Security Administration (TSA); the combined DHS team that we bring to our state and local partners. We are globally deployed and very focused on supporting our DoD partners.

LL: What role does SECJAX have with regards to the space activity and launches from the Space Coast?

Great question. Most people don’t realize how much maritime activities are connected to the launch and recovery operations and how heavily we’re involved in it. We actually have five different lines of effort just for space operations. We support the U.S. Space Force in Maritime Range Control. For every single launch and recovery, we have assets out there to keep people out of the way so they can make all those launches successful. On top of that, we regulate all the maritime vessels that support space operations.

Talk about cutting edge! SpaceEx is deploying drone ships—ships that are autonomous. The first in the world to do that kind of operation with vessels that they are landing rockets on, and we wear the regulators for that space aspect. We have the Federal On-Scene Coordinator hat, so pollution and hazardous materials and launch anomaly response is something that we own on the maritime side. We are part of the Global Search and Rescue response with the Air Force for astronaut recovery. We support the Maritime Force Protection for the strategic asset the rockets can represent, especially when some have astronauts in them. That’s five different things we do for every single space launch and it usually takes three attempts for every successful launch.

We have mobilized about 40 times in the last six weeks to get about ten off. That’s a lot of effort; most people do not realize how involved we are with space operations.

LL: What USCG role in SECJAX are people surprised to learn about?

That comes up a lot. I think that’s probably an answer that depends on the perspective of the person that we’re talking to because a lot of people [usually] deal with us in one or two lanes. They don’t realize how broad we are until an incident pops up and they react with “You do that?”

A [DoD partner] will be surprised that we are the regulatory agency needed to solve a problem, or I’ll be working with the port and they will be surprised hearing about our involvement in space operations. People who work with us on LNG will be surprised we do search and rescue.

We’re so broad... that’s what makes it so fun for me; the number of things that we do, that we get involved with every single day, with so many partners. I’ve never known anything other than the Coast Guard, but I don’t believe the Coast Guard has ever been more relevant or valuable to the United States than it is today.

LL: You are personally very accomplished; a Cutterman, Judge Advocate, Diving Officer and Commander. Are there any influencers, principles or edicts that supported your success?

For most of us in the Coast Guard, and certainly what I carried forth in this command, are our core values: honor, respect, devotion to duty. I have found that if everyone at your unit connects to and lives by those core values, you really solve a lot of problems.

The concept of respect is really everything we are about in the Coast Guard, particularly as we operate and live in more diverse communities and as our organization becomes more diverse. That pinnacle of respect is what allows us to operate in the environment we operate in and successfully operate amongst ourselves.

Devotion to duty is critical because we have a lot of jobs, which we have talked about. I wear a lot of different hats and we do a lot of different things. I think we all are equally joined together in that drive to meet our obligations to the American taxpayers and citizens. That really brings us together in our obligation of duty and carrying out our responsibilities.

Honor is a fundamental bedrock for all of us. It is our integrity and why people respect us. I always speak to, and lead, from our core values.

I would add that as a federal regulator, my marquee points are to try to be uniform, consistent and transparent. As a federal regulator, military organization and law enforcement agency, that’s important because we have a lot of obligations out there in terms of the safety, security, and environmental protection of our operating environment.

We have a lot of obligations with industry to safeguard the maritime community and its transportation system. We try to be uniform so that whether you arrive in Miami, New York, L.A. or Jacksonville, the rules are enforced uniformly. That allows all of our ports to remain competitive and, ultimately, we want to facilitate that commerce. We do that by having a uniform set of rules.

Being uniform among the ports and then consistent in how you apply the law creates a more predictable environment for the industry which, again, really helps them facilitate commerce. We are there to make sure that it’s safe, secure and take care of the environmental aspects of it.

Transparency is that if I make a decision, you know what we considered in that decision and how I got to it. That’s really what helps our industry partners understand there’s no hidden screen. Our goal is to be as transparent and as public about the process as possible.

I think by being uniform, consistent and transparent, we can fulfill our role in oversight and facilitate commerce.

LL: How did you come to be in the Coast Guard and attend the Coast Guard Academy?

I’m a third-generation Coast Guard officer. My great-uncle was an aviator in the Coast Guard. My father was Captain of the Port in New York and Honolulu during his career. My brother is an Air Force colonel, so he broke away, but I stayed in line. I never expected to be in this long, but I am at 27 years here. I’ve never known anything other than the Coast Guard.

LL: Our pro-military readers love sea stories; will you indulge us?

From a trivia standpoint and as a point of fun, one of my Naval Justice School classmates—in fact, he graduated first in our class—was then-Navy Lieutenant Ron DeSantis, now governor of Florida.

Also, I think we were trying for at least three years while I was in Miami, including all kinds of bets and wagers on whether we could ever get Senator Scott on the TV camera wearing a Coast Guard hat. He was pretty true to his Navy hat and I don’t know if we ever succeeded, but that was always some fun among the staff.

LL: You attended both the Navy Dive School and Navy Justice School; any observations, lessons learned or appreciation of the “other” sea service?

Thanks for asking. One of the things that probably really got the trajectory of my career off on the right foot early on was Navy Dive school. When I applied to dive school coming off my first buoy tender, I had absolutely no idea what I got myself into. By about day three, I called my girlfriend—now wife—and told her I didn’t know if I was going to make it to day four; I was way in over my head. By the end of the first week I was rapidly worried about becoming the weakest one in the herd. My problem was that I just wasn’t in shape for the Special Forces program I found myself in. I was just trying to survive to the next meal.

I remember I had a check-in with one of the instructors and I think he’s trying to give me a pep talk or something. I don’t remember anything he said, but I’ll never forget a poster over his head and determined to be the frog.

I’ve remembered that poster [and] the concept of never giving up from the Navy Dive School. Navy training took me into [my personal] red zone and then showed me that I could go further—showing me what my human limits really were.

By the time I finished that program, I was not the same person that started it. To this day, of all the things I’ve ever earned or worn in my career, my pride in my Navy Dive pin is up there at the top! I relied on what I learned from that program for the next 25 years of my career.

LL: The locations you have lived have been as diverse as your military career. How is life on The Liberty Coast?

We in all likelihood may stay here! It’s the friendliest military town I have ever lived in, and I have lived in some great military towns. Of all the places we have lived, we have really been enamored with the community here. My daughter loves her high school, runs cross country. My son plays hockey and is involved in Boy Scouts. This is just a fantastic community and we’ve fallen in love with it rapidly.

My wife and I are refinancing our house this week and I think we’re going to hang on to this one. Of all the places we’ve lived, this is pretty darn close to the top of the list. In a perfect world, we would probably have something in Colorado because we love to ski, but we are really liking it here.

For more information, search “Sector Jacksonville.”

12 | LIBERTYLIFEMEDIA.COM | DECEMBER 30, 2020 VOL. 1 / ISSUE 11