Navy Takes New Approach to Ship Rotation

[MORTARDUDE]

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Navy Takes New Approach to Ship Rotation
By ROBERT BURNS
ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) - In a shift that will affect the lifestyles of thousands of sailors, the Navy is throwing overboard a decades-old approach to rotating its ships and crews on sea duty.

Instead of sticking to a schedule that sends ships to sea for six months - rarely for even one day longer - followed by 18 months at home preparing for the next deployment, the Navy will speed up parts of the preparation cycle so more ships are available for duty.

It is abandoning predictability in favor of flexibility that Adm. Vern Clark, the chief of naval operations, said Thursday will give the president more options in a national crisis.

For example, instead of having just a few aircraft carriers available at any given time for sea duty, as has been the case for decades, as many as eight carriers will be available, other Navy officials said.

"(Just) like that, we're going to be able to deploy five or six anytime" the president wants to, Clark said. As many as two others would be available on short notice at a lower level of combat readiness.

The Navy has 12 carriers, but at any given time one or two are in long-term overhaul and not available to deploy. Clark gave no indication he saw a need to increase the number of carriers.

In a breakfast interview with reporters, Clark said he believes sailors are ready for this change, although he acknowledged that they may find it difficult in some respects.

"We don't promise them an easy time," Clark said. "There are going to be some hard times."

Clark said the Navy is breaking its own records for recruiting and re-signing sailors, and he's convinced that they are ready to do what is necessary to help the U.S. military win a global war on terrorism, even if it means sailors spend longer periods separated from their families.

"If you start doing nine-month deployments as a matter of routine, you're going to pay for this," he said. "But not in war," and that was demonstrated during the Iraq war, he added.

Clark said that when he visited an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, the first question sailors asked him was when would they be returning home. He said he told them he was trying to stick to the six-month timetable they had become accustomed to.

"But if your staying here another week or month makes one bit of difference in winning the global war, (then) you're staying," he said he told them. "You know what they did? They all applauded."

The Navy had seven aircraft carriers deployed during the Iraq war - two in the eastern Mediterranean, three in the Persian Gulf, one in the western Pacific and one was sent from San Diego to replace the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Gulf. The Lincoln, based at Everett, Wash., spent nearly 10 months at sea - one of the longest carrier deployments since the Vietnam War.

Normally the Navy would have one carrier in the western Pacific at all times and one in either the Gulf or the Mediterranean. Today it has one in the Gulf and one in the western Pacific; those that fought the Iraq war have returned to their home ports.

In the future, deployment schedules and patterns will be less predictable. Gone will be the longstanding practice of putting a carrier into six months of maintenance after it returns from an overseas deployment, followed by 12 months of progressively more demanding training of sailors.

The new approach will tailor the length of the maintenance period to a ship's particular needs and missions, rather than keeping it rigidly at six months, officials said. And instead of then training for 12 months before being certified as ready for deployment, the carrier crews will undergo three months of basic training before being classified as ready for deployment in an emergency. If there is no emergency, they will continue training and deploy when needed.

Thus, at any given time, as many as eight carriers would be "employable" or already deployed.

Clark said sailors should know that just because their ships will be available for longer or more frequent deployments in times of crisis, that does not mean they will do so as a matter of routine.

"Can this thing go the wrong way if we start driving people toward nine-month deployments? Absolutely," he said.