Cmdr. Drew Carlson is the AAMDS Romania commanding officer. His command element is based at the Romania site, but the nine crews live and train at Dam Neck, Virginia, and deploy as 11-person teams to the site for six months at a time. A new crew reports every two months, and there are always three crews on station.
AAMDS is a tenant command of Naval Support Facility Deveselu, which is a tenant of the Romania Baza Militara 99 Deveselu.
“All the things that have transpired with Aegis Ashore are just eye-watering. Our sailors spend four months getting ready to deploy, learning, training and preparing. Then they get on a plane and come out here, and I get to see the looks on the sailors’ faces when they see an Aegis deckhouse in the middle of sunflowers in Southern Romania. It’s real. And it works. And they get to be a part of it. I think that’s probably the biggest reward.”
Carlson said the team-building begins when they walk through the door at Dam Neck, and is stressed during the eight weeks of indoctrination at “Aegis Ashore Academy.”
“We talk about the individual contribution to the team, because we only have 11 people on a watch team, there’s no bench. Each one is a fairly unique in the skill set and job function, so everybody’s got to be good. After the academy we go through the Aegis Ashore Team Trainer, which is modeled after the same training syllabus that we would give a ship – there’s a basic phase at the beginning, individual watch qualification, validation, and then team performance. Afloat Training Group Norfolk and Tactical Training Group Atlantic are involved, and they make their recommendation for deployment certification. The training standard is no less rigorous than what a ship would do; it just happens to really focus on one mission area.”
Carlson said that sustaining the training is also important. “We need to continually expand the individual’s capability and their contribution and to the overall team’s capability. Pushing the envelope with respect to what people do on watch helps the individual and the team; and it also can advance the tactics and our discussions at the strategic and operational levels about how we should employ and integrate this capability; and push the envelope for the technical development. As we figure out what we can do with the system, maybe we can see how to push it further beyond what was originally in the specification. That opens up a new questions about possible changes to the computer code, or the radar setup, or how we deploy it. We’re not preoccupied by other tasks and evolutions that we might find underway, so we have the latitude to examine what we do and how we do it. So if we want to dive into an idea about how to change the radar setup, or flex a different maintenance concept, especially given that we have a hybrid maintenance team with civilians and military, we have an opportunity to do that.”
Some of the watchstanders will be monitoring the tactical picture, while other members of the 11 people with material or maintenance support roles for their particular skill set might not necessarily be on the actual watch floor in the combat information center, but they’ll be in the complex. That would include an electronics technician, a vertical launch system gunner’s mate or an information technology specialist, for example.
The new Housing and Dining Facility (HDF) building at Naval Support Facility (NSF) in Devesulu, Romania, serves the majority of the 150-plus service members at NSF Deveselu. U.S. Navy photo by MCC Larry Foos
“The European Phased Adaptive approach, especially Phase 2, is more than Aegis Ashore. It also includes our shipmates in this endeavor on the four FDNF destroyers at Rota. We’re part of that architecture. We just happen to be the newest and we don’t move,” Carlson said. “Interoperability, whether it’s in the Navy or inter-service, or with our allies and partners, is crucial. We’re expanding into the NATO architectures to make sure we can be interoperable. If there’s an FDNF BMD ship in the Black Sea, we’re talking to him. If they’re going to shoot a test missile at PMRF, we can see that.”
“There isn’t a lot of variation in what we do. But we have to train and be ready on a moment’s notice to do our job, and we hope that it’s a job we never have to do,” said Carlson.
“Our Navy does a lot of things that are unprecedented – because we’re a dynamic, responsive, innovative and forward-thinking organization,” said Carlson. “All the things that have transpired with Aegis Ashore are just eye-watering. Our sailors spend four months getting ready to deploy, learning, training and preparing. Then they get on a plane and come out here, and I get to see the looks on the sailors’ faces when they see an Aegis deckhouse in the middle of sunflowers in Southern Romania. It’s real. And it works. And they get to be a part of it. I think that’s probably the biggest reward.”
Courtesy of Surface SITREP. Republished with the permission of the Surface Navy Association.