ABOARD GUIDED-MISSILE DESTROYER USS MASON – When sailors assigned to USS Mason (DDG-87) were in workups last year, many expected a standard Mediterranean Sea deployment.
Maybe they’d stop in Souda Bay, Crete, or Naples, Italy, and have liberty in southern Europe, all while the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer continued the presence missions U.S. warships have performed globally for decades.
“We started out on our deployment thinking we’re probably just doing a quick once over to 5th Fleet, go back out to 6th Fleet, maybe do some counter-Russian operations,” Lt. Jack Cabell, a fire control officer aboard Mason, told USNI News on Thursday. “You know, just be present to break up the normal day-to-day for the Russians.”
But after Hamas launched attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7 and the Yemen-based Houthis started attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea in response to Israel’s ongoing bombardment of the Gaza Strip, the destroyer quickly became one of several U.S. warships to engage in sustained naval combat for the first time since World War II. Mason deployed with the Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group a week after the Hamas attacks.
For months, Mason’s sailors kept up with a consistent barrage of Houthi firings by shooting down unmanned aerial vehicles and missiles. For the first time in naval combat, the crew shot down anti-ship ballistic missiles.
On Nov. 26, the sailors saved the crew of M/V Central Park from pirates who had boarded the merchant tanker in the southern Red Sea.
“We created a wall of steel as it is – us and the Akebono, Japanese coalition partner – and we pretty much coaxed the pirates into leaving the ship because they were surrounded by two ships,” Cabell, standing in Mason’s combat information center, recounted to USNI News at the pier in Naval Station Mayport, Fla.
When the pirates jumped into their skiff, Mason’s embarked helicopter chased them down and the destroyer’s visit, board, search and seizure party took them into custody. The sailors liberated the merchant mariners who had taken refuge in the tanker’s citadel, according to a Navy accounting of the incident.
It was a landmark deployment for a U.S. naval warship, one that spurred the Navy to issue Combat Action Ribbons to the Mason sailors for multiple incidents between December 2023 and April 2024.
“I think it is a testament to the training that we have done and all the investments that we’ve made over the years in our weapons systems – that they work as designed, that our sailors were trained to use them, and that they had the confidence to be able to use them,” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti told USNI News on Thursday in an interview shortly after visiting Mason in Mayport.
While the early days of the deployment were chaotic as the crew figured out how to operate in a different type of environment and respond to these new threats, by the end of the ship’s time in the Red Sea, sailors said they established a battle rhythm.
“In the very beginning it was tense, I’m not going to lie,” Boatswain Mate 2nd class Moises Diaz, Mason’s leading petty officer, told USNI News on the bridge of the destroyer.
But as time went on, they figured out where to safely stand watch and what to look for over the horizon to keep an eye out for Houthi attacks.
“You got used to it in a way. It started becoming like an everyday rhythm, where, ‘okay this happens, now we know what to do,’” Diaz said. “We weren’t so … tense anymore. Just, ‘alright, oh cool this happens, new launch event, oh let’s do this.’”
Evolving with the Threat
Navy officials have said the ongoing Houthi attacks have evolved since the U.S. State Department-designated terrorist organization first started launching missiles at commercial shipping in October. That means U.S. sailors, too, have had to adjust to keep pace with the attacks.
That ability to adapt happened across the ship, from casualty control in the engineering spaces to how to use the destroyer’s five-inch gun.
“One thing that I’m taking back from this deployment is the urgencies of restoration of the [engineering] plant, especially with the conditions that we were in out there,” Lt. jg. Steven Bryant, Mason’s main propulsion assistant, told USNI News.
“It was so important for us to restore from all of our casualties as quick as possible so we could provide all the services that this ship needs to stay in the fight.”
During a more typical deployment, sailors might have more time to respond to a lube oil leak in the main propulsion plant, Bryant said. But given the ongoing UAV and missile attacks, the engineers needed to act as fast as possible to keep the destroyer’s propulsion system going.
For those operating in the CIC – where sailors are pulling in data and information to determine how to tactically respond to Houthi attacks – keeping pace with the Houthis meant working with the intelligence community and altering doctrine based on how engagements would play out in real life.
“The Houthis like to employ a myriad of both ballistic missiles and one way attack UAVs,” said Cabell, the FCO. “So the evolution for them is how they’ve tried to maximize their capability using those systems and ballistic missiles, changing off different components and firing them in different patterns that make them more effective against us. And we’re trying to get to the left of all that.”
The ship worked with Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren, having analysts look at the data coming off Mason and sending updated tactics back to the destroyer based on that information.
“We developed our doctrine, our tactics, our techniques to be able to have a battle rhythm when we experience that again. Because it did happen another seven times, I believe,” Cabell said.
For example, after some experience operating in the Red Sea against the Houthis, sailors learned to clear the weather decks in case they needed to use Mason’s weapons and to ensure the crew was aware of the given situation. They then codified those changes into doctrine.
During a Thursday visit to Mason, which came home a month ago, Franchetti met with several sailors on the bridge and thanked them for their actions during the recent deployment. Before pinning Fire Controlman 2nd Class William Edenfield for his promotion to 1st Class, the CNO said she wanted to pick his brain on how best to employ Mason’s five-inch gun.
That feedback loop from operations to tactical doctrine, Franchetti said, is one of the biggest takeaways from what service officials are calling an unprecedented deployment.
“He observed what was happening. He observed how the gun was performing and then they provided information back to technical experts, and then they came up with a different way to use the gun and the entire fire control system,” Franchetti said, referring to Edenfield, who was nominated for the combat Meritorious Advancement Program that allows commanding officers to promote enlisted sailors to the next rate.
“Everywhere you went, everyone had a story like that,” Franchetti said of the ships deployed to the Red Sea for the last 10 months.
“There was a lot of things that we saw for the first time, like using a Hellfire against a [unmanned surface vehicle]. These are things that we hadn’t done before. And so each time you do something new, you’re going to learn something new.”
