- NORFOLK, Va. - The carrier
Harry S. Truman sailed Wednesday in a test of the Navy,s ability to have
seven of its 12 carriers away from port simultaneously, a major shift from
the way carriers have traditionally been used. A second Norfolk-based carrier,
the carrier Enterprise, was expected to leave Thursday to participate in
the exercise, dubbed 'Summer Pulse 04.'
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- Summer Pulse 04 continues through August, with seven
carriers conducting joint exercises and international exercises with allies
from the Americas, Europe, Africa, Australia and Asia, officials said.
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- "The ability to push that kind of military capability
to the four corners of the world is quite remarkable," Navy Secretary
Gordon R. England said when he announced plans for the demonstration last
week in Washington. "Several years ago, we could deploy only two"
carriers at the same time.
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- Summer Pulse 04 is the first exercise of the Navy's new
Fleet Response Plan, announced last December, under which ships will move
away from traditional, regularly scheduled six-month deployments and be
prepared to leave as world events demand.
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- The Navy wants to be able to send six carrier strike
groups in less than 30 days to handle a crisis anywhere in the world, plus
have two more carrier strike groups ready within three months to reinforce
or rotate with those forces and continue operations in other areas.
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- Summer Pulse 04 is "a proof of concept that we can
in fact make that happen," Capt. Michael R. Groothousen, the Truman's
commanding officer, said Wednesday by telephone after the Truman left Norfolk
Naval Station.
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- Groothousen said the Fleet Response Plan makes deployment
schedules less predictable - a change necessary in a post-Sept. 11 world.
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- "Terrorists love predictability," he said.
"If we can start putting some unpredictability into our schedule,
it makes it more difficult for any threat out there to determine when to
strike."
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- That also means more volatility in the sailors, schedules.
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- "When you're planning on being in port for a little
while and then the schedule changes, nobody likes that," said Petty
Officer 1st Class Tony Rice, 34, of Midland, Texas, a Truman crew member.
"But you kind of get used to it as a sailor. You're taught to be fluid
and expect the unexpected."
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- The Navy demonstrated its ability to 'surge' multiple
carriers like this a year ago during the Iraq war, said John Pike, director
of GlobalSecurity.org, an Alexandria research center on security issues.
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- However, the Navy wasn,t really set up to deploy several
carriers at once, so it wasn,t easy, he said.
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- "Now they are demonstrating that they are set up
to do it," Pike said. "If anybody anywhere gets any ideas - if
North Korea gets frisky or the Red Chinese get too risky - they might have
a half-dozen carriers show up on short notice."
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- This is "a fundamentally different way of deploying
aircraft carriers than we had during the 20th century," Pike said.
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- Typically, a carrier deployed overseas for six months,
then was at home for 18 months while sailors went back to school in the
Navy and the ship was repaired and overhauled.
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- Under that arrangement, a carrier was combat-capable
only for about six months during a two-year cycle, so generally only two
of the stateside carriers could be deployed at a given time, Pike said.
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- The other carriers taking part in "Summer Pulse
04" are the Norfolk-based George Washington and San Diego-based John
C. Stennis, which are already deployed; the Kitty Hawk, based in Yokosuka,
Japan; the Mayport, Fla.-based John F. Kennedy; and the Ronald Reagan,
which left Norfolk last week and is en route to its new home port of San
Diego.
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- Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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