Lessons Learned from the Royal Navy

Here in the last few years I have heard the name Sir John Fisher, First Sea Lord, brought up increasingly when it comes to how the US Navy can still be competitive in a limited budget environment. I had done some limited research on the First Sea Lord, but nothing definitive. To my surprise in this month's issue of USNI Proceedings (October 2012) there is a excellent article written by Captain Gerard Roncolato, USN (RET.) on not only the First Sea Lord's concepts but how they are applicable to the US Navy. I would like to extrapolate that one further, by applying those concepts to the US Coast Guard. 
By the time of Sir John Fisher, the United Kingdom was seeking ways to pay off war debt from several wars in South Africa, and after large ground conflicts, the Royal Navy was the service under the chopping block. So with a limited budget to function with Sir John Fisher took that time to reset naval thinking and doctrine. Some of his ideas where to have more agile, faster, and more advanced vessels forward deployed throughout the Empire, with the slower, older, larger, but heavier hitting vessels in the homefleet to protect the British Isles. He sought to increase the use of at the time state of the art communications and Intelligence to allow his fleet increased forewarning of hostile activity so he could concentrate his fleet in those areas. These concepts alone still ring true today in the USN and USCG, over one hundred years later. 
Captain Roncolato looks within Sir John Fisher's concepts and applies them to the modern US Navy and its current budget issues. I feel that while most of them are applicable to the Coast Guard there are a handful that will be immensely important to the USCG:
* "Procurement decisions that can be made with maximum flexibility for uncertain futures." I see this as being a call for the USN and USCG to pull back from the idea of designing vessels around current technology and mission requirements and to being looking more generally when it comes to hulls and capabilities. 
* "Programs that by nature limit tactical options can or should be dropped." A similar concept to the one above, but I read it is a more anything that is single mission specialized should be eliminated for a more versatile asset. 
* "How the Navy might better use and integrate its considerable educational and wargaming capacity to ensure realistic concept development." This concept actually leads into several others made by Captain Roncolato, but I think the USCG would have to focus in this respect before they could even try to move any further in planning and development. The USCG has maintained the mindset of a reactive force for so long, that in relation to our sister services our planning capacities are severely lacking. For a service so small, budget that matches, we should maximize our planning operations to look at all the most likely eventuality before we commit any of our hard earned budgets to any system or process. 

There is a quote within the article that rang home for me, and if thought out of context of the Jutland Campaign, I see its application to the USCG, "The failure was not due to very smart British Officers not working hard to solve though problems. It was, in fact, that they were working so hard - though a flawed system. The prism was too limited, and this brought them up short. It was a case of wrong thinking by committed, intelligent, trained professionals; it was not a case of no thinking." (Roncolato, Proceedings Magazine, October 2012) We as a service have worked so hard within Deepwater to revitalize the Fleet, and our systems, but have fallen short at times. If Sir John Fisher can teach us anything it is to not let anyone system become too specialized, we must plan and develop not for one specific enemy or mission, but instead develop assets that will have application to a wide range of eventualities, those predicted and unpredicted.