Navy officials on Tuesday began to open up about the lessons they are learning from the months of sustained combat in the Red Sea against Houthi forces in Yemen, including how the service shot down its own jet last month.
The four top leaders of the Navy’s ship and aviation communities told a large crowd of mostly other military officers at a conference in Arlington, Virginia, that one of their key takeaways has been a push for accountability, transparency and rapid learning. However, the public remarks didn’t reveal much about tactics or the danger ships face.
Vice Adm. Daniel Cheever, the service’s top aviation official, told reporters that the push for rapid learning meant that Navy officials have already done “a big debrief, basically, to make sure we know what happened and why” in the friendly fire incident involving the USS Gettysburg and a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet.
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“There are multiple different investigations to make sure we learn. … Those investigations don’t stop us at the tactical level from learning everything and training and changing our training to make sure that never happens again,” Cheever added.
The conflict has been ongoing since October 2023 when the destroyer USS Carney first repelled a Houthi barrage of missiles and drones. Since then, Navy ships in the area have been engaged in a steady stream of strikes against the Houthis as well as defensive measures against missiles and drones, and at least seven have been awarded the prestigious Combat Action Ribbon.
Speaking more broadly, the admirals on the panel stressed that the Navy’s surface warfare community, the group of sailors who man and sail the service’s ships, has begun to embrace the idea of reviewing training and real world data, or “the tape,” to learn and improve.
“I see this cultural shift of ’embracing the tape’ and aligning to our aviation community as the single most important thing we’ve done as a community in the last 20 years,” Rear Adm. Joseph Cahill, the head of Naval Surface Force Atlantic, told the conference.
The officials said that this rapid turnaround of data from units deployed to the Red Sea to the ships getting ready to deploy is critical because the threats and tactics are constantly changing and evolving.
Cheever noted that a Navy helicopter, an MH-60R Sea Hawk, recently shot down a drone in a likely first for the platform.
Very early in the Red Sea conflict, a Navy destroyer also managed to shoot down some combination of drones or missiles with its 5-inch deck gun — another unorthodox tactic.
The Navy’s commander of surface forces, Vice Adm. Brendan McLane, told the conference that tactics instructors are now able to get data from forward-deployed ships within hours or days.
“The learning that we do together continues at the speed of every engagement, and every event is another opportunity for us to assess, learn and improve together as a force of complete transparency,” McLane said.
However, that transparency seems to be limited to just inside the Navy.
The sea service has been very tight-lipped publicly about what its ships are actually doing, firing, or being threatened with while deployed to the Red Sea. While some Navy officials have cited the need for operational security as the reason for the silence, that secrecy has often continued long after the ships in question have returned home.
Ships in the area have faced serious danger, including one incident in which a missile came within a mile of a U.S. destroyer before being shot down by a last-line-of-defense gun system.
Meanwhile, the result of studying the conflict, according to the admirals, is not only a faster ability to develop tactics to counter new threats, but future strike groups that will be deployed to the area are able to do their workup training on the most recent scenarios and updated information.
“Right now, the Nimitz strike group and the Ford strike group are preparing to go and are being trained with everything that [Cahill] talked about — they’re all being trained to the fight,” Cheever said.
“The fight will change — the learning has to adapt,” Cheever added.
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