 Alright man, so with this interview I'm just going to ask you about your perspective of this event from pretty much from when you assumed command when it started or when you found out about the incident and how you reacted and how everything played out. So, you had just assumed command of CTF, correct? Just a couple of days, yes. Can you explain what CTF is and what the responsibilities were of that command? The counter piracy task force CTF 151 had just been put together and been around about six weeks or so, maybe a little bit longer and had been under the command of Rear Admiral McKnight, who was the first person as the Admiral to stand it up with his staff. There had been a UN Security Council resolution authorizing governments to work together to fight piracy and to be able to go into the territorial waters of Somalia to fight piracy. And so, the NAPCENT said we're going to stand up a task force and ask our coalition partners to join us so that we have an organization to disrupt piracy and to tackle piracy. And it was primarily focused in the Gulf of Aden. And that was 2009. January 2009 they stood up and I took command in April of 2009. So, you had been in command just a couple of days and found out about this situation? Yep, the battle watch called me up and notified me that Merce, Alabama had been hijacked, a U.S. flagship had been hijacked by pirates. So, that was the initial report. And then within an hour or two we had the reports that it was a U.S. American Captain Phillips who had been taken and put on a life raft under the control of pirates. So, what was your reaction to this situation? Start making best speed towards the situation. We were actually in the Gulf of Aden and the kidnapping happened in the Somali Basin. I was reassigned USS Bainbridge and she was closest to where the kidnapping had taken place. So, she was making best speed to try and intercept the life raft and the Merce, Alabama. And we were working our way around the Horn of Africa to join up with her. So, was the initial plan to have the Bainbridge intercept the pirates? Bainbridge was closest so she was going to be on scene first. So, part of it is the Somali coastline is about 2,600 nautical miles long. When you're talking about counter piracy and the waters from the Gulf of Aden across the Horn of Africa into the Somali Basin, you're talking about 2.8 square million miles. So, to put that in context it's like trying to patrol the United States from Newport, Rhode Island to San Diego. And so then when you have that much area and that much opportunity for activity, you've got to get to where the activity is first and if you don't happen to be right on top of the activity, it'll take you a few days to get there. So, what was next? What happened next with the story? So, Bainbridge got on scene and we started to get the reports of where the Merce was. A better sense of what was happening, confirmation that yes, the pirates had kidnapped an American and he was on the life raft. We started, we had already been developing information collecting intelligence using the Marine Corps assets and P3 assets to get pattern of life on the pirates, understanding if there was any other activity or events that were going on. We continued that work as well as collating information from coalition partners on what they knew. Bainbridge had a scan eagle that they could monitor the life raft and then, fortunate for us, they also happened to have a Somali interpreter on board. So, they were very early able to make communications with the pirates and start talking to them about they needed to surrender, they surrendered nothing would happen to them and to return Captain Phillips to the U.S. Can you explain what a scan eagle is? It's a unmanned aerial vehicle, comes off the flight deck of a smaller surface combatant and gives you video of whatever you're trying to watch. I was in charge of a piracy mission. That means you are trying to disrupt piracy throughout that entire AOR. There were other piracy events going on at the same time throughout the course of the days and even before and after Master Phillips was kidnapped. Clearly, a kidnapped American was the number one mission that we were focused on and working, but that was not my only responsibility at the time. I'm on a large ship with significant command and control capability because I'm communicating with other ships throughout the area of operations and doing what we need to do in terms of disrupting piracy, trying to detain pirates and get them turned over to other countries for legal prosecution. I know we get focused on this mission, but that's not what a strike group commander just doesn't do one thing at one time. Clearly, unbelievably significant mission. Oh, absolutely. I was communicating with Admiral Gortney. We were walking through, so let me talk. Yeah, that's fine. You'll be able to figure out. Are you still rolling? Yes. Okay, so some of the challenges we have up front. Our conventional forces, our sailors and Marines, ships and our assets, we're not negotiators. And so when you think about someone being kidnapped, it's in this country, it's normally the FBI that does the negotiation. Well, one of our initial challenges is you want to get this person back, Captain Phillips back, and preferably you want to get him back safely and you want to detain the pirates. They're criminals at this point, suspected criminals. And so the first thing you want to try with the kidnap victim is try and negotiate the person back. We didn't have any FBI negotiators out there at sea. So what happened is in the early days, there was a working group that was set up in the United States and then working with NAVSENT and their team. We started to work through conversations and dialogue that the CEO of the ship, the intelligence specialist and whoever else he designated, the conversation they needed started to have with the pirates who kidnapped Captain Phillips, working their way through the logic of, it's in your best interest if you let him go. All this had to be done as we negotiated for his safe release at the same time it had to be translated by the Somali translator who was on board Baybridge. And so when you talk about the wonderful intellect and adaptiveness, agility of our people, they're taking on the role of negotiation just like they're a professional FBI agent, trying to convince people to let go of this human being and at a minimum stop moving the life raft, stop trying to get ashore. And that was our concern in the first few hours. The life raft is heading towards the shore of Somalia. And if we couldn't stop the life raft from getting ashore, we were probably not going to get Master Phillips, Master is the technical term merchant used, Captain Phillips back. My concern is if the pirates got ashore in Somalia, Master Phillips captured once he went into Somalia, we would be very, very hard to locate him again and find him and make it much harder and less likely that we'd get him back home safely to America. So the big pieces for me was getting that life raft to stop moving, convince the pirates to turn him back over and hopefully, you know, arrest them, get FBI out there, send them back to be prosecuted for a crime of kidnapping. And that was our initial intent in the first literally 24 to 36 hours. Throughout the operation, was there anything that seemed or looking back as anything that was especially impressive or unbelievable to you? Yes. So in the end, we had a DDG or frigate and then we had the big deck amphib that I was embarked on. You have the air elements associated with the marine expeditionary unit. And so when you think about it, and then we had P3 flights coming out of Djibouti, you think about all of those assets working together to keep track of the life raft. Make sure we understood as much as possible 24 hours a day what was going on, the negotiation process, the continuing collection of pirates' activities outside of the life raft across the ocean and in Somalia. In the end, that's probably across a big deck amphib, the P3s, the other two ships were talking four or five thousand sailors and Marines, a couple of Coast Guard men and a couple of folks from the other services. For all of those military people to be working together on a mission, kidnapping, rescue at sea, that I don't think up until that point we had trained together to ever do, it was very remarkable. The leaders and the crews were very focused on the mission. Everybody was very intent on getting Captain Phillips back. And I don't think there was, whether they were a sailor working in the mess decks, a sailor or airmen up on the flight deck in CIC or in the back of that P3, there was nobody who was not focused on that mission. And I think in the end that's what set us up for success in getting him back. But when you think about it, there's not that many organizations in the world that could bring that many people together and get something done so well and in my mind so perfectly. And that is reaffirmation of what the greatness is that lies in our sailors and Marines. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of operating forward and war fighting first and be ready? So when I started off, I talked about the geographic scope of the counter piracy mission going from the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden to the Somali Basin. So when you think about our world and how long it takes to go across the water at 20 or 30 knots, when something happens, if you're not there, it takes too long to get there if you're coming from home base. So the only way to make a difference in the life of that American citizen or the life of other American citizens in the future or Indonesia, in my case is a perfect example, going in and helping the people after the tsunami is you have to be somewhere in the vicinity of what's happened in order to steam as quickly as you can and make things go the way they should be or help people. And presence means you're already there. You're either for deployed FDNF in Japan or you're steaming around the Gulf of Aden or Somalia or in the Mediterranean and you're there so that when someone says this is the mission I need you to do, it literally within a few hours or maybe at the most a couple of days, you can go in and make a difference. So war fighting first I guess also plays into having presence? Yes. So war fighting first is understanding what it is we need to be as war fighters, whether it's the capability of our ships and that has got to be our primary focus every day, being the best war fighters we can be. In regards to this situation, ma'am, in the future what do you want sailors to know about this operation as it becomes part of the Navy's heritage and history? They should remember how well the sailors and Marines performed and how well they worked together, how well everybody did their job. So there's in the sense of heritage and heritage saying I want to be as good as the people who came before me. You know the wonderful piece about this story is when you think about the USS Bainbridge being named after the original Bainbridge who was the original counter piracy leader off at Tripoli. There's this standard of we protect America's citizens and we protect America's property and in this case fighting pirates was one of the missions where we do that protection. So you have the Bainbridge as a standard whose name becomes the USS Bainbridge. You have the sailors of the Bainbridge and the Boxer becoming a standard for future sailors to go. I want to uphold that standard when my time comes, when my mission comes where I have to be my best. The other thing is thinking about Captain Phillips that when you look at individual heroism here's a leader who said take me if you leave my crew. I'm willing to be kidnapped. Just leave my crew alone. That each of us, we think about the broader legacy of that kidnapping. We'll remember that and go when my turn comes and I'm tested I hope I want to be able to do the right thing that Captain Phillips did and think about the people I'm here to, my shipmates that my shipmates come first and I will do the right thing by my shipmates and that is also an important legacy of the entire mission. Regarding very tense high stakes scenarios like this is there any advice that you have for future naval leaders? I think the focus, when you have a mission like this, the focus is naturally there and as I mentioned before I found that to be true. You have to give yourself time to think and so there's some of it that is immediate and natural reaction that gets the entire team moving in the right direction but you have to carve out time and teams to think about approaches so that while the mission is going on you're trying to get two or three steps ahead and have plans and responses for the next three or four things that are going to happen and leaders have to figure out how to carve out the time to while you're in the middle of it to think ahead but also to balance everything else that they've got going on because for every important mission there's probably three or four subset missions that are going on and then there's other missions that you also have oversight over that it's just as important that they're successful as well. Is there anything else that you would like to add about this? No. Can I have some questions? Sure. I'll ask an opinion just to look at them. Sure. So, Captain Phillips' rescue what's going through your mind? It's a big sigh, I'm sure, a relief. It wasn't a sigh, it was like a yes! And we were in a meeting we were actually looking at Piracy sort of a campaign perspective, Ritlarge, the battle watch was monitoring the lifeboat and Bainbridge and they had taken the pirate leader on board and that conversation was going on so we were in a meeting on Piracy, Ritlarge, looking at a way ahead when the word came in and I was like, yes! We've got him back. You're not going to move your mouth just talking, are you? That would be so cool. So that Task Force had been set up in 2009 in the first few weeks and that was really one of the pinnacle events in that Piracy in that region and really set the standard and years later now Piracy in that region has significantly declined. What can you attribute that to and you and the rest of the ships there and the team and the Task Force and the partnerships and the standard there? Can you talk a little bit about what we've seen? So I think your last word, partnership's pretty key. The coalition's working together. There's a NATO Task Force out there, a European Union Task Force and CTF 151 is still enduring and has been commanded by our partners Singapore, New Zealand, Turkey, and all partners have had command of 151 and so working together as a team bringing all that capability together as really and synchronizing all that capability has been a key factor in Piracy diminishing. The other big thing is the commercial ships bringing on board their own security teams and so as the pirates have gone to attack the ships their security teams have disrupted the pirates and the pirates have just driven away and so the ships themselves, the commercial ships having a little bit of capability themselves has helped diminish counter piracy and so we've gone from having dozens upon dozens of ships under pirate control held for ransom down to zero we still have hostages but they've been moved to shore but the numbers are much smaller than they were in the last few years. Absolutely. Do I still have to look at Cousin Phillips basically? Captain Phillips, alright. So throughout the whole thing there's going to be a lot of emotions going through obviously there's going to be fear confusion and everything but as a I know I think you've touched upon it a little bit but I want to expand on it hopefully how did you overcome it as a leader of all these chess pieces? First of all what kind of emotions were going through you? I give our sailors and marines credit for being professionals and certainly as you're in route to a mission there's some excitement. I don't think fear was an emotion that I felt going through the crew so I think people very quickly a sense of what's going on wanting to know what's going on wanting to know what their role was going to be and very eager to get what is it I need to do to help and then enthusiastically all of them got after what they needed to do. Oh yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about your coverage? Right so you know it's amazing how quickly some things seem to change so we were in desert camouflage in 2009 the Navy had just started to roll out the NWU's and we were doing it command by command starting in the United States so I and my staff were still wearing DCUs when we embarked on the boxer and from the photographs from that time frame you can tell because there's pictures of us in this uniform and the sailors are in blue coveralls and you've got a few folks in the new NWU's at the time and so then of course we're no longer wearing this uniform so this may have been one of the last major that year 2009 going on probably one of the last major years we were wearing this uniform and it sort of closes out era for me because we started wearing this uniform coming into OIF and now we've completely changed out but if the uniform going away represents piracy going away that's a good thing yeah I didn't realize how big a deal it was because you're at sea you're in the mission you know you start seeing some of the television stuff and I did a couple radio interviews because I'm at sea and then you're on to the next big mission and it wasn't until I had to fly back to the United States for an event over it's the congressional caucus and I'm going to go speak I'm going to be back in the United States for 96 hours we've gone ashore and in Bahrain and I walked into the room and got a standing ovation just by walking into the room and I'm like what the heck and Lieutenant Mendes who's my acres I think you're a rockstar but nobody told us it's into what you're saying you know this is our job this is a day to day activity the Navy this is what we do