Roughead: Executing FRP Means Projecting Power Quickly

Vice Adm. Gary Roughead commands U.S. Second Fleet and NATO Striking Fleet Atlantic, and is responsible for executing the fleet readiness program (FRP), a major restructuring of the Navy’s maintenance, training, scheduling and deployment processes to create a fleet that can more quickly surge to world trouble spots and is employable for more sea days each year. FRP was promoted by Adm. Vern Clark, chief of naval operations, last year as a framework for leaders such as Roughead and Adm. William J. Fallon, commander, Fleet Forces Command, to improve the readiness and power projection of naval forces.

A career surface warfare officer with diverse experience, Roughead graduated with the class of 1973 from the U.S. Naval Academy. He has served on the Navy staff, with the Navy Secretariat, and at Atlantic Fleet and Pacific Command, as well as a stint as commandant of the U.S. Naval Academy.

At sea, in addition to commanding the Aegis destroyer USS Barry and the cruiser USS Port Royal, Roughead has led Cruiser Destroyer Group Two and the USS George Washington battle group. Aboard his command ship, USS Mount Whitney, moored at Naval Station Norfolk, Va., Roughead spoke with Sea Power Associate Editor Hunter C. Keeter about the FRP and his other priorities and challenges.

You have been at the helm of Second Fleet for a couple months now, what tops your list of priorities?

Roughead: First, refining the FRP and making it as responsive and as versatile as it possibly can be. Ultimately, our job is to project power forward and to be able to project power in many different places at the same time. That is the key thrust. The FRP is about the need to be in many places, with credible power, quickly. If you start with that premise and begin to package and train your forces always keeping that in mind, then it becomes rather easy to, for lack of a better term, operationalize the FRP. That is very simplistic of me to say, but there are a lot of people working very hard to make this happen.

What does this program mean to the fleet’s sailors and Marines and their leaders?

Roughead: We now have a force that is more employable for a longer period of time. [Employable refers to the readiness of a force to carry out missions; deployed forces are those actually at sea.] The old construct, which was a 24-month [maintenance, training and deployment] cycle, we have now expanded to a 27-month cycle. In the old cycle, you were deployed 25 percent of the time. In the FRP, you are now employable about 55 percent of the time.

So the initial challenge of the FRP was to have those deployments back down to the six-month period. As people looked at it, they said, ‘Well, I am going to be gone more often because I can be.’ That is not what has happened. We are still deploying and, after resetting the force after [Operation Enduring Freedom] and [Operation Iraqi Freedom], we are committed to keep [deployments] at six months. But you also now have that additional time where you are employable [if needed].

In what other ways has the fleet begun to get accustomed to the new FRP way of doing business and what challenge has that brought?

Roughead: We are getting the carrier strike groups to a level of readiness in about a 72-day period as opposed to about an 83-day period, and people will feel that stress. Because we are driving to a more ready force sooner, there is compression on the front end in training and in maintenance. There is no question about that. Some of the ships are ready to deploy in a shorter period after they have completed maintenance. We are getting to a level of readiness where those forces are able to surge forward sooner [than in the past].

If the fleet is becoming more combat-ready sooner, how do you know they maintain their high level of readiness if not immediately employed?

Roughead: We had the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier strike group come back from deployment in May 2003, and she stayed in a sustainment period through Jan. 1. We took her and her air wing to sea once for an eight-day period to see if they still were on top of their game, at about the 100-days mark. We used all the same metrics that we use at the beginning of the training period. They had held steady. We monitor key personnel and organizations within the ship-air wing mix to make sure we are not losing a lot of that talent we need to make the [carrier strike group] machine work the way that it needs to work.

How is FRP changing your approaches to training?

Roughead: We are being much more analytical about what we do to prepare forces than we have been in the past. That ultimately comes down to two things: making them as effective as we can, and getting the efficiencies that we require.

Before, we would say, ‘I have a group coming along and this is the recipe that I am going to use to get them ready.’ Now we say, ‘I have a group here. I know things about that group. How can I make them most effective?’ At the end of the day, we will get to higher levels of readiness with less expenditure of resources than we have in the past.

How will Second Fleet work with other U.S. Navy forces bringing the FRP to fruition?

Roughead: Second Fleet and Vice Adm. Michael J. McCabe’s Third Fleet [based at San Diego] are moving forward together with FRP. There is a high likelihood that you will have East and West Coast forces operating more flexibly together. The way that we do things on this coast needs to be reflected on the West Coast, and vice versa. We are very committed to marching down this road together in lock step. … There are different environments on each coast, there are different areas in which we operate, but clearly we must be capable of operating very seamlessly together.

What does the future hold, based on the changes you see coming from the FRP implementation?

Roughead: Quite frankly I don’t know what the future structures and constructs are going to be, but I know that I have seen our Navy improve based on the work of our sailors and young people who go out and take these concepts to sea. We put in place a program and the people who use it will improve it. I see the FRP delivering a capability in a way that is important for today, but I see it as being a process as well. This will evolve in ways that I can’t really foresee now and it will evolve long after I have left the service.

Besides the FRP, what other issues have your attention?

Roughead: The evolution of the expeditionary strike group (ESG) is very important. On the East Coast, we have just finished our first ESG exercise, centered on the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit and the amphibious assault ship, USS Wasp. I believe that putting combatants and submarines, which gives a very versatile and potent strike capability and air defense capability, with our amphibious ships and Marines creates a very powerful force. The Navy is very excited with some of the work we have done in coordinated fires. It is a look into the future.

How is the development of the ESG applicable to some of the new weapons systems coming into the Navy?

Roughead: As you get into things like the acquisition of Tactical Tomahawk, which is the next generation of the Tomahawk cruise missile, the work that we have been doing with planning coordinated fires is a preview of where we are going with that new weapon [capable of loitering in a target area and being redirected to strike additional targets once launched].

The Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), also, without question, is going to be part and parcel of the environment in which the ESGs operate. Clearly, the LCS is going to be a factor in so much of what we do along the world’s coastlines and I believe [it] will be absolutely integral to the FRP process.

How are your training plans within the FRP aligned to take best advantage of emerging capabilities such as LCS and other advanced systems?

Roughead: The type of training we are doing is supportive of the advancements that we will see in systems and ships and aircraft and also in doctrine and procedures. We are spending a great deal of effort on synthetic training and simulation — being able to connect multiple strike groups together to conduct training while in port. This is another area where we are going to see gains in effectiveness and efficiency.

We are able to run problems where the operators and leadership in individual units can experience the conditions they would encounter in the real world, synthetically. Our young people are very comfortable doing that and are very receptive to that kind of training. We are not always taking entire groups to sea anymore, and using the fuel and putting wear and tear on the machinery. There will always be a place for sailors and Marines to take their ships and aircraft out into the environment to practice and experience the conditions that are out there. But I think we can do a lot synthetically that will better prepare them in the long run.