‘As soon as Tampa came we had to put in place a plan to prevent any more boats getting through so that took a good third of the operational navy up on the northwest coast,’ Ritchie says. ‘Then 10 days later 9/11 happens and everybody is wandering around saying, “Well, what are we going to do?”’
For every senior Australian military officer, the combination of Tampa and 9/11 triggered the most hectic period since Vietnam. With the navy fully occupied on border protection operations, Ritchie and his team expected the Americans to request the usual contribution from Australia in the form of SASR troops, RAAF Boeing 707 aerial tankers, P-3 Orion maritime surveillance aircraft, C-130 Hercules cargo planes and a frigate or two. But the Americans asked for more.
‘They said, “Well, we want you to send F-18s to Diego Garcia,” and we thought, “What for? What are we going to do in Diego Garcia?” “Well, we’re going to shoot down aeroplanes that approach Diego Garcia.” And we did send planes there,’ he says.
So, on 9 November 2001, four F/A-18 Hornet fighters from 77 Squadron took off from RAAF base Richmond bound for the highly strategic Indian Ocean atoll of Diego Garcia.
Visiting Diego is a surreal experience. Even when in transit on board military flights (civilian flights are banned) we were warned against wandering away from the rudimentary terminal facility and barred from taking any photographs. Apart from the strict security measures, it is difficult to grasp that this tiny British territory in the middle of nowhere is a major military facility and that during the Cold War it was a vital staging point for nuclear-armed US strategic bombers in the event of a major conflict. There have also been numerous unconfirmed reports that the atoll was used to ‘render’ prisoners in the aftermath of 9/11 before the establishment of the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.
The deployment of Australian jets was the first time RAAF fighters had been sent on operations overseas since the Korean War, and many people inside and outside Canberra were perplexed, given the lack of enemy aircraft that were capable of striking the remote outpost.
‘Nobody came so they didn’t shoot anybody down,’ Ritchie says drily.
The frigate HMAS Anzac had been on station in the Gulf as part of the blockade against Iraq when 9/11 happened. She was replaced in November 2001 by the first task group under Operation Slipper. By coincidence, Anzac was back on duty in the Gulf in 2003 for the US-led invasion of Iraq. On 20 March, she became the first Australian warship since the Vietnam War to fire on land-based targets when she shelled Iraqi positions during the capture of the town of Al Faw by British commandos.
Anzac has so far made four trips to the region, and the twenty-three-year-old ship’s experience – and that of the other nineteen warships to have served there – reinforced the view of many that the navy must be equipped with capable, multi-role, war-fighting ships.
The Maritime Commander during Operations Damask 1 and 2, retired Rear Admiral Ken Doolan, told the 2003 Sea Power Centre conference that the crux of the RAN’s Middle East deployments was that Australia could only make a meaningful contribution because it had warships that could ‘take the fight to the enemy, defend themselves and win’.
Doolan, who went on to become the national president of the RSL, argued that the operations in the Gulf had finally put to bed the post-Vietnam doctrine of ‘low level contingencies’ being spruiked by some bureaucrats and academics.
‘It would be the most abject folly for the ADF to ever again flirt with the ideas of those who contend that a force equipped and trained primarily for low-level contingencies could be effective,’ Doolan warned.
Thirteen years later, he stands firmly behind his claim and as Darwin steams away from the east coast of Africa in May 2016 it is clear that the ‘war fighting’ doctrine is here to stay.
3
At the captain’s table
It is the second day of Darwin’s new patrol. Everything is quiet as the frigate steams steadily eastwards and the ship’s helicopter Orko is aloft for its first sortie on the hunt for suspicious vessels.
My day begins with a welcome cup of fresh Tanzanian coffee at 6 a.m. before I climb up to the wardroom for a hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs with the ship’s officers. The CO is not allowed to eat in the wardroom unless invited by the mess, so Phill Henry takes his breakfast, and most other meals during the six-month deployment, in his cabin.
Positioned just below and behind the bridge and adjacent to the armour-plated operations room, the tiny cabin is a sanctuary for the man or woman who has the lives and welfare of some 230 souls and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of military hardware in his or her hands.
A quiet haven where big decisions – including occasional judgements about life and death – are contemplated, made and mulled over, it can also be a place of inner turmoil where the buck finally stops. Many of the calls that a ship’s captain has to make are not taught at command school or included in the pre-deployment briefing pack. Each Middle East mission throws up unique leadership challenges.
According to the most experienced sailors, there are broadly two types of commanding officers in the navy – those who spend most of the time in their cabin or the ops room focused on the big picture, and those who, as well as doing that, also make time to interact with their crew. These skippers are generally more popular below decks.
Commander Henry falls into the latter category. During the warship’s two-week patrol from Tanzania to the Seychelles he pops up all over the vessel. From serving meals and washing dishes in the sailors’ mess to having a coffee in the petty officers’ mess, Phill Henry, a bank manager’s son, is closely engaged with his crew.
I sit down with him for a cup of tea and chocolate biscuits at his small dining table, and he explains what the mission is, where Darwin will be operating and that she will be working closely with the French navy in the waters between Africa and the Seychelles. Prime targets will be fishing or cargo dhows suspected of smuggling illicit drugs or weapons along what is known as the smack track between the sub-continent and East Africa.
Compared with the cramped junior sailors’ mess three decks below, the CO’s cabin on a guided missile frigate feels quite luxurious. It consists of a small entrance corridor leading into a three-by-four-metre room that serves as an office, dining room and sleeping quarters, with a cramped ensuite bathroom off it. The cabin contains the dining table, a desk and shelves that house a computer, numerous family photos and other personal items and a sofa which folds out into a bed that receives only limited use during patrols. A porthole provides some natural light and a glimpse of the outside world – mostly sea and sky. Beyond the entrance is a small galley where the chief steward, Leading Seaman Anne ‘Becks’ Becker, organises meals for the boss and his guests. Most of the time that is just a single plate for the captain.
After dinner, the skipper’s cabin quickly fills with bodies for the daily heads of department briefing. It is also the venue for operations and command briefings, when up to a dozen people cram inside for the short, sharp gatherings. Intelligence and other sensitive briefings take place in the more secure ops room, where all mobile phones and cameras are banned.
Henry grew up in Dunedin and moved to Christchurch during his teenage years. There he became an apprentice refrigeration engineer and joined the Royal New Zealand Navy Reserves as an engineer sailor.
‘I made it to the dizzy heights of Able Seaman Engineer,’ he says.
After completing his apprenticeship and working for a year or so in the meat industry, he left to join the navy full time as a seaman officer. There he stayed for thirteen and a half years, following a fairly common path as officer of the watch and then navigator.
‘The first time I came to the Persian Gulf was in 95–96 as the navigator in HMNZS Wellington, doing the blockade of Iraq operations,’ he says. He also saw service in Bougainville and became Operations Officer in the frigate HMNZ Canterbury, serving in East Timor. Crossing the ditch in 2001 on an exchange with the RAN, he served in two Anza
c Class frigates – HMAS Arunta and then HMAS Stuart. Towards the end of the exchange he decided he join the RAN.
There was no single reason. ‘It was quite a lot of just little reasons. I could see the way that it looked like the New Zealand navy was going at the time, with a reduction in the number of frigates from four to two, a focus on inshore patrol craft and OPVs [offshore patrol vessels] as opposed to a lot of MFUs [major fleet units/big warships] and global operations. They still do the global operations with two ships but there was more opportunity, not only in serving in the RAN but more opportunity in Australia at the time.’
The ginger-haired officer also needed a break after more than thirteen years’ solid time at sea. His first marriage had broken down and his former wife had returned to New Zealand, so he took six months off before starting work with the Australian navy.
Once he had joined, he served in the Anzac Class frigate HMAS Anzac before moving to the fleet base in Sydney as maritime operations coordinator. Then it was on to postings as XO in two guided missile frigates, HMAS Melbourne and then HMAS Adelaide. From there he moved upwards, including a year at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra commanding a squadron of second-year cadets.
‘It was a year where I felt I was giving back, to be able to help with the training and the shaping of a lot of what would be the junior officers across all three services,’ he reflects.
After filling in as XO in the tanker HMAS Sirius for six months, he headed to Bahrain in 2014 for eight months with the Maritime Operations Support Group, the official name for the Australian contingent to the Combined Maritime Forces. The Australians worked closely on the planning for operations there.
‘At the time, we had Melbourne and Darwin [in the area] and then transitioned to Toowoomba while I was in the headquarters. That was a great experience – working alongside thirty other countries in a united effort to beat smuggling and the anti-piracy operations and [working to keep] the stability in the Gulf under [Combined Task Force] 152.’
Returning to Australia, he took command of Darwin in June 2015 from the previous skipper, Commander Terry Morrison.
Ensuring that a ship is ready and capable to return to the Middle East Region is a huge undertaking with strict procedures. After its 2014 deployment, the frigate, which has clocked about 1.2 million nautical miles (2.2 million kilometres), had spent several months in a major maintenance period before moving into her ‘system qualifying trial’ in May 2015. That is a long and challenging process.
‘We make sure all the weapon systems, predominantly, are working as they’re supposed to do – so lots of air tracking of targets and firing the weapons systems,’ Henry explains. ‘That’s generally anywhere from three to five weeks. We also do a couple of aviation training-week periods with the squadrons at Nowra and use a ship that’s basically dedicated to them, to do the landing and take-offs from the deck so that they are progressing the qualifications of the pilots.’
After that they rolled into a ‘unit ready workup’ with Sea Training Group, known as the ‘green team’.
‘They come on board and, progressively over five weeks, make sure that the ship and its people are confident in all aspects of maritime operations,’ Henry says. ‘It’s a very busy period – the ship sails at eight o’clock Monday morning out of Sydney, doesn’t get back until four or five o’clock Friday afternoon, and it is put through its paces the whole time. It is a rewarding day when the head sea trainer says, “You’ve passed.” And this ship’s company did really well – we passed with nothing outstanding across all avenues. [Jason O’Gorman] and I looked at each other going, “Thank Christ it’s over.”’
He says the achievement belongs to more than the ship’s company. ‘It’s the Sea Training Group that helped train us to that standard and the support of people at fleet base that kept the ship running while we were out there doing it – you know, we wouldn’t have gone to sea on Monday morning if stores people and support people and Thales contractors hadn’t worked over the weekend to get the ship ready.’
Then came a further eight weeks of maintenance to add all the systems and self-protection measures needed for the Middle East, as well as to certify the engineering systems to enable her to sail for a long period and remain seaworthy. During this time, specialists from maintenance contractors Thales and BAE Systems swarmed over the ship under a special contract known as the ‘FFG Enterprise’ agreement.
Unlike past contracts, where blame shifting took centre stage, the ‘enterprise’ approach focuses on the problem and how to fix it in a fast and cost-effective manner, ensuring that Darwin’s 100 per cent availability record will be maintained during seven months of hard running.
By November 2015, Darwin was ready for her ‘mission readiness workup’.
‘That was three weeks again with our favourite people at Sea Training Group, doing the training required specifically to come up here – the boarding operations, the increased potential for a tense environment, particularly when transiting in an area where it could quickly go wrong,’ says Henry. ‘You know, in the Gulf of Aden at the moment there’s all the operations around Yemen. There have been tensions between the coalition and Iran throughout the Strait of Hormuz for a long time. We’re not planning for anything to go wrong, but you’ve got to be ready if someone miscalculates, and I believe that our training was at the right level.’
The proof has already been evident on this tour. ‘Our operations, where we’ve had interactions with Iranian Navy and the IRGCN [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy], which is the religious side of the military, have been very professional. A couple of times it got a little bit tense but very professional.’
That ‘little bit’ of tension included a dangerous game of chicken played by several Iranian skiffs during the ship’s transit through the strait. Luckily, it did not erupt into a full-blown incident that could have become a disaster.
‘We were ready to match [them],’ Henry says. ‘But they acted not in an unsafe manner. So we were well prepared.’
Each Australian warship deployed to the Gulf region steams from its home base bristling with the best weaponry and equipment that money can buy.
For a civilian fresh from an operations briefing in the ops room, a guided tour of Darwin’s weapons and fire control compartments with the fire control and weapons chief, Chief Petty Officer William ‘Eddy’ Edmondson, is a mind-boggling and sobering experience. After several costly upgrades, the frigate is a lethal fighting ship equipped with millions of dollars worth of state-of-the-art computerised missile and self-defence systems integrated into her three-decades-old framework.
The three missile systems are the SM-2, Harpoon and evolved Sea Sparrow. They, along with the US-made Phalanx Close-in Weapon System (or CIWS, pronounced ‘Sea Whiz’) and the Italian-made Mark 75 OTO Melara 76-millimetre rapid-fire gun, must all be tested and maintained to the highest levels, ready to swing into action at a moment’s notice. So must the six Mark 32 torpedo tubes and a raft of radars, sonars and command-and-control units.
In Darwin that responsibility falls to WEEO Lieutenant Commander Jason O’Gorman and his team of specialist ‘greenies’ – the electrical branch of the navy. Darwin’s greenies are led by Eddy Edmondson, and the combat systems chief, Chief Petty Officer Darren ‘Swampy’ Marshall. They supervise teams of specialists that include electronics and weapons technicians, as well as ‘gun busters’, or gun maintainers.
Inside the large magazine, immediately below the gun deck, dozens of sixty-three-centimetre-long, seventy-six-millimetre-calibre (diameter) shells are stacked neatly in racks waiting to be loaded into the rotating magazine and fed into the main gun’s automatic loading system.
The menacing seventy-six-millimetre gun is mounted amidships just forward of the exhaust stacks. It can hurl 6.3-kilogram shells up to forty kilometres at a rate of 120 every minute. The high rate of fire with pinpoint accuracy, combined with specialised ammunition, means it can be used for a variety of tasks,
including anti-aircraft, point or self-defence and ground support. It is difficult to imagine what a Somali pirate in a small skiff armed with an AK-47 assault rifle would make of such awesome firepower.
The CIWS uses a radar-guided, twenty-millimetre swivelling Gatling gun to protect the ship from incoming missiles. It can let rip at up to 4500 rounds a minute. This is a vital piece of equipment because modern sea-skimming supersonic missiles can take as little as thirty seconds from detection on the horizon to impact. After identifying a target’s bearing, range, velocity, heading and altitude, the CIWS tracks the outgoing rounds electronically and ‘walks’ them on to the target.
Also under Edmondson’s purview are the Harpoon and SM-2 anti-ship missiles, as well as the evolved Sea Sparrow anti-missile system. The Harpoon and SM-2 are fired from the Mark 13 rotating missile launcher fitted forward of the bridge and next to the Mark 41 vertical canisters for the Sea Sparrows, which are located towards the bow of the ship adjacent to the toilet paper storage cupboard. This is the same ‘canister and cell’ system seen regularly on TV images during the 2003 Iraq War, when coalition ships in the Gulf launched Tomahawk cruise missiles against targets in Iraq, and in April 2017 against Syria from ships in the Mediterranean Sea.
The powerful arsenal is linked to radars and fire control systems overseen by ‘Swampy’ Marshall and his combat system technicians. Marshall’s domain includes the brains of the set-up, the Mk 92 guided-missile fire-control system and its combined antennae system that is housed in an egg-shaped dome on the superstructure. This allows the ship’s weapons to track and engage targets, as does the AN/SPS-49 long-range air search radar that can pick up incoming air threats from 470 kilometres away and up to an altitude of 46,000 metres.
The combat systems also include the state-of-the-art retrofitted Mine and Obstacle Avoidance Sonar. The transducer, located under the hull at the forward end of the ship, can detect sea mines and other obstacles, map the seabed and even track submarines. It automatically locks onto a target and displays how fast and how deep it is and where it is heading. The frigate is further equipped with hull-mounted and towed anti-submarine sonars, and its ‘B’ model Seahawk helicopter is also fitted with the latest ‘dipping’ sonar to hunt for submarines. The effectiveness of this kit was later demonstrated during my flight on the ship’s helicopter.
The Smack Track Page 4