Despite talk of the Navy’s surface fleet losing its war-­fighting edge, the head of U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor said a two-year training success that’s only being revealed now challenged the status quo, injecting greater uncertainty — and a higher degree of risk of failure — into sea-based exercises.

Ultimately, sailors rose to the challenge, with the tests seen as a way to help boost preparedness for the “high-end maritime fight” that is of new concern, said Adm. Scott Swift.

Swift, who wrote about the training in the March U.S. Naval Institute publication Proceedings, said his command reached to the past to prepare for the future with “Fleet Problem,” a Navy training regimen between 1923 and 1940 that sought to replicate realistic maneuvers at sea in war.

Swift, who is retiring in the spring after three years at the Pacific Fleet helm, contends the Fleet Problem series is the most significant change in sea-based operations in several years and that the approach offers a “battle lab” for intensifying war-fighting readiness.

Swift gave an example of a reinstated Fleet Problem: operating aircraft carrier strike groups in areas with a significant submarine threat.

“Our traditional approach to this challenge would be to create an anti-submarine warfare exercise, tasking submarines to act as targets within a set geographic area,” he said.

Under the Fleet Problem construct, the carrier group would be given a strike combat mission in an area that also had submarine threats.

“Managing the submarine threat is the means to the end: strike,” Swift said. How the strike group commander manages that threat is not prescribed.

Bringing it together

Previously, deployed ships were able to demonstrate essential war-fighting tactics, but “at no point in the training cycle did they get to bring it all together,” he said.

Having so few prescriptions — and so much possibility for failure — was something commanders were not used to in the new exercises.

“Some teams clearly were uncomfortable, looking for the gouge (details) on how the problem would go down,” and although the response was tenuous at first, “diligence, hard work, creativity and aggressiveness have become the order of the day,” Swift said.

Although two years and more than six iterations of Fleet Problem have passed, Swift said it is the first time the approach is being discussed in public.

“In some forums there has been open discussion about the fleet losing its war-fighting edge,” Swift said. “We see the Fleet Problem as a key element of ensuring that edge endures.”

The approach comes with the Navy seen as being overburdened with patrols around the world — and with a series of ship collisions in the Western Pacific last year in which 17 sailors were killed. Also of concern are North Korean, Chinese and Russian threats.

Ship capabilities like firing defensive SM-3 missiles require time-consuming input from defense contractors, retired Navy Capt. Kevin Eyer, who commanded three different guided missile cruisers, said at a Dec. 4 defense forum.

“Every time a ship gets prepared to do an SM-3 shot, quite literally, a team of rocket scientists come on board, and they groom the system,” Eyer said. He added that it’s a worthwhile question to ask, “If we took all of the (ballistic missile defense)-capable ships in the fleet out, and we lined them up and North Korea launched something, how many of them could successfully engage?”

Beyond ‘by the book’

Swift said that when he returned to the Pacific Fleet three years ago, it was clear the Navy had become very efficient at training and deploying the fleet to meet the challenges of insurgents in the Middle East.

“But despite the best efforts of our training teams, our deploying forces were not preparing for the high-end maritime fight and, ultimately, the U.S. Navy’s core mission of sea control,” he said.

With the renewed Fleet Problem, Swift said a thorny challenge “at the heart of our culture” was that “if we presented an accurate — which is to say hard — problem, there was a high probability the forces involved were going to fail.” Failure in training events simply did not happen at the rate that will occur in war, Swift said.

“We had to convey to the operational leaders that failure during the Fleet Problem was not just tolerated, but expected,” he added.

Swift said the entire Navy fleet — and not just Pacific- based ships — needs to be thinking in terms of solving Fleet Problems.

“In some scenarios, we learned that the ‘by the book’ procedure can place a strike group at risk simply because our standard operating procedures were written without considering a high-end wartime environment,” Swift said.