In the wake of two destroyer crashes that killed 17 sailors over the summer, U.S. Pacific Fleet commander Adm. Scott H. Swift told The San Diego Union-Tribune on Thursday that he’s quickly revamping the way warship crews train, maintain their vessels and get credentialed for missions at sea.

“This transcends a professional responsibility. I feel a personal responsibility, a personal commitment to get after the challenges we face in the Pacific,” said Swift, who controls 60 percent of the Navy’s warships and oversees more than 140,000 sailors from the Pacific coast of the United States to the waters of North Korea and Australia.

“To be clear, I’m the one that is responsible. I’m the one who has the authorities to fix this. I’m the one to be held accountable for these events and I don’t shirk these responsibilities whatsoever.”

Swift’s call for reforms comes a week after the Navy’s top brass in the Pacific Fleet, Surface Forces Pacific and the embattled 7th Fleet met in the Japanese port city of Yokosuka to brainstorm ways to fix problems exposed by the deadly collisions of the Fitzgerald and John S. McCain with commercial shipping in the bustling sea lanes of Asia.


Flanked by Vice Adm. Thomas S. Rowden in the Naval Surface Forces commander’s Coronado office, Swift proposed the creation of what’s being called the Naval Surface Group Western Pacific.

Helmed by an unnamed captain who has held major command at sea, with a staff of between 30 — 50 experts in engineering, safety, maintenance, seamanship and training, the Group will report directly to Swift, a signal of what he said is the “urgency driven by the sense of loss of these 17 sailors.” It could be working on the surface fleet snafus by next week, the admiral said.

Modeled both on an entity that was headquartered in the Philippines before 1992 and to the existing Naval Surface Group Middle Pacific in Hawaii and a similar detachment in Bahrain, the authority will be headquartered in Japan to rapidly perform a “hull by hull review” to determine whether crews are ready to deploy to sea, face remedial training or put the warship into maintenance, Swift and Rowden said.

“This is about taking care of our entire Navy family and ensuring that they have the tools and resources to be able to get the job done,” said Rowden.


The new Group also partly mirrors previous reforms Swift instituted to the way amphibious warships train their crews, maintain vessels and deploy for operations.

“We were doing 174 exercises in Seventh Fleet when I came into the job and those become operational demand signals,” said Swift. “So we went through those 174 exercises and a lot of them were kind of nice to do things, but that was trade space to give time back to train sailors and get maintenance done on the ships.”

After fixing the “gator” fleet in the Pacific, Swift has faced far tougher problems with surface warships like guided-missile destroyers and cruisers.

On Jan. 31, the cruiser Antietam ran aground on rocks along the Japanese coast. Less than five months later, the cruiser Lake Champlain bashed a South Korean fishing boat. Then came the June 17 destroyer Fitzgerald crash with a merchant vessel and, on Aug. 21, the collision of an oil tanker with the destroyer John S. McCain east of Singapore


Fire Controlman 2nd Class Carlos Victor Sibayan of Chula Vista and Yeoman 3rd Class Shingo Alexander Douglass of Oceanside were two of the seven sailors killed in the Fitzgerald disaster.

Swift’s proposed reforms were announced five days before Adm. John M. Richardson, the 31st Chief of Naval Operations, is slated to testify before Congress about the slew of mishaps. He’s ordered an operational pause for all fleets worldwide and directed Adm. Phil Davidson of Fleet Forces Command to oversee a deeper analysis of the problems plaguing the Seventh Fleet.

He also fired Seventh Fleet commander Vice Adm. Joseph Aucoin and replaced him with Phillip G. Sawyer, a three-star career submarine officer.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office already has identified a wide range of problems likely contributing to the maritime mishaps.


Over the past 11 years, for example, the Navy has doubled the number of warships based overseas in order to boost a “forward presence” and rapidly respond to crises in troubled waters such as the South China and Yellow Seas, but there are few dedicated training periods built into the operational schedules of cruisers and destroyers operating out of Japan.

When the Fitzgerald crashed, killing seven sailors, more than a third of the destroyer and cruiser crews in Japan had expired training certificates, including crucial schooling in seamanship.

Efforts by the Navy to slash the size of crews throughout the early 2000s saved money but might be triggering safety risks, with some sailors toiling more than 100 hours a week, GAO reported.

Warship commanders also continue to record persistently low readiness levels after failing to complete maintenance on time, leading to more time in dock than at sea training for war. Instead of spending valuable days training for missions and getting credentials certifying their competence at key tasks, sailors deployed to sea to run operations or attend exercises.


Lawmakers are debating a range of solutions to aid the overworked forward-deployed warships, from hiking the sizes of crews to floating a 350-ship Navy, but those remedies could take a long time to roll out.

“We have to fix these problems based on the resources we have,” said Swift. “If there was an increase in ships or an increase in manning, those increases won’t manifest themselves in the fleet for another two or three years. We owe it to those sailors, we owe to their families, we owe it to their shipmates to get after these problems now, now, now.”

Swift cautioned critics not to get fixated on one solution, “like if we get credentialing right, we’re good.” Instead, he wants to use the new Group to dig into deeper “cultural” problems that might afflict the fleet, including a push to maintain a punishingly high tempo of exercises and operations.

“Where we’re out of balance is this operational demand signal that’s being brought down on us just based on world events,” Swift said, nodding at national security concerns involving China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and the Islamic State terror franchise roiling the Philippines.


Swift said that he could trim the dreaded “optempo” without squandering America’s national security interests in the volatile Western Pacific. Critics have questioned whether he can properly counter potential Asian rivals after losing a pair of destroyers to accidents, but he pointed out that he has 200 other ships assigned to him, 60 percent of the Navy’s arsenal of vessels.

“The depth on the bench is significant,” he said. “Clearly we have more than enough resources to cover down on the North Korean threat. We have more than enough resources to reassure our allies, partners and friends with respect to the challenges presented by China in the South China Sea.”

Swift said that he and Adm. Harry Harris, the 24th Commander of U.S. Pacific Command, continue to have an ongoing frank but “robust discussion” about prioritizing missions, increasingly with an eye on ensuring the warships are fully trained and resourced to do the operation.

“I don’t know exactly what the right answer is, but I know what the wrong answer is,” said Swift. “And the wrong answer is the status quo because the status quo delivered us collectively three collisions and a grounding and 17 lost sailors. And that’s unacceptable. It’s unacceptable to me. It’s unacceptable to the American public. It’s unacceptable to the Congress, so we have to be active in moving forward.”


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cprine@sduniontribune.com