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Navy plans yearlong stay off West Africa

The Navy’s top sailor in Europe said Thursday that the service plans to have a continuous big-deck presence in the Gulf of Guinea for the foreseeable future as part of its Global Fleet Station initiative.

“My aspiration is to have a ship there 365 days a year,” Adm. Harry Ulrich, commander, U.S. Naval Forces Europe and Africa, said after meeting with representatives of several West African nations at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C.

But Ulrich said the final scope of the Navy’s presence there has not been decided.

“This is a pilot,” he said. “The next ship we have go down there might look significantly different, because we have learned so much from this first six-month deployment. It’s going to happen but it’s going to be better.”

Ulrich said the Navy is scheduled to have either a ship or maritime aviation presence in the Gulf of Guinea region for 360 days this year, up from just 12 days in 2004, but he said that many of those days would be spent by smaller ships traveling from port to port, training African maritime personnel during port calls.

“I find that to be very inefficient and not nearly as effective as I would like to be,” Ulrich said. “The idea is to take a different type of ship, in this case a large amphibious ship, load it with more concentrated training teams and focus, laser-like, on building maritime capability and capacity.”

The first amphibious ship to deploy to the Gulf of Guinea is scheduled to arrive in the region this fall and remain there until spring 2008.

The ship, which has not been named, will carry between 200 and 300 trainers in addition to its normal crew, Ulrich said.

Ambassador Peter Chaveas, director of the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, said that it was important that the Navy’s interest in West Africa be perceived as long term.

“One aspect of Africans’ experience with the United States going back decades is that the United States has shown a great tendency to start some great initiatives, and too often the experience is that we are not there five years later,” Chaveas said. “We don’t follow through on it. And so Africans look at these things skeptically with that in mind. It is very, very important ... to keep at this. We have to keep ... making the case that we are in this with them for the longer term.”

Military and civilian representatives from Ghana, Sierra Leone, Senegal and other West African nations listened intently to a presentation but were unavailable for comments afterwards.

The Gulf of Guinea region has drawn increasing attention because it is a major oil supplier that has experienced increasing levels of political instability during the past decade.

West African nations also have struggled to prevent illegal fishing and regional piracy, which now ranks third in the world behind Somalia and Indonesia, according to a statement released by the Navy.