‘I know the humanitarian assistance–disaster relief capabilities of a DDG.” I have forgotten the name of the officer who e-mailed this sentence to me. Those words could have been written by any one of thousands of U.S. Navy officers. I bear him no ill will—but he was wrong.
On 13 January 2010, our ship, the USS Higgins (DDG-76) was making best speed for Haiti. We had been tasked to provide humanitarian assistance–disaster relief (HA/DR) to that country following the earthquake of 12 January. As the name “destroyer” implies, the Flight II DDGs were not designed or constructed with humanitarian missions in mind. They were built to be a sword, not a plowshare. As such, the single briefing-slide answer to HA/DR capabilities includes a lot of white space, with water production and helicopter refueling as the major competencies. My fellow naval officer and I were engaged in an e-mail conversation as to what our tasking would be once we arrived on station. In the event, we proceeded to our assigned station to the west of Gonâve Island, approximately 75 miles from Port-au-Prince.
Are We Relevant, or an ‘Optic’?
One of the universal truths the Naval War College teaches is that the Army and the Marine Corps equip the man, while the Air Force and the Navy man the equipment. This observation, of the Navy at least, is spot-on. While we recognize that our equipment is useless without Sailors, we still largely measure the value of Sailors in terms of maintaining and operating equipment. Naval professionals quantify and qualify orders of battle based on the weapon systems carried, not on the Sailors involved or the leadership under which they operate.
When it comes to HA/DR, helicopters and landing craft are the most prized equipment. Having neither in this case, we were left to determine how to make ourselves relevant to the fight or to relegate ourselves to the status of mere “optic,” to use the current public-relations term. We chose the former.
Being a typical U.S. Navy ship, we were manned by a crew of varied backgrounds and talent. Two were native Haitians. The navigator was not only an emergency medical technician, but he also directed a student-run ambulance service during his college days at Tulane University. He was doing so when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, so he had significant experience on the ground performing HA/DR. These skills do not lend themselves to concise bullet points, nor are the proficiences of the Higgins’ crew the same as those of the crews in other Navy ships; however, every ship has Sailors whose talents and training lend themselves to helping disaster victims.
Service members in general desire to make a difference and to be part of something greater than themselves. Certainly this urge is not present in equal measure in all, but few lack a spark of passion for contributing to the greater good and relieving suffering where possible. As Captain Dominic DeScisciolo, commanding officer of the USS Bunker Hill (CG-52), said when he was on station off Haiti, “I have 309 Sailors who would dig latrines with plastic spoons if they thought it would help the Haitian people.”
But the best quality Sailors bring to any fight is resourcefulness. It is an attribute developed by virtue of the environment in which they live. The isolation and self-containment of a ship at sea develops in them the ability to assess a challenge and quickly devise and implement a solution. It’s what they do every day.
First U.S. On-Site Support
Killick Coast Guard Station lies west of the main port facility in Port-au-Prince. Two U.S. Coast Guard cutters, the Tahoma (WMEC-908) and the Mohawk (WMEC-913) anchored off Killick the day after the earthquake and established a makeshift medical treatment and evacuation facility at the base. As Killick had no helicopter landing area at the time, patients who needed to be evacuated were taken by small boat to a cutter. A helicopter would land on the cutter; patients would be loaded onto the aircraft and then transported to a functional Haitian hospital.
After arriving on station, the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70) began sending medical teams to Killick. The teams needed a place stop overnight, and this is how we entered the fray onshore. With no beds available on the cutters, we offered to host one of the teams on board the Higgins for the night and to deliver their replacements to Killick the next day by small boat. When we sent the medical team to the station, we included a corpsman and our two Haitian crewmembers as translators. I also instructed the boat officer to help. That afternoon, our boat crew transported eight patients from Killick to the cutters, where they were transferred to helicopters for evacuation.
The following day, in addition to the Creole speakers and a corpsman, we sent ashore several Sailors with more specialized first-aid training, along with the executive officer, the weapons officer, and the command master chief to provide leadership and offer assistance.
As fortune would have it, the USS Gunston Hall (LSD-44) a dock landing ship bound for the west coast of Africa with the Africa Partnership Station (APS) team, was joining the fight in force at Killick. On paper, an LSD is a superb HA/DR platform. It has ample storage capacity for relief supplies and a large flight deck, and its heavy lift boats can transport a great deal of material and patients between ship and shore. These ships also have personnel equipped to deal with numerous casualties. The APS team proved particularly valuable, as their multinational officers and nongovernmental organization specialists were able to draw on UN peacekeeper ground transportation capacity and increase the Haitians’ involvement.
With Gunston Hall Sailors, Higgins officers and crew cleared a field to open a helicopter landing zone at Killick. They administered basic medical care and bore stretchers. The Higgins command master chief—a fire controlman by trade—was, for much of the day, placed in charge of determining which patients were to be transported by medevac. The on-shore team judged that it was a successful day and that we could do more.
That evening, back on board the ship, the XO, weapons officer, command master chief, and I huddled over the XO’s hand-drawn map of Killick. It had become apparent to all on shore that the ad hoc medical facility needed to be restructured to improve patient flow. A U.S. Army mobile surgical team had arrived, and its surgical tent had become the centerpiece of the operation. The tent served its purpose; however, a room in one of the base buildings, which had electricity from the local power grid as well as air conditioning, was available to be transformed into an operating room. A plan had been roughed out on shore by the surgical team, the APS leadership, and others to restructure the camp without disrupting patient care. The Gunston Hall had been tasked to deliver supplies to an area west of Port-au-Prince, so the available labor pool was more than cut in half.
We sent four dozen Sailors ashore the next day to carry out the restructuring while ensuring that patient care could continue. The designated operating theater was scrubbed and equipment installed as it became available. By the end of the day, surgery was being performed there. Sailors with more training gave rudimentary medical care, and others kept up the flow of patients carried to the helicopter landing zone. Truckloads of medical supplies were offloaded. In short, whatever was necessary was being done to make the medical facility operate, and operate more efficiently.
The following day, our tasking was changed. We didn’t put Sailors ashore for three days. However, the Gunston Hall had returned with bells on, and the USS Underwood (FFG-36) was anchored off Port-au-Prince refueling helicopters on a nearly continuous basis and sending Sailors to Killick as well. When we returned to the base for what would be our final day on station, we sent a dozen Sailors to assist. Two of them, qualified forklift operators cleared out a warehouse, which was later used to store non-food supplies provided by the Mexican and Colombian navies.
Meanwhile, the Bunker Hill Sailors were meeting the human needs of Haitians on Gonâve Island and the area to the west of Port-au-Prince. Along with Sailors from the USS Normandy (CG-60), they landed at villages along the coast, assessed earthquake damage and disruption, then set about doing what they could, fixing village wells or calling in relief supplies.
Is HA/DR a Core Competency?
When one weighs these efforts against the magnitude of the physical destruction and human suffering the earthquake wrought, one is tempted to ask, “Did we make a difference, and would what happened in Haiti be applicable anywhere else?” These are valid questions. The answer to the first is that we made a difference to those we helped, and the answer to the second is that the Navy can apply lessons from its work in Haiti to execute A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower more effectively.
Even a cursory perusal of the maritime strategy indicates that we are trying to cover a wide array of endeavors with our maritime forces; however, at its core lies the mandate to be prepared to fight and win wars—to conduct prompt and sustained combat operations at sea in support of national interests as directed by Congress in the U.S. Code, Title 10: Armed Forces. The strategy further recognizes what is arguably the greatest challenge the Navy faces, which is that of time–space–force. Interacting with a regional adversary in time to influence the outcome of teetering events requires forward-deployed forces, and those forces need to pack a wallop.
A short paragraph buried three-quarters into the strategy states that HA/DR is indeed a core competency. It specifically touches on “deliberate, proactive” mitigation of human suffering, noncombatant evacuation and “. . . response to crises. Human suffering moves us to act, and the expeditionary character of maritime forces uniquely positions them to provide assistance.”
From this stems the inescapable conclusion that with a global force focused on providing credible combat power, when disasters occur, the first U.S. naval force to arrive on scene may not be the best force for the job. Such was the case in Haiti, where the closest U.S. Navy unit was the Higgins, a DDG returning home from a deployment to the eastern Mediterranean, where our primary mission was to provide ballistic-missile defense.
The disaster occurred relatively close to considerable naval force concentrations in Florida and Virginia, and the Caribbean Sea is an area of significant interagency cooperation in counter-drug-smuggling efforts. But we cannot always count on such ready support for relief operations. In the future it will likely be days if not weeks before the most capable HA/DR platforms arrive to influence the outcome of the humanitarian crisis.
We must consider what the U.S. Navy can do with a suboptimal force that is alone and unafraid at the point of humanitarian need. Here we need to return to the idea of the “optic.” Is it enough to have a ship on-station to provide an optic for press purposes, while more capable forces make their way to the scene? It is not. Setting aside the moral implications of parking a ship off the coast of a disaster-struck land simply for the purpose of issuing a press release, being a “Global Force for Good” must entail active endeavors to meet humanitarian need. The on-scene force should be engaged in easing human suffering as well as implementing the efficient insertion of other forces as they arrive.
In Haiti, the U.S. Coast Guard best demonstrated how our nation’s maritime forces should approach such a situation. The good achieved was accomplished because personnel from the Mohawk and Tahoma responded by anchoring their ships deep in Port-au-Prince Bay and establishing a clinic on shore and a medical evacuation process for the most seriously injured.
The maritime strategy’s final section is devoted to implementation. As one would expect, it includes a significant discussion of equipment—weapon systems and sensors—and improvements to these systems and their interoperability with our partners. But it also devotes passages to preparing our people. “Maritime forces will normally operate in a less concentrated manner than they do today, and junior leaders will be entrusted with a higher level of responsibility and authority for carrying out important aspects of strategically important missions.” Fine words, but for a service focused on manning the equipment, this will launch us out of our collective comfort zone.
For the staffs controlling our widely dispersed combat forces, that means allowing the on-scene commander to determine the HA/DR capability of the forces based on the disaster at hand and the capabilities of the service members in the on-scene units. That is not to say that the operational commanders should simply make do. As one who was on scene watching forces arrive and engage, I think the force flow into Haiti in the days following the earthquake was masterful. This, too, is an area in which we can build on lessons learned.
As we proceed to execute our cooperative strategy, we would do well to remember the direction that Vice Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson gave his commanders prior to the Battle of Trafalgar. “In case signals can neither be seen nor perfectly understood, no captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of an enemy.” That is a superb tactic, whether the enemy compelling us to act is a fleet of warships or human suffering.