An interview with Capt. Richard Dromerhauser, U.S. Navy

Commodore, Destroyer Squadron SIXTY

Commander Task Force 65

Courtesy of Surface SITREP.  Republished with the permission of the Surface Navy Association (www.navysna.org).

 

Capt. Edward H. Lundquist, USN (Ret.): Tell me about your four forward-deployed guided missile destroyers (DDGs).

Capt. Richard Dromerhauser: These are amazing ships. We took 10 rotational east coast deployers and replaced them with four forward-deployed DDGs. They are operationally at the tip of the spear.

People refer to the four DDGs in Rota as the BMD ships, because it’s a capability they own. But first and foremost they’re multi-mission combatants. Carney arrived at the end of the summer in 2015, and we got her underway a week early. Instead of coming out of Rota and going through the STROG – the Strait of Gibraltar – and doing the scheduled 4-month initial deployment, we sent her up the coast of Portugal to meet a Russian Kilo that was coming down to be transferred into the Black Sea, and she went with them. And so here we have a ship that just changed home ports, and is new to the theater, and she came in for an initial once-over, and then we sent her right back out, and she escorted the Kilo all the way into the Med. At the same time she’s escorting the Charles de Gaulle strike group, which was on its way to the East Med – they were operating off Syria – and provide air defense for the strike group while simultaneously tracking and escorting the Kilo into the Black Sea. Oh, and by the way, at the same time she augmented the strike group that was transiting, to provide them escort duties, as well. All while she’s doing the BMD mission for us.

 

They are based at Rota, which is not a traditional homeport for us. How do you keep the crews trained?

We have a small but extremely effective detachment there, and we get superb support from the base. Think of all the things that we need to do to get a ship underway: they need to be manned; they need to be trained; and they need to be equipped.   And we do that with the team in Rota. We leverage the capability at Afloat Training Group and SURFLANT.   We don’t get any special treatment, but when we ask for a training team to do a 1.1 recurring unit level training event, we insure the ship is prepared and can also get them to the 1.2 and 1.3 events, as well, and we can knock out this entire training requirement that would normally take two or three weeks, and get it done in four days. Because if we have a team of experts fly all the way out here we need to get the greatest bang for the buck. We may have an opportunity to visit multiple ships and knock out multiple events…the ships just need to be ready. I am extremely proud of our ships 97 percent first pass yield for ATG assessments.

We want to make training as realistic as possible. We have warfare tactical instructors (WTIs) conducting the training, and they’re the experts. We have WTIs with ASW expertise, and with the DDGs getting SeaRAM, we’ll have WTIs with the specific SeaRAM training.

 

Do you leverage the training capabilities or ranges or facilities of our allies and partners?

We recently sent Porter to the Spanish Navy’s firefighting school at Rota. We have a memorandum of agreement with them. We send our ships, and we have some U.S. trainers working side by side with the Spanish trainers. We’re watching and learning about each other’s equipment and how it’s used, and building this capability. I’ve had Spanish engineers help us out in port. There’s a great relationship on that base and that is paying big dividends. And as we talk about BMD in the theater, the Spanish have been very interested in “Smart Defense,” where Spanish ships are acting as air defense for our DDGs when they’re engaged with a BMD mission. BMD by its very nature involved looking up vice looking around, so we’ll can have another ship on patrol with them. We usually send our DDGs out in twos for four months. One predominantly does Black Sea and Med missions, and the other will do East Med or Med. We switch them on and off so they work the entire theater. Sometimes we’ll get them outside of the Med. The other two ships will go through a major overhaul in port, and get any kind of equipment – like SeaRAM — and the other ship that’s off cycle is doing some pretty significant training. We’ve sent them up to FOST– the Flag Officer Sea Training in England. They do Joint Warrior with CTF 80 ships from the East Coast. Our FDNF ships are constantly doing training and exercises. The Ross will be fully integrated into France’s upcoming Charles De Gaulle Strike Group deployment to the Easter Mediterranean.

The operational pace of the ships enables them to be able to go and do so many amazing missions – not just BMD, but ASW, SUW, AAW, and theater security. We do a lot of what we call focus collection operations where we’ll take the ships into anti-access/area denial environments up in the Black Sea off the coast of Crimea, to the Eastern Mediterranean off the coast of Syria. We’re prepping the operational environment and making sure that everyone knows, “Hey, here we are. We are in the Mediterranean; we are in the Black Sea; we are in the Eastern Med; we are in the Baltic. We’re the Sixth Fleet and this is where we operate.”

Yes, they have a very critical part of the BMD mission, and we’re very proud of that. As the officer in tactical control of them, we love the fact that they can go out and operate in just about any environment and threat situation in theater. I don’t want to be arrogant and say they “operate with impunity. We still want to keep our heads on swivel? We’re not complacent about anything out here.

 

Are you referring to the choke points in the theater, and a growing offensive threat?

The Russian Kalibr missile is on the Kilo submarines and the new class of FFGs that the Russians are putting out. We’re getting six Kilos in the Black Sea, and they’ll operate in the Eastern Med. And they’ve launched cruise missiles from the Caspian Sea.

 

Were you involved in the BMD mission previously?

I had command of USS Fitzgerald (DDG 62), a BMD DDG in Japan. I really enjoyed that mission, and I think I have a good understanding of BMD. We were a DESRON 15 ship, and came under the BMD warfare commander when conducting BMD. We do the same thing here.  I come in on the maritime side with BMD assets and assisting in the overall BMD mission alongside the AEGIS Ashore facility. We position those ships, we run them and maintain them.   We get these FDNF ships here for seven years before we rotate them back home. Then we’ll get a new set of ships. But our goal is to send those ships back in great condition, because in order for me to do everything I’ve just talked about, we have to focus on the maintenance, preservation, training, and the manning. I visit Rota every month, and of course we’re plugged in to the Sixth Fleet Commander to provide his sea control.