Security

Assault Ship Diverted for Storm Relief: Sign of Things to Come?

A month after the USS Kearsarge assault ship (pictured) sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, on a four-month humanitarian mission to Latin America, the 840-foot ship is being diverted to Haiti in order to help with recovery efforts following last week’s hurricanes. In one sense, the rapid shift is all part of the concept. Kearsarge‘s mission is, […]

2763298686_860da81773A month after the USS Kearsarge assault ship (pictured) sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, on a four-month humanitarian mission to Latin America, the 840-foot ship is being diverted to Haiti in order to help with recovery efforts following last week's hurricanes.

In one sense, the rapid shift is all part of the concept. Kearsarge's mission is, after all, meant to be a "learning experience," Commodore Frank Ponds told me during my two-week stay on the ship in the Nicaragua phase. The cruise is an early exercise in a new Latin American "soft-power" strategy brainstormed by an innovative admiral. I explored Admiral James Stavridis' strategy in a piece for The Washington Times' Sunday magazine:

*With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan gobbling up most U.S. military resources and monopolizing the attention of the nation's top policy-makers, Adm. Stavridis and like-minded senior officers, with the blessing of Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, are using leftover people and weapon systems, plus the freedom that comes from being mostly ignored by the public, to invade some of the world's most desperate and volatile countries with free medical care and education and economic assistance.
*

The basic theory, I wrote, is simple:

*It's easier and in the long run cheaper to win over people with friendship and gifts than it is to fight them into submission when a crisis flares.
*

**Whether it works is hard to say so early in the game. Soft power pursues generational change, Ponds said -- and that means it will take generations to judge the results. But count on soft power becoming more important in the future, especially for the Navy. After all, according to DANGER ROOM naval analyst Galrahn, Stavridis is a likely candidate for the next Chief of Naval Operations.

(Photo: me)

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