Wednesday, March 28, 2001

By Steve Liewer, Stars and Stripes

Jason Carter / Stars and Stripes The USS Vandegrift (foreground) and USS Curtis Wilbur sit pierside at Yokosuka.

YOKOSUKA NAVAL BASE, Japan — For the second straight year, a shortage of cash to pay for fuel is leaving 7th Fleet ships moored at their piers while politicians in Washington bicker over filling the gap.

The culprit is last year’s sharp upward spike in crude oil prices, the same one that has sent stateside gasoline prices spiraling upward and bankrupted utilities in California.

The crunch apparently has affected nearly all of the 11 Yokosuka-based ships of the 7th Fleet, according to crew members.

• The destroyer USS Curtis Wilbur returned to Yokosuka on March 14, barely six weeks into a planned five-month deployment. Port visits to Singapore, Guam and Australia were canceled.

• On the same day, the cruiser USS Cowpens came back two weeks early from a three-month trip to India.

• Later, the frigate USS Vandegrift sailed home to Yokosuka, two weeks into a scheduled three-month cruise that would have included visits to Singapore and Malaysia.

• The destroyer USS O’Brien skipped two weeks of local operations in March and, crew members say, also is opting out of a planned western Pacific deployment next month. No more operations are planned until June, when the ship is scheduled to head for the Persian Gulf.

• The USS Kitty Hawk carrier battle group — including the cruisers USS Vincennes and USS Chancellorsville and the frigate USS Gary — had been expected to come home in mid-June but moved the return date ahead two weeks, according to numerous family members of the crews.

At Sasebo Naval Base, Japan, home to seven other 7th Fleet ships, the fuel crunch is not as apparent. Three of the four largest ships are operating as scheduled in the Philippine Sea, said Lt. j.g. Chuck Bell, a 7th Fleet spokesman, while the fourth, the USS Fort McHenry, is undergoing scheduled maintenance. Two small minesweepers and a salvage ship are home.

In Guam, Bell said, the sub tender USS Frank Cable is likely to make its usual summer visit to Yokosuka and Sasebo.

Last summer, the Pacific Fleet raided its fuel budget to pay for a major computer upgrade mandated by top Navy officials but not funded by Congress, Navy officials said. As a result, a number of ships in the Pacific curtailed deployments or canceled port visits. The 7th Fleet’s ships burned about 25 percent less fuel during the quarter than in a typical summer.

This year, the crunch appears to be worse. The first fuel-related schedule changes were announced last year in late May. This year they came in February, before the fiscal year was even half over. And President Bush has shown no inclination to back the Pentagon’s usual midyear supplemental budget bill.

It’s not clear how the rest of the Pacific Fleet is faring. Commander in Chief Pacific Fleet public affairs officers, appparently overwhelmed by the USS Greenville incident in which a Navy submarine hit a Japanese fishing boat off Hawaii, did not respond to requests from Stars and Stripes to discuss the effect of increasing fuel prices on fleet operations.

The fleet’s fuel expert has been in a training exercise for two weeks and is going on leave this week, said CINCPACFLT spokesman Jon Yoshishige.

For 7th Fleet sailors, the unexpected port time is a mixed blessing.

"It’s fine with me. I’m married," said Seaman Manny Flores, 23, of the Cowpens. "Deployments were good when I was single. Now I’ve got a family to worry about back home."

"I hate being away. I love being back here," said his friend, Seaman Aaron Sheets, 21, also of the Cowpens.

A lot of sailors don’t care much for sailing. It means weeks of hard work, with little shipboard entertainment between long duty stretches. Liberty in exotic western Pacific ports offers the only real break.

"I don’t like getting under way, but I know I have to do it," said Petty Officer 3rd Class Laura Lononholt, 20, an O’Brien sailor. Still, she added, "It’s better to get under way and go to ports, than to go around in circles in the ocean."

Some sailors, though, fear their battle readiness could suffer if they’re stuck in port too long. The destroyer USS Cushing recently wrapped up a lengthy maintenance period that has idled the ship since last fall, and its crew is eager to go back to sea. But several crew members say they’ve been told they will be skipping a planned summer tour.

"We want to go to sea," said Petty Officer 3rd Class Kirk Steele, a 17-year Navy veteran who works in the Cushing’s engine room. "If we don’t get trained, we can’t do our job. We can’t go to war."

Officially, no one is discussing why the ships are not at sea, though it is common knowledge among sailors on the waterfront that fuel costs are a major culprit.

Sailing schedules are highly sensitive. Ships’ crews are told about deployments as much as a year in advance, but the deployments are not disclosed to outsiders.

Even as the ships are under way, Navy security protocol dictates that their locations be cloaked in generalities. Port visits aren’t announced until a few days before the ship arrives.

Cmdr. Matt Brown, a spokesman for the 7th Fleet command, has not denied that fuel prices are an issue. But he said there are many factors that influence ship’s schedules, especially in the Far East: training requirements, maintenance and equipment issues, weather, national tasking, even world events.

"Schedules, in the classic sense of the term, are much more fluid out here," Brown said. "It would be inaccurate to describe (fuel) as an overwhelming factor compared with other factors. It is not, by a longshot, the only consideration when it comes to scheduling."

"Other considerations may be training requirements and shortfalls, maintenance and equipment issues, national priorities and taskings, events in other parts of the world, and even the weather."

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