Fleet scrambles to meet BMD ship demand

From Navy Times

Fleet scrambles to meet BMD ship demand

By Christopher P. Cavas - Staff writer

Posted : Monday Jan 4, 2010 8:17:17 EST

No sooner did the Aegis ballistic missile defense system become operational in 2008 than combatant commanders started asking for BMD-equipped ships to begin patrolling their areas.

U.S. Central Command needed a “shooter” in the northern Persian Gulf. European Command wanted one in the eastern Mediterranean. Pacific Command already had Aegis ships with limited BMD capabilities on guard around Japan for a potential launch from North Korea.

The demand for BMD ships is expected to increase, driven in part by rising concerns about Iran’s intentions and the U.S. decision in September to cancel an anti-missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic and rely instead on Aegis.

But the Navy has a relatively small number of such ships, and those destroyers and cruisers are designed to carry out a wide range of war-fighting tasks. As a result, while Navy commanders are pleased with the expanding capabilities of their Aegis ships, they’re also somewhat guarded about trumpeting the advances.

“We can’t constrain assets to one mission,” a senior officer said last month. “They need to do a variety of other missions.”

Worries that valuable Aegis ships might be locked into the BMD mission were discussed in December at a two-day seminar at the National Defense University in Washington. Reporters were allowed to quote comments made at the seminar under the condition that no speaker be identified.

“Sea-based ballistic missile defense is a necessary component of any theater defense,” the senior officer said. “We need to find ways to get folks to use the ships in ways consistent with their being a ship — to realize they are not a point-defense asset.”

One analyst added, “The demand signal is ahead of the pot of ships.”

Navy spokesman Lt. Tommy Buck said the service is working to manage the demand.

“Combatant commanders need to understand BMD-capable ships are multimission-capable. BMD is one available asset,” Buck said Dec. 18.

The Navy is also working on how to respond, said Vice Adm. Samuel Locklear, director of the Navy Staff.

“We have a small Navy today — the smallest since 1916 — yet we have a growing global demand for maritime forces, maritime security operations. And now we have a growing demand for maritime ballistic missile defense. Our ships and our crews and our systems are up to the challenge, but it’s a capacity issue for us,” Locklear said to a reporter during the NDU seminar.

“As the capacity grows faster than we can grow the number of ships we have — which is always difficult, particularly in the demanding fiscal environment we’re in — we have to look at ways to deploy these ships so that we can get the job done and still have a reasonable expectation that we can take care of the ship and the crew. So we’re looking at a lot of different options as to how we’ll do that as this demand grows. But we are limited in capacity.”

Locklear said that despite meeting demands from joint commanders, the Navy has “to some degree preserve the command and control. Navy component commanders still command and control these ships.” But, he added, “What we’ve had to do is to spread these multimission platforms more thinly across a growing number of demands globally.”

The demand has already affected deployments. Early in 2009, for example, the Florida-based destroyer The Sullivans, on deployment with a carrier group, moved to Japan for a few weeks to pick up the exercise schedule of a Japan-based BMD destroyer that was called on by Central Command to guard the northern Persian Gulf. The exercise did not require BMD capability; The Sullivans completed its Aegis BMD upgrade in September, after returning from deployment.

This fall, the San Diego-based destroyer Higgins deployed to the eastern Mediterranean to provide BMD defense for European Command and take part in exercises.

Both moves are unusual, as it’s rare for an Atlantic Fleet ship to visit Japan or for a Pacific ship to patrol the Mediterranean.

Such cross-deployments require more coordination by fleet planners.

“Effective global force management requires global visibility on requirements,” Buck said. “U.S. Fleet Forces Command [headquartered in Norfolk, Va.] and Pacific Fleet [headquartered in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii] collaborate, coordinate and communicate to have more complete knowledge of location and status of fleet capabilities and work to best employ those capabilities to meet global combatant commander requirements to include BMD.”

The senior officer said one way to manage demand is to encourage combatant commanders to give “sufficient warning to have ships on station. We need to remind [combatant commanders] that these are multimission ships.”

27 BMD ships by 2013

Twenty cruisers and destroyers have been upgraded with the Aegis ballistic missile defense capability, with the cruiser Monterey set to receive the upgrade in March. Six more destroyers are to receive the upgrade in 2012 and 2013. The Navy’s missile defense ships and their home ports:

Norfolk, Va.: Destroyers Ramage and Stout; cruiser Vella Gulf.

Mayport, Fla.: Destroyer The Sullivans.

San Diego: Destroyers Decatur, Benfold, Milius, Higgins and John Paul Jones.

Pearl Harbor, Hawaii: Cruisers Lake Erie and Port Royal; destroyers Russell, O’Kane, Paul Hamilton and Hopper.

Yokosuka, Japan: Cruiser Shiloh; destroyers Stethem, Curtis Wilbur, John S. McCain and Fitzgerald.