For the sailors and Marines of the just-deployed USS Kearsarge ready group, their first mission came close to home: pitching in on the Navy’s first fleet battle problem of the year, off the North Carolina coast.
They were testing a part of a major Navy strategic push — it’s called distributed maritime operations, essentially pushing decision-making out closer to the front lines.
This battle problem called on the Little Creek-based Navy Expeditionary Combat Command to take charge of command and control by bringing in its sailors’ experience clearing, securing and setting up bases quickly in often-hostile spots.
NECC explosive ordnance disposal technicians — the divers who disarm bombs and mines — along with the NECC’s Oceana-based electronic intelligence group set up a command and control center in a tent on the beach at the Marine Corps’ Camp Lejeune.
“It’s really a capability that we have ... to go wherever it’s needed to establish C2 (command and control) and do it,” said Lt. Cmdr. Bruce Batteson, NECC’s future operation officer.
That means going forward — as with that tent on the beach — and operating from a small footprint in what expeditionary command sailors like to describe as “austere environments.”
Those environments for two decades have often been hot and dry, and the distinctive mission of NECC has meant its sailors are often handling command and control in operations that demand the skills of expeditionary sailors and other military personnel.
“Just the conditions are just different this time,” said Rear Adm. Joseph DiGuardo, NECC’s commanding officer. “We are not in the desert, we are in the maritime environment, but that doesn’t mean the tasks are different and doesn’t mean we are any less prepared,”
For the fleet battle problem, that meant command and control of Navy special warfare operators, as well as the sailors and Marines of the Kearsarge group, said Capt. Chuck Eckhart, commanding officer of Little Creek-based Explosive Ordnance Group 2, who served as deputy commander for the battle problem.
Linking the explosive ordnance disposal technicians’ drone- and sensor-handling expertise with an operating amphibious group of sailors and Marines, like the Kearsarge group, was the main task of the battle problem.
For Eckhart and the NECC team in that Camp Lejeune tent, it meant fielding what EOD techs were seeing with their underwater drones — it takes a lot of practice to recognize a fuzzy video image as a mine — as well as data from airborne sensors and relaying it in a usable way so sailors and Marines could respond to any threats.
They tested defenses against attacks on the Kearsarge group’s ships and aircraft, including attacks by swarms of drones.
But for all the high-tech sensors, underwater drones and communications gear sailors and Marines brought to the battle problem, working in the tent at Camp Lejeune had a bit of a feel of sailing ship days, Eckhart said.
That’s because the distributed maritime operations strategy means a more decentralized approach to Navy missions — just as in the days when a Navy warship set sail and might be out of touch for months, as the frigate Old Ironsides, the USS Constitution, was in the fall and winter of 1811 and 1812, training gun crews and running sail-handling drills off the French and Dutch coasts to be ready in the event of war with Britain. The Constitution search for HMS Guerriere, ending in the slugfest when it earned its “Old Ironsides” name, came in the course of a month-long patrol in Canadian waters.
“It’s really getting back to a core Navy capability,” Eckhart said.
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