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Pacific Fleet to get new commander Friday

SAN DIEGO — The Navy’s top fleet command in the Pacific region is changing hands Friday in Hawaii.

Adm. Patrick Walsh will take command of the U.S. Pacific Fleet from Adm. Robert Willard, who has been tapped to replace retiring Adm. Timothy Keating as head of U.S. Pacific Command, based just a few miles away at Camp H.M. Smith.

The morning ceremony is planned at Kilo Pier at Pearl Harbor, with the World War II memorials for the sunken battleships Arizona and Missouri as the backdrop. The Pacific Fleet command is the Navy’s largest, covering more than half the Earth’s surface, from the coast of southern Africa to the eastern Pacific, and it includes about 180 ships, 1,500 aircraft and 125,000 sailors and Marines.

Walsh follows a similar path as Willard, who was vice chief of naval operations at the Pentagon before taking the Pacific Fleet helm.

Willard, a 1973 graduate of the Naval Academy, trained as an F-14 Tomcat pilot and served as executive officer of Navy Fighter Weapons School, aka Top Gun, and commanded Fighter Squadron 51. He later commanded the nuclear powered carrier Abraham Lincoln and amphibious assault ship Tripoli, and went on to command Carrier Group 5 aboard the now-retired conventional carrier Kitty Hawk and U.S. 7th Fleet in Japan.

Walsh, who graduated from the Naval Academy in 1977, trained as an A-7 Corsair pilot and transitioned to the F/A-18. He flew with the “Blue Angels,” the Navy Flight Demonstration Squadron, and later flew combat missions off the carrier Theodore Roosevelt during the Persian Gulf War. Over his career, he commanded Strike Fighter Squadron 105, Carrier Air Wing 11 and Carrier Group 7 aboard the carrier John C. Stennis, and went on to command U.S. Naval Forces-Central Command and U.S. 5th Fleet.