January 29, 2024

'The greatest name in the fleet'

By Matt Grills
Honor & Remembrance
'The greatest name in the fleet'
Navy Cmdr. Matthew Arndt, center, Operations Specialist 1st Class Marq Hamby, left, and Gunner’s Mate 1st Class Maan Alquran of USS Indianapolis (LCS 17) visit the USS Indianapolis CA 35 Memorial on Jan. 9, during a visit to their ship's namesake city. Photo by Matt Grills

USS Indianapolis commander talks Middle East deployment, ship’s legacy during visit to namesake city.

Navy Cmdr. Matthew Arndt of USS Indianapolis (LCS 17) arrived home in Mayport, Fla., just in time for Christmas, after a milestone six-month deployment for the littoral combat ship.

He wasn’t done traveling, though. In mid-January, Arndt – accompanied by two crewmembers, Gunner’s Mate 1st Class Maan Alquran and Operations Specialist 1st Class Marq Hamby – headed to Indianapolis’ namesake city. Over three days, they visited the Indiana War Memorial and Soldiers & Sailors Monument, participated in a public meet-and-greet at Fort Harrison Public Library, attended Gov. Eric Holcomb’s State of the State address, and were recognized by the Indiana General Assembly for the “ongoing military efforts of the USS Indianapolis and its crew.” The ship is the fourth Navy vessel to bear the city’s name.

While in town, the sailors also placed a wreath at the USS Indianapolis CA 35 Memorial, honoring the 879 men killed when the World War II cruiser was torpedoed and sunk July 30, 1945. Of the 316 who survived what is widely considered the Navy’s worst disaster at sea, one is living. 

Following a tour of American Legion National Headquarters, Arndt talked with The American Legion about the future of the Navy’s littoral combat ship (LCS) program, the legacy of USS Indianapolis (”the greatest name in the fleet”) and more.

Indianapolis just returned from what DoD called a “historic deployment” in the Middle East. What did your ship and crew accomplish?

A little history about LCS – we were designed as a product of 9/11. We were fighting wars in the Middle East, a lot of swarm tactics were developed at that time by the Iranians, and these ships were designed to have a multi-mission reconfigurable platform that could operate close to shore, very fast, capable against small craft and submarines. The submarine package didn’t really work out, and a mine warfare package was envisioned to be our focus. That’s actually on the Independence-class now, and the Freedom-class LCS are all surface warfare variant ships, which means a lot of guns, vertically launched Hellfire Longbow missiles for small ship defense and a limited anti-air capability. So the two theaters of operation the ship is perfect for are 5th Fleet in the Middle East and 4th Fleet doing drug interdiction ops with the Coast Guard. It’s not so much blue water as it’s close in, a lot of spots for us to stop for fuel and provisions, and because we can go really fast we can chase down drug runners or fast inshore attack craft.. 

Our mission really was to go prove we could be deployed. As soon as we got into theater, 5th Fleet was  interested in getting us involved in literally everything. Trials and tribulations, bumps in the road, but we proved we could be operationally sustainable out there, and we proved that the small crew exchange chain of command concept could actually be executed in the Middle East. More than anything, we proved that operations with LCS are effective. We had a national tasking mission that I think is still classified, but we flawlessly executed that. We proved that personnel delivery via MV-22 Ospreys onto LCS is possible. We interdicted an attempted hijacking in the Strait of Hormuz. We regularly encountered IRGCN (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy) forces who didn’t really know what to make of us. I think from a force availability standpoint, having us out there, having us different, having us visible – it was something the Iranians weren’t expecting. It was one more factor in the calculus of how they were going to act.

When the Israel-Hamas crisis kicked off, there was a big pull for the cruiser-destroyer (CRUDES) elements down to the Red Sea. That left a void in the Strait of Hormuz escort mission and the presence op mission in the Gulf, and that’s what we filled. We were also there as the smaller-size ship that more closely resembles the ships for the Gulf Cooperation Council nations, so we operated in a lot of international exercises. 

Indianapolis also participated in Digital Talon 2.0, a teaming of manned and unmanned systems. Describe that exercise.

Digital Talon is one of the exercises we conducted with Task Force 59, which is the new kind of unmanned task force that Vice Adm. Brad Cooper has stood up out there. They brought us into a mesh network controlling all the unmanned assets: three floating assets, one flying asset and ordnance launched from one of the surface vessels that was basically a loitering munition. For the first time in the history of Task Force 59, they had an LCS as the mothership, relaying all these individual feeds to a single pane of glass back in Bahrain so they could see all these things in one spot. The force multiplication of that, it’s pretty big. I think it was a big step forward in this ongoing science project going over there with maritime awareness being provided by robots. To be in the middle of that is pretty exciting.

Tell us more about Indianapolis’ crew swap and how that works.

We’re the last Freedom-class LCS to have the two-crew construct. The original theory behind this was to get the operational availability out of the hulls, you have to send the ships forward, and if the ship is going to have a two-year deployment order – well, you can’t keep a crew deployed for two years, so you have to have crews that can go meet the ship. They’re each fully proficient independently and can perform all the functions required to maintain and operate the ship. So that’s what we do. About every five months we spend about a week with both crews co-located, turning over all the parts and pieces and programs, and at the end of the week the other CO takes it and they go off and do their thing. We go back stateside and exist in an office building for a few months where we recertify on some warfare areas and get caught up on  admin. And we get some down time. We’re Blue Crew. The other crew is Gold Crew. That two-crew concept is coming to an end. In fact, when we go back and take it, that’s going to be the last time an exchange of command happens. We’ll take it, and that’s the crew. It was an interesting experiment, but it’s over.

A recent Washington Post op-ed argues that while America needs a bigger Navy, a more lethal one would be better. What are your thoughts on that, and how does LCS fit into that vision?

I am solidly in the camp of “It depends.” I think that national defense strategy has to be clear on what we’re trying to do, and that’s going to dictate what we need to do it. With the rise of the near-peer competitors, I think you need both volume and lethality. It’s not enough to be out there looking scary, as we’ve found out, but volume comes in many different forms.

Is it a bunch of smaller ships? Is it a bunch of Arleigh Burke destroyers that the nation can’t afford to have a thousand of out there floating around? I think you need a lot of stuff, and that stuff needs to be as lethal as possible, but what that mixture looks like is heavily dependent on what the president and the nation say we need it to go do, and we really need to be clear on that.

If someone asked you 10 years ago what you thought we’d be doing 10 years from now, you never would have guessed any of the things going on, because the world always gets a vote. That’s the difficulty with future fleet architecture; the things you think you’ll need 10 or 12 years from now, you have to start today. That’s how long it takes to go from concept to creation to capability. And a lot of times, like we learned with LCS, by the time you get the thing you bought it’s not the thing you need anymore. You’re going to hear a lot of opinions about whether we need volume, quantity or quality. It depends. It really does.

The LCS has been criticized for breakdowns, weapons failures and ballooning costs, with some experts saying the platform didn’t deliver on its promise. Is that accurate? 

I think some of it’s accurate. There’s a lot of new unproven technology on these ships. We were the first to get SPS-80 radar, and we had a different combat system as the first LCS Freedom-class to get SeaRAM. There are integration issues we have encountered. Reliability wise, I think every ship class has growing pains. From the stories I’ve heard, there was a lot of talk around the Arleigh Burkes when they first came out: We needed something else, we needed something new, and now we can’t get enough of them. We got over the learning curve and got them the resources they needed – the intellectual property resources, the equipment resources, the part suppliers and the manufacturers. It became this self-sustaining ecosystem to keep these ships going, which is proven out today that that’s exactly what we needed.

(The LCS) don’t have that yet, and I think it’s due in part to confusion on the part of the organization about what do we do with them. They were built for the last war. Instead of finding missions for which they’re purpose-built, we were trying to make them work for missions that already existed. LCS is very good at doing one thing at a time. The crew’s very small, 75 people. I have three people on the bridge at any one time driving the ship, and one is the engineer. When we start trying to do multiple things, the entire crew ends up involved and you can tire everyone out quickly. So I think these ships got a bad rap from the beginning because they weren’t as capable as the ubiquitous Arleigh Burke – highly visible, highly touted. But they were never supposed to be.

The more I’ve dug into the history and creation of the LCS program, we got exactly what we asked for. We got exactly what we paid for. The LCS sailors of today are now charged with figuring out how to make it all work. There is no possible way to figure out how to make it all work unless you’re out deploying, out operating, out breaking things and doing the things that provide you the data points that turn information into wisdom. We gained a lot of wisdom in five and a half months operating in the Middle East. 

Your ship carries the name and legacy of USS Indianapolis. How does that history shape the crew and culture of LCS 17?

I think we have the greatest name in the fleet. It’s definitely one of the most famous. For me personally, it  makes me think twice about how we are represented in every aspect of what we do. I’m not going to let those guys down, the 316 who survived and the 879 who perished that day. Because we exist, they continue to be remembered. The ship itself is a floating monument to the Indianapolis. We’ve got the 500 in there, we’ve got CA 35 in there; all four versions of the ship are represented within that one hull.

On LCS typically we have two crews, and each crew would have their own mascot. When I came onboard as executive officer, we’re on Indianapolis. Indianapolis deserves more than some mythical creature being the representation of this ship and this namesake. We dropped our mascot, and we’re Indy; that’s what we are. In a trophy case outside my office onboard is a newspaper from the day Japan surrendered, and in it is this little tiny paragraph: “Indianapolis sunk.” I see that every single day as a reminder that this is a very serious job and we have an important duty and responsibility to make sure we are always representing those who came before us.

Why is a namesake visit like this important for you and your crew?

I think for the same reason it’s important for elected representatives to have offices in their districts. You want to see the people you are representing. We see the images (of the city of Indianapolis) on board. We see the Speedway, we see the skyline, but to be able to experience it does a little bit more to weld that bond. In my 29 years of doing this, this is the most contact with a commissioning committee I’ve ever had on any ship I’ve ever been on. It’s pretty special. The gratitude from the people of Indianapolis … we walked into a restaurant and everybody wanted to say hi to us. We don’t get that in Jacksonville or Norfolk. When we come here, it gives the people we serve an opportunity to see that we’re real, that we exist, and they get to see where their tax dollars are going. Is the typical Midwesterner going to travel to a fleet concentration area to see what the Navy’s all about? It’s much easier to bring the Navy here than it is to bring them to the Navy.

The American Legion’s Be the One mission is about reducing the veteran suicide rate and destigmatizing asking for mental health support. As a ship’s CO, share your thoughts about mental health awareness, stress, and reducing the risk of suicide during and after service.

It’s a concerted effort to get the message out that asking for help is a strength and not a weakness. I think we’ve gotten to a much better place, but we still have a long way to go. On the clinician side, there’s some metamorphosis that has to happen with understanding shipboard stress, shipboard life, and shipboard requirements, but the first step is our guys have to talk to them to give them that body of knowledge and data points.

My job as a CO is to know my people, to be able to understand when something’s off, to ask if they want to talk to somebody and give them the time and space and confidentiality to do that. The Navy’s gotten much better about providing the resources. A lot of times it is difficult, especially on this platform; depending on who it is, if you take that person out of the game, you just lost, like, five people, because they’re doing so many things all at the same time. That requires a big shift in leadership to say, “Whatever we’re doing can wait, because if I don’t get you healthy, I’m going to lose you and I’m going to have a gap.” For guys like me, that’s not the way we grew up, so there’s a learning curve for us as well. 

Matt Grills is managing editor of The American Legion Magazine.

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