Travels with Gates: Ship visit highlights Obama missile defense plan

Aboard the destroyer USS Higgins, Defense Secretary Robert Gates takes questions from the crew. August 12, 2010, Naval Base San Diego, California

Kevin Baron | Stars and Stripes

In always-sunny San Diego, Defense Secretary Robert Gates visited the crew of the Navy’s USS Higgins, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer that is just one piece of the Obama administration’s new, more mobile ballistic missile defense system for the future.

Last fall, Obama’s national security team scrapped the Bush-era missile defense plan for Europe. The old plan was based on using large, ground based interceptor missiles, or GBIs, designed to take down similarly large incoming ballistic missiles.

But in the 21^st century, the U.S. predicts that instead of a few big ones coming from Russia, Europe’s more likely threat is a “salvo” of short or medium-range missiles coming from Iran, Gates told Congress this year. To match that threat, like in the rest of the military, the U.S. is going smaller and more flexible, using the Aegis anti-missile system aboard destroyers – like the USS Higgins.

Lt. Chris Cummins, a weapons officer on board, said the ship last year circumnavigated the globe, jumping from 7^th Fleet to Asia, to 5^th Fleet and through the Suez Canal, spending the bulk of their time with the 6^th Fleet in the Mediterranean. As they were steaming for U.S. waters, the Haiti earthquake hit and the Higgins was the first on the scene, sending about 50 sailors ashore to assist in relief efforts, before continuing through the Panama Canal back to California in February.

Early next year they will deploy, likely to the Middle East, he said.

Gates did the usual quick hello speech, shaking hands and giving out personalized challenge coins.

But in a brief Q&A, one sailor got up the courage to ask the secretary how the latest announced plans to trim waste within the defense budget and find savings would affect the average sailor like him.

Gates quipped, “If it works the way I want it to, you get the money.” (He explained it a little more, too.)

Another sailor asked just for Gates’ assessment of how serious was this whole WikiLeaks business.

“I think there are very serious operational consequences,” Gates said, including the names of many cooperative Afghans. “They convey a huge amount of information about our tactics, techniques and procedures; how we fight, where we’re vulnerable. We know from intelligence that b oth the Taliban and al-Qaida have given direction to come those documents for information.”

“We don’t have specific information of an Afghan being killed yet because of them. But I put emphasis on the word ‘yet.’”

The Higgins may have a special place in Gates' heart, who reminded the crew their ship was named for the Marine Col. William "Rich" Higgins, the only military casualty of the 1980's Beirut, Lebanon, hostage crisis. The other American casualty: CIA station chief Bill Buckley.

Gates, then CIA director was at Andrews Air Force Base to recieve both of their bodies, when they were returned to the U.S., on New Year's Eve, 1991. 

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