July 9, 2004
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States' largest naval exercise in decades, involving the deployment around the globe of seven of the Navy's 12 carrier battle groups, is not designed to send political signals to potential enemies, a senior Navy officer said Thursday.
"We're demonstrating to ourselves as much as to anybody else" what the Navy is capable of in times of crisis, said Rear Adm. John D. Stufflebeem, the Navy's chief of plans and operations.
"If others on the other side of a curtain will want to take lessons from that, I think that's advantageous," he said in an interview with a small group of reporters at the Pentagon.
U.S. allies in Europe and elsewhere will feel reassured by the exercise, Stufflebeem said.
The exercise, dubbed Summer Pulse '04, is the first test of the Navy's new approach to managing its combat readiness.
The Navy is abandoning its traditional approach of regularly scheduled, six-month deployments and instead will have ships and sailors prepared to go as world events demand.
The Navy wants to be able to send six carrier battle groups in less than 30 days to handle crises anywhere in the world, with two additional carrier groups ready to sail within three months.
The only carrier that is permanently based abroad is the USS Kitty Hawk, at Yokosuka, Japan.
The Summer Pulse '04 exercise will include the areas of responsibility of all five regional U.S. warfighting commands: the Pacific, European, Southern, Central and Northern regions.
Stufflebeem, who began his Navy career as a reservist in 1969 and is a 1975 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, said this is the first time in his career that the Navy has had as many as seven carriers deployed on an exercise around the globe. The previous high number, he said, was three.
During the initial stages of the Iraq war in 2003 the Navy had seven carriers operating in and around the Persian Gulf.
The carriers involved in Summer Pulse '04 are the USS John C. Stennis, the USS George Washington, the USS John F. Kennedy, the USS Harry S. Truman, the USS Enterprise, and USS Ronald Reagan, and the Kitty Hawk.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/07/08/navy.exercise.ap/index.html