5th Fleet Focus: Knowing Which Ships To Observe

You have to hand it to the Navy, the USS Oak Hill (LSD 51) gets new orders, and the ship gets a new website. We haven't seen anything online yet, but the USS Oak Hill (LSD 51) supposedly departs today for the 5th Fleet to replace the USS Whidbey Island (LSD 41) whose 6 month tour is coming to an end.

While it is commonplace for those who read the Navy tea leaves that talk about the deployments of the big strike groups and what it might mean for someones political agenda, this blog continues to observe the deployment of the amphibious ships to the 5th Fleet theater of operations as the most important and interesting so far this century, deployments that strike to the purpose of a peacetime Navy. We observe that if an officer or sailor wants to be on the front line of the action of the surface fleet in the US Navy today, serving on a LSD in the Atlantic fleet continues to be the most likely place to get combat experience at sea.

Prior to the launching of Tomahawks by a submarine recently, the previous two naval ships to fire weapons at a hostile was the USS Carter Hall (LSD 50) at pirates off Somalia and USS Whidbey Island (LSD 41) in the Strait of Hormuz at some idiot acting aggressively. We wish good luck to CDR Heidi Agle and her crew as they head into the 5th Fleet region, based on the history of these types of deployments, the USS Oak Hill (LSD 51) is the ship most likely to make a positive impact to commercial traffic off east Africa in the next 6 months, and the ship most likely to engage in a firefight in the next 6 months. In other words, the ship is most representative of the scope of roles as outlined in the Maritime Strategy.

In our book, that makes the USS Oak Hill (LSD 51) deployment the most interesting to watch for the next 6 months of 2008.