PORTSMOUTH, Va. – The Fifth Coast Guard District will welcome a new district commander during a change of command ceremony at 11 a.m. Thursday at the Coast Guard Integrated Support Command here.
Rear Adm. Fred M. Rosa, Jr. will relieve Rear Adm. Larry Hereth as the Fifth District Commander.
Vice Adm. D. Brian Peterman, the Coast Guard Atlantic Area Commander, will preside.
Rosa recently served as the Coast Guard’s deputy director of intelligence and criminal investigations, where he was responsible for supporting the full range of Coast Guard missions including ports, waterways and coastal security; drug and illegal migrant interdiction; fisheries law enforcement; environmental protection; search and rescue; and national defense.
Rosa served aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Mariposa, as commanding officer of Loran Station Wake Island and chief of port operations at Marine Safety Office Cleveland, Ohio.
Rosa also taught political science and psychology at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn.
Rosa served as deputy U.S. representative to the legal committee of the International Maritime Organization in London, England. He then was assigned to Coast Guard Headquarters in the office of law enforcement and defense operations, as the legal advisor for the enforcement of laws and treaties program.
Rosa was then assigned to Group Detroit as deputy commander, and then as director of the Maritime Intelligence Center in Miami. He was detailed to the staff of the National Security Council at the White House, where he served initially as director for Gulf War illnesses, and then as director of the international crime group within the Office of Transnational Threats.
After a tour of duty in the Coast Guard’s Seventh District, Rosa returned to the White House in 2004 to serve as special assistant to the president and senior director for border and transportation security on the staff of the Homeland Security Council.
Rosa is a 1975 graduate of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., and the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle Barracks, Penn. He also received a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Wesleyan University and a Juris Doctorate from the University of Connecticut School of Law.
Rear Admiral Hereth assumed command of the Fifth District in June 2005. The Fifth District stretches from central New Jersey to the border of North Carolina and South Carolina, and covers 156,000 square miles of ocean, bays, rivers wetlands and tidal marshes.
Hereth plans to retire to his hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, with his wife of 34-years, the former Kathy Hays of Hillsboro, Oregon.
