Do you think that will attract people to want to put in for duty with Aegis Ashore. Duty in Europe sounds appealing.

I wouldn’t characterize it as a great set of European orders. Deveselu is in the middle of nowhere – it’s a 3-hour drive from Bucharest. The nearest town is very small, and the mission requires them to be on post most of the time. We have barracks, and they live on base. They’re in a watch rotation like they would be on deployment. We’re looking at how we give them some liberty, because when you’re underway on deployment, you have a routine. You stand watch, train, do your divisional work, eat and sleep, and there’s no place to go off the ship because you’re at sea.

You get liberty ports on deployment.

But with Romania, we don’t pull into liberty ports and sort of shut down. We always have to do the mission.

So we have to build watch rotations that have some flexibility in there to allow our crews to have liberty and maybe have a weekend to get away. We need to give them the opportunity to get out and see a little bit of the country and Europe.

When we conducted At Sea Demo 15 last fall, nine member nations of the Maritime Theater Missile Defense Forum – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, the United Kingdom and the U.S. – were all contributing in some way to the BMD mission, either by building the capability to track a ballistic missile so they could provide cueing to the US ships, or providing the air defense to protect our BMD ships when they’re out on mission.

 

What’s the command structure there?

We have a Navy captain who is the base CO, who reports to Navy Region Europe. He’s essentially the face of the Navy in Romania, and he interfaces with our embassy and the Romanian Military personnel who run the base, and he deals with the local officials. And then I have a Navy commander who is in command of Aegis Ashore, and his sole focus is on doing the ballistic missile defense mission there. He runs the Aegis weapons system, the deckhouse, and launchers, and the associated equipment to deal with all that. Even though they’re co-located, the Naval Support Facility (NSF) and Aegis Ashore have very different focuses.

 

How do the Romanians feel about having the Americans there?

We have a great relationship with the Romanians – and I’m not just talking the locals. At their ministerial level, their Minister of Defense and their Minister of Foreign Affairs, are very happy to have us there. They see it’s a major contribution for Romania towards NATO. This is their contribution. They’re providing the land, they’re providing people to work on the base, and they see this as their contribution to the defense of Europe and the mission. This is Romania doing their part for the defense of Europe. All 28 NATO nations need to make a contribution to the collective defense, and this is an example of Romania and Poland contributing to this mission.

 

Are there other navies who want to contribute with ships?

A number of our partner navies are looking at ways to develop their ships to provide a BMD capability. When we conducted At Sea Demo 15 last fall, nine member nations of the Maritime Theater Missile Defense Forum – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, the United Kingdom and the U.S. – were all contributing in some way to the BMD mission, either by building the capability to track a ballistic missile so they could provide cueing to the US ships, or providing the air defense to protect our BMD ships when they’re out on mission. A lot of the nation’s navies can make a contribution to BMD by providing the air defense to protect the BMD ships, because it’s hard to do BMD and also focus on incoming aircraft and anti-ship missile at the same time.

 

How big is your staff?

I have 28 people that work the BMD mission. There are so many different pieces of it. Some of us have additional duties under NATO. I have a NATO hat, as well, under Strike Force NATO. Vice Admiral Foggo is the Sixth Fleet Commander, but he’s also the Strike Force NATO Commander. So I am the CTF-64 Commander in my U.S. hat and I’ll be the Task Force IAMD Commander under NATO. It makes for an easy transition when the ships TOA – Transfer Of Authority – from U.S. to the NATO side.

It makes for a clean command and control because they’re working for the same commander when they’re doing the mission. But I want to emphasize, they only work for me directly when we get to a certain posture level. They’re normally working for the DESRON 60 commander or CTF 65, because they’re multi-mission ships. So they’re working for that task force on all the other missions that they do. I only have IAMD.

BMD is a very intelligence-driven type of warfare. It’s dependent on I&W— Indications and Warning – what we think is going on, what we know is going on, and whether they need to be focused on BMD while they’re doing ASW or some other mission. The ships are more than capable of doing it, but it’ll be dependent on which is the greater threat at the time. So we normally have competing priorities between missions for the ships, and ASW has been one of those. They can do both simultaneously if they’re in the right position.

 

Do you have a counterpart in the other fleets?

We’re the only fleet with a separate task force for BMD. In Seventh Fleet, there are IAMD people on the staff, but the BMD commander is the cruiser Shiloh. So the CO of Shiloh oversees the BMD mission. In Fifth Fleet, the IAMD personnel are embedded in their staff, similar to how we are organized prior to the stand-up of CTF-64.