USS Monterey to make unscheduled deployment

The Navy announced today that the USS Monterey, CG-61, will deploy to the 5th/6th Fleet AOR. This includes the European and the Middle East regions. Monterey is based at Norfolk, so deploying her to that AOR will free up the Hawaii based USS O'Kane, DDG-71, to deploy to Seventh Fleet, to assist operations in the Asia region. Both ships are equipped with the Aegis BMD system. Seventh Fleet is currently down two BMD ships, after USS Fitzgerald and USS McCain suffered collisions that left both ships severely damaged.

Monterey had previously deployed to the region in June of 2016, with the USS Eisenhower Strike Group. She returned home in January of this year, and recently completed the sustainment phase of the Optimized Fleet Response plan. Under O-FRP, ships go through a 36 month training and deployment cycle.

The guided-missile cruiser Monterey will deploy on Oct. 16 as the Navy shuffles ships around to ensure there are enough ballistic-missile defense ships in the Pacific in the wake of two major accidents that rendered the destroyer’s McCain and Fitzgerald unable to deploy.

“Monterey will leave on a previously unscheduled deployment to the 5th and 6th Fleet areas to conduct maritime security operations,” Lt. Cmdr. Courtney Hillson told Navy Times Thursday.

“This deployment will allow the Hawaii-based destroyer O‘Kane to deploy to 7th Fleet to provide more BMD-capable ships in the region,” she said, referring to ships with ballistic-missile defense systems.

The demand for ballistic-missile defense capabilities in the west Pacific has intensified as North Korea continues testing missiles, putting allies on edge in Japan and South Korea.

www.militarytimes.com...

O-FRP

Where on the scale of "Uh-oh" to "Meh" is something like this?

a reply to: TomLawless

Higher than "Meh", not as bad as "Uh-Oh". They're still upgrading BMD ships, so it's kind of uncharted territory as far as they go, and having them where they need to be. Unscheduled deployments do occasionally happen, but there haven't been a huge number of them that I can recall.

a reply to: Zaphod58

both the ships that were damaged happen to have aegis on board?

Thats some serious bad luck with the timing of everything.

a reply to: Reverbs

Yes. Both are part of the Aegis BMD fleet.

it does read to me simply that she is putting to sea early simply to make up numbers
in operational capability following the damage to the other two ships.
the real question should be is it only coincidence that both the other ships
collision damaged and on the way home just happen'd to be BMD vessels.