U.S. destroyer escorts British carrier - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

U.S. destroyer escorts British carrier

ABOARD THE HMS ARK ROYAL — The voice from the bridge crackled over the 1MC: This 22,000-ton aircraft carrier, the flagship of the Royal Navy, would be threading its way through a hostile strait. Danger of attack: High.

But at least Ark Royal wasn’t making this transit alone. It would be sailing under the close protection of an unusual escort — a U.S. Navy destroyer.

The choke-point transit was just an exercise, conducted in the wide-open Atlantic off the U.S. East Coast, but the American escort was real. Like a personal bodyguard, the destroyer Barry kept close to Ark Royal for the drill — sometimes just off the port quarter, sometimes charging forward behind a bow wave, but always only a few thousand yards away.

Ark Royal was “attacked” twice — by “low, slow fliers,” but Barry wasn’t called upon to respond. Ark Royal’s British escorts, the frigates Cumberland and Sutherland, dealt with those targets.

But when the exercise was over, Barry didn’t head for home. The ship went back to its station as a full-fledged, completely integrated member of the strike group, on what could be the longest cruise in which a U.S. warship deployed under a foreign navy’s control, a rarity in the modern Navy.

Barry sailed from Norfolk, Va., and joined the Ark Royal strike group off Great Britain in April. It stayed with the British ships for their trip across the Atlantic to the U.S., and American and British commanders were eager to describe how well the journey was going.

“The operation has been a phenomenal experience for my sailors, I can say that,” said Cmdr. Adolfo Ibarra, Barry’s commanding officer. “The number of underway days we’ve had has been fantastic, especially as far as being able to see other units and how they operate, and get into a battle rhythm of operations.”

Although Ibarra praised the other escorts in the task group, he said Barry was a valuable addition because it combined the best individual qualities of all those ships in one that can hunt submarines, defend against air attacks and tackle other meat-and-potatoes escort jobs — simultaneously.

“What we bring to the table is that we can go from one mission area to the other fairly rapidly,” Ibarra said. Unlike any of the British ships, Barry carries an arsenal of Tomahawk missiles, giving the task group commander, Commodore Simon Ancona, the ability to hit targets far inland without risking one of Ark Royal’s six Harrier attack jets — at least for the purposes of the exercise.

For as proud as both sides were of Barry’s work with the Ark Royal strike group, there were still hiccups in getting the U.S. and U.K. ships to work smoothly together.

One problem is that Ark Royal and the other British ships don’t have the same kind of secure Internet and chat access as Barry; European warships tend to rely much more on talking by voice over secure radio channels, said Capt. John Clink, Ark Royal’s captain.

“It’s tricky — when you’re doing chat, how do you know when you’re giving an order?” Clink asked. “Does [typing in] all caps mean I’m shouting?”

Another problem goes back to the old saw that Britons and Americans are “two peoples divided by a common language,” said Cmdr. Dan Ferris, Ark Royal’s weapons officer. U.S. and British warships call the same things by different names, so sailors spent a lot of time trying to decipher what service-specific jargon their counterparts were using.

What U.S. sailors call the “combat information center,” or CIC, is the “ops room” on Ark Royal. An American “radio room” is a British “main communications office,” or MCO — so when Ark Royal started sending messages to Barry “from MCO to MCO,” U.S. sailors had no idea what that meant, Ferris said.

Until the crews figured it out, the Americans were very polite, Ferris said: They just didn’t respond.