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Interview with LCDR James Drew

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Interview with LCDR James Drew UNCLASSIFIED A project of the Combat Studies Institute, the Operational Leadership Experiences interview collection archives firsthand, multi-service accounts from military personnel who planned, participated in and supported operations in the Global War on Terrorism. Interview with LCDR James Drew Combat Studies Institute Fort Leavenworth, Kansas UNCLASSIFIED Abstract In this interview LCDR James Drew discusses his time in the Navy on board the USS Yorktown and the USS The Sullivans. LCDR Drew was onboard the USS Yorktown in port when the attacks of 9/11 occurred. He describes the mission of the ship immediately following the attacks and how things changed. After being an instructor at the SWO School, LCDR Drew arrives on the USS The Sullivans to serve as the weapons officer and combat systems officer. Serving in this dual-hatted role LCDR James explains the challenges he had and the different tasks the ship performed while deployed to the Mediterranean and Black Seas from 2006 through 2007. LCDR Drew concludes his interview stating that although the Navy has been doing deployments for a long time more attention may need to be paid to the training of its junior officers; that the training which solely rests on the shoulders of the other officers onboard ships could be detracting from the state of readiness of the ship if not managed correctly. UNCLASSIFIED Interview with LCDR James Drew 28 May 2009 JT: My name is Jessica Trussoni (JT) and I'm with the Operational Leadership Experiences Project at the Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. I'm interviewing LCDR James Drew (JD) of the US Navy. Today's date is 28 May 2009 and this is an unclassified interview. Before we begin, if you feel at any time we're entering classified territory, please couch your response in terms that avoid revealing any classified information. If classification requirements prevent you from responding, simply say you're not able to answer. When did you first find out that you would be deploying to Iraq? How long have you served in the Navy? JD: 12 years. JT: How much of that time have you been aboard ship? JD: Probably seven years. JT: Are there any training requirements you must complete prior to being stationed aboard ship and going to sea? JD: Yes. It's changed within the last couple of years but after I got commissioned I was required to attend six months of Surface Warfare Officer (SWO) School at Newport, Rhode Island. In 2004 the Navy changed its training requirements and that requirement was changed to just three weeks of training prior to being stationed on board ship. JT: Is that three-week period adequate time to prepare yourself? JD: What has changed as that the onus of training newly commissioned ensigns falls on the ships more so now than it ever did. I'm sure the Navy as a whole is doing studies as to the effectiveness of it. One of the jobs I held on my most recent ship as the senior watch officer on the USS The Sullivans was to be responsible for training the newly commissioned ensigns. I believe that program was done successfully. There was no major difference between how well those individuals performed at that stage of their career versus someone like me who had six months of preparatory training prior to arriving on board. JT: During those six months of training what sorts of topics did you cover? JD: It was generally an overview of Navy capabilities and limitations. It was broken up into what they called training modules. An example of a training module would be weapons systems where they would describe to the newly commissioned ensigns the capabilities of all the ship classes in the Navy inventory at that time. They would also talk about the communications capabilities the ships had. There was obviously some ship and navigation instruction and different things were stressed like adherence to international rules of the road as far as how the internationally accepted norms for how ships are to behave and interact with each other at sea. JT: For a new ensign boarding a ship for the first time, how long would it take for those same modules to be completed [on board]? Operational Leadership Experiences Project, Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 3 UNCLASSIFIED JD: In large degree that depended on the motivation of the individual. They took a lot of the classroom instruction that I had received when I went through the program in 1998 and made it exportable on CD ROMs that could be forwarded out to the ships. The intent was to cover the same amount of material that a person like me would have gotten six years prior to in a classroom. The standards of it would vary from whatever ship you walked on board. Some folks would say you need to have it done within six months. If you had a highly motivated individual that could get it done in three, there was nothing stopping them from completing those tasks early. If you had someone who wasn't as highly motivated there wasn't anything that stopped them from completing the requirement within nine months. The intent of it is that by your 12-month on board mark you've completed all of the CD ROM training and that you've been deemed worthy of getting your office of the deck letter, which is when the captain trusts the individual to drive the ship without his direct supervision. JT: What period of time were you stationed on the USS Yorktown? JD: I was on board the Yorktown from July 2000 until January 2002. JT: What was your professional position? JD: I was the fire control officer assigned to the combat systems department. All of the missiles on board are surface-to-air missiles and they belonged to me. I was also one of the primary air warfare commander watch standers during my time on board. JT: What did a typical day of yours consist of? JD: We'd get on board the ship about 0600 and would attend officer's call with the executive officer (XO). Your in port routine is devoted to maintenance of weapons systems or radar systems or equipment; that would have been my primary responsibility -- making sure that happened. If and when the ship was underway those duties continued but also you're required to stand a minimum of six to eight hours of watch in any 24-hour period. That could be split between being the officer of the deck -- the person in charge of the safe navigation of the ship -- or as a watch stander in the combat information center where my duties included the air defense of the ship wherever we were transiting to and from. JT: Did you have any staff working for you? JD: Yes. For a time I had three chief petty officers who were my direct subordinates. At the highest peak of manpower we had 32 Sailors that answered to me. JT: In a general sense, what were those enlisted tasks? JD: The enlisted tasks were the care and maintenance of the Spy One radar which is the primary fire control radar on board the Aegis platforms which USS Yorktown was. It's really the central piece of the Aegis weapon system. In addition to that the enlisted also took care of the Mk-99 fire control system which included the four fire control illuminators that the ship uses to engage air targets. Every display system that was in operation in both the bridge and combat information center was a part of their routine maintenance; to make sure they were all up and running. I would think that most of the ships during that time were doing things the same way but I also had several gunners' mates missile technicians that cared for and performed Operational Leadership Experiences Project, Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 4 UNCLASSIFIED maintenance on the Mk-26 missile launching system and any other kind of auxiliary equipment associated with it. That generally was the scope and limit of my division's responsibilities. JT: While out at sea were you able to conduct any exercises? JT: On board the Yorktown, which was stationed in Pascagoula, Mississippi while that base was still open -- Hurricane Katrina basically shut that operation down -- however, when I was down there in 2000 through 2002 we would have primarily been tasked with doing counterdrug deployments in South and Central America. As it turned out we had some maintenance problems with both our sonar dome which had a tear and we were required to spend about seven months in the shipyard in Mobile, Alabama. As such our deployment got moved to a time after I had transferred off the ship. On board the Yorktown we didn't do any far reaching deployments while I was on board. The one real operational thing we were involved in that had any significance was immediately after 9/11 when many of the ships in Pascagoula, Mayport, Florida, Norfolk, or San Diego had to immediately sortie to who knows what to protect the homeland from another attack by terrorists. JT: Was the ship still in port once the attack occurred on 9/11? JD: Yes. We were actually preparing for a visit by the Board of Inspection and Survey, which is a routine assessment that's conducted during the life cycle of the ship; it's supposed to be done every five years. We were in port during that time and within a couple of days we had to obviously pack up shop ashore and go out into the Gulf of Mexico and a little bit to the east coast of Florida to enforce the grounding of all civilian air traffic that was inbound to the US or over flying the US.
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