Teamwork, flexibility, & sustained combat power: Interview with Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Vern Clark

Sea Power, Oct 2002 by Peterson, Gordon I

The importance of operating in a coalition with large numbers of ships at sea places a special responsibility on us. It is our task to be interoperable with every one of them. We relearned the importance of interoperability. Lastly, we reinforced again the importance of being an expeditionary force. We are the Navy-Marine Corps team. We are able to take our combat capability and our logistical support and go anywhere to operate out of the maritime environment.

You called the commandant of the Coast Guard on 9/11 to offer him the Navy's support during the war on terrorism. Will such cooperation continue?

CLARK: Yes, it will. We have had a very successful year working with the United States Coast Guard. I committed all Navy PCs to them for homeland defense with money in our '02 [fiscal year 2002] budget. Some of these ships were scheduled to be decommissioned, but we cancelled those plans and have continued funding support for next year to the sum of approximately $63 million. The U.S. Atlantic and Pacific Fleets have done a great deal of work to establish joint harbor-control operations. The Coast Guard stepped up its pace of operations for homeland defense, and we have operated in support of them.

One of our most important areas of collaboration relates to global intelligence. We have established an all-force maritimetracking operation. I can't describe the details for security reasons, but in cooperation with the Coast Guard we develop a global intelligence picture tracking all ship movements on the high seas. It is paying profound results.

Have recent combat operations validated the decisions that you and Secretary of the Navy Gordon England made to put a top priority and early emphasis on fully funding the Navy's personnel, current operations, and readiness accounts in recent Navy budgets?

CLARK: Absolutely. I believe recent operations prove the point. We did not know this war was coming. We live in an uncertain world. We cannot predict tonight where we will be called upon to fight or who our enemies will be five to 20 years from now. None of us would have predicted that we would go to Afghanistan or need to surge four carriers to the Indian Ocean within a matter of minutes. We did it without blinking an eye because our combat-readiness rates are superb.

During operations in Afghanistan we flew our aircraft at 250 percent of their operational planned flying-hour rates for months. This is a tribute to our people, to be sure, but if your people do not have the right tools and spare parts it is hard to make a difference. I am totally convinced that our recent experience has proved once again that you must be sure to put your money where your mouth is if you want to be a ready force. You must commit needed resources, or you will not have a ready force.

We have seen peaks and valleys in operational readiness in the past. All the indicators today show that the depth of the "bathtub" [the readiness profile during the Interdeployment Training Cycle] is shallowing out, even in the context of expanded operations.