VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. – The short-notice surge of U.S. warships from the East Coast to take on missile and drone threats in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Red Sea is informing a model for how the Navy will surge ships to fight in future conflicts, the commander of U.S. Fleet Forces Command told a group of naval engineers on Tuesday.
With about two weeks’ notice, Fleet Forces prepared guided-missile destroyers USS Carney (DDG-64) and USS Mason (DDG-87) to sail from Virginia and Florida to augment ships already in the region, Adm. Daryl Caudle said during a keynote at the ASNE Fleet Maintenance and Modernization symposium.
Carney and Mason both went on to serve as part of Operation Prosperity Guardian and downed hundreds of missiles, one-way attack drones and attack surface craft launched by Houthi forces in the Middle East.
The ships were classified as combat-ready surge forces that met a minimum level of qualifications to quickly deploy in the event of a crisis.
A combat-ready force component is “a unit that within an acceptable level of risk, I would have confidence that could go into combat… and I know it can do a few things,” Caudle said.
“I know it can maneuver, communicate, shoot and defend itself… They’re good enough.”
Under the construction, every ship and submarine on the waterfront are ranked by their ability to be ready in time to surge.
That was the case for the DDGs sent to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Red Sea following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent Houthi attacks on merchant traffic in the Middle East.
In preparation to go forward, “we quickly gave them an intelligence brief. Gave them some synthetic training on what we thought they would see and within a couple of weeks we were pushing two more DDGs across the Atlantic,” Caudle said.
The ships stayed for months in the Middle East reloading as needed to keep present against the Houthi drone and missile threat.
Caudle is planning for stories like Mason and Carney to be the new normal for surface ships. He framed the combat surge as an answer Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti’s ongoing call for more players on the field to meet the demand for forces, he said.
Overall, the trend will move toward shorter maintenance periods and longer periods in a ship’s life where they will be able to move at short notice.
“The expectation is that you flow within 30 days,” Caudle said.
In addition to restocking missiles, Caudle said the Navy needed to improve maintenance rates and look at other ways to conduct the maintenance in the U.S. and overseas to maximize the surge capacity.
“We are looking at potential benefits of shorter duration or frequent availability to reduce scope,” he said.
“For the global maritime response plan to reach its full potential of generating surging and regenerating forces, our maintenance and modernization team will have to think about how to scale both operations and output to quickly respond to increased demands.”
Throughout his speech, Caudle emphasized the expansion of Chinese naval power, Beijing’s close relationship with Moscow and the growing technology exchange between the two as the imperative to speed up maintenance rates and improve Navy readiness.
Caudle said it took years for U.S. industry to catch up after the attack on Pearl Harbor to meet the needs of the war effort and implied a modern conflict might not allow for that length of time to support a fight.
“It would surely take time for us to get to the gold standard of production we enjoyed in our industrial base by 1943 until about the war’s end. Said another way, consider that today is Dec. 6, 1941, are we ready for Dec. 7th?”
