Concerning Admiral Clingan.
The Navy is busier than snot-but good guy or bad-Admiral Clingan and the rest of the flag leadership are guilty of crossing a line that never should have been crossed in the first decade of the 21’st century. He is now in a position where he sanctions ships and squadrons and individual Sailors staying deployed longer than six months.
The Navy has come full circle. In the 1970’s and the early 1980’s-the Navy I came into would extend a deployment at the drop of a hat. Thus-I had the “privlege” of spending an additional six weeks on Satan’s Flagship (CV-666) boring holes in the Indian Ocean, while they decided it was “safe” to transit the Suez Canal after Sadat’s assassination. ( Apartheid or no-a port visit in Capetown would have been OK with me).
Then in the mid 1980’s the Navy woke up to the damage the long deployments cause-and by the end of the decade, PERSTEMPO was something the Navy actually took seriously. It took a decision by the Chairman of the JCS himself to extend a carrier battlegroup-and it better be for only the best of reasons. We pretty much held to that through the 90’s.
Then along came Uncle Vern.
Deployments of 8, 9, even 11 months became suddenly acceptable. War on terror and all that, you know. Gotta make sure those brand spanking newe F-18 E’s and F’s get into the fight.
If the Navy wants someone to blame for its increased OPTEMPO-it needs to look in a mirror. The decisions acquiesced to by the leadership-of which I was once a part, have created as much of our problems as anything else.
And now Clingan is a part of that continuing trend-whether he admits it or not. The only service to stand up to the Rumsfeld machine on deployment lengths was the Marines. They held to 7 month deployments and told the SECDEF they cannot and would not become the Army.
They had the right idea.
The Navy, sad to say, lacked the cajones to say the same.