Maritime Security

Incorporating Prior Lessons Learned into BALTOPS 09

More from the BALTOPS 09 Bloggers Roundtable. Joining RADM Christenson on the call was Lieutenant Commander Jorgen Bergman, a LNO from the Swedish Navy. The topic of my second question pertained to incorporating prior lessons learned.

Admiral, what are some of the past lessons learned that you’ve incorporated into this year’s exercise?

ADM. CHRISTENSON: Past lessons learned for this year’s exercise? I think the biggest thing we’ve felt was an increase in multinational operations. We’ve had — the boarding teams that went in were Swedish boats carrying Finnish sailors to go aboard, you know, a Swedish naval base. We had the Royal Navy providing — the U.K. Navy providing the ASW and overall coordination. We had multinational events.

Another lesson learned would have been the complexity of the event, making them more complex, which we’ve done. The fact that, you know, we had German Tornadoes doing air defense, an integrated air defense exercise today. If this had been 30 minutes ago you would have heard the sounds of the low-flying jets coming over the ship.

So, sophistication. When different navies come together, usually the first couple days are spent just being able to talk to each other on the various frequencies and communicate and basic ship handling. We feel like we’ve gotten a lot further along doing anti-submarine warfare, which is as challenging in these waters as anywhere. We’ve done anti-submarine warfare with a Polish submarine and a Swedish submarine.

And so those are two examples. I’ll turn it over to Commander Bergman. Commander Bergman, do you have any past lessons learned that we’ve addressed in this year’s exercise?

LT. CMDR. BERGMAN: …we are all, in our hearts, sailors, but we do think different ways. And this is the perfect exercise to train together, do things together to develop our skills, to be teamworkers.

What say you gentle reader?

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