 Hello, from USS Fort Worth, a US Navy warship currently deployed to the US 7th Fleet and operating in the South China Sea. I am Commander Matt Kawas, the commanding officer of Fort Worth and a littoral combat ship crew 103, and I'd like you to welcome you to our ship. Thank you for joining us for this tour. You may wonder why I'm wearing these headphones. Shipboard life can be noisy sometimes, so these headphones are best for us to be able to hear each other and speak with each other. We're very excited to give you this virtual tour today. It's a first in our Navy and it's something pretty cool for our sailors to be a part of. We're also very proud of what we do and are happy to give you a glimpse of what life is like for us on deployment. So let me set the scene for you before I turn it over to my tour guide. It may be morning for those of you viewing us from the US, but right now it is 2300 onboard the ship. It's 11pm in military time. USS Fort Worth is currently on a 16 month rotational deployment to the Asia Pacific. The ship left its home port of San Diego back in November and arrived in the 7th Fleet in December. Our unique manning structure allows us to deploy nearly twice as long as other US Navy warships because we swap crews about every four months. My crew, the crew 1 and 03 Rough Riders along with Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron Detachment 2 and Surface Warfare Mission Package Detachment 1 arrived on board Fort Worth in February in Singapore. We took over from the Littoral Combat Ship crew 104 Juggernauts who had sailed the ship over to Singapore and shortly after arriving spent the first half of January supporting the search for the missing Air Asia flight. Since assuming command of Fort Worth, my crew and I have had a chance to travel to northeast and southeast Asia visiting countries such as South Korea where we participated in an annual US and Republic of Korea Navy exercise and also getting a chance to visit Japan. This past week we've been in Vietnam working with our naval counterparts from the Vietnamese People's Navy. We also had a chance to enjoy some quality liberty in Denang and had a great time meeting all the people there. After several days in port, we got underway from Denang this morning and had a chance to spend a few hours operating underway with other ships from the Vietnamese People's Navy. It was a great experience and we learned so much from operating with our counterparts. We will be conducting routine operations for the next few days in this region before we return to Singapore for a routine maintenance stop. With that I'm sure you're very interested to get on with the tour so I will pass you over to Petty Officer Second Class Connor Minto, our embarked mass communication specialist who will be your tour guide tonight. Enjoy your tour. Hi, I'm MCT Connor Minto and I'll be walking you guys around the ship and we'll get this started right now. Alright, so as you can see a lot of the ship right now has the red lights on and that's what we do at night time. The lights don't go as far and we're going to peek into the bridge right now where we have three people operating as a bridge team. We have the engineering console right here where the entire ship engineering plant can be controlled and then we have two people driving the ship and keeping an eye out on the water. We'll take a little closer look in here. So underway it only takes three people to fully run the ship. With those three people they can get everything they need to get done to get us underway. Here's a memorabilia from the city of Fort Worth right here. They're really good about sending care packages during the holidays. The city of Fort Worth is really supportive of the sailors on board and the ship, their namesake. Right now we're going to go to the airborne mission zone and speak with Lieutenant Commander Hill. He is the air boss with helicopter maritime strike squad from 35. Here he is right here. I'm going to pass you over to him and he's going to speak about what's going on here in the airborne mission zone. Sir, how's it going? Here you go. Alright, thanks MC2. First off, welcome to the airborne mission zone. As MC2 said, I am Lieutenant Commander Ted Hill, in charge of all aviation related matters on board LCS. If you'll pardon me for one second, we'll go downstairs and we'll take a closer look at both aircraft that we have. Alright, in the foreground you can see that we've got the unmanned area vehicle called Firescout and out on the flight deck, and I think you can just see it, is the MH-60 Romeo. So the MH-60 Romeo is the workhorse of the Navy's fleet. It's found on numerous ships throughout the Navy. What makes us special is this here, in the front ground, the Firescout. My squadron, HSM-35, is specially designed to operate both manned and unmanned aircraft. We're the first type in the Navy that's designed to do this. That gives me, as the air boss, the flexibility to both fly the manned aircraft, the unmanned aircraft, or both aircraft simultaneously to meet the mission. And as you can see, my guys who are on board, there's 24 of us, are cross-trained in both aircraft. So the pilots fly both, the maintainers fix both, and that allows for great flexibility to do our mission. Try to give you a better shot all the way out to the flight deck. And with that, I'll hand you back over to MC2, and I hope you enjoy the rest of our tour. Thank you, sir. All right, now that we're done with the AMZ, we're going to make our way down to what on other ships is referred to as Damage Control Central. It's another location where they can control the engineering plant here on the boat. Here's our mess decks that we're going to be walking through, but we'll come back to this. We've got a menu where our cooks put all the chow that we'll be eating for the day. So a lot of these doors that you'll see here, they're referred to as watertight doors. They've got big latches on them, and that way you can open them. It helps isolate if there's an incident, if there's a fire on board or smoke or water, it helps keep that isolated. All right, here's our Damage Control Central. We have our Master Chief on board, and Master Chief, are you going to speak on this? I'm going to pass you over to Master Chief here, and he's going to tell you about what goes on in here. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on what time zone you're in. Welcome to US's Fort Worth. This is the engineering department we call the Brains of Engineering. This is Central Control Station. This is where all the good stuff happens. As you see in front of you, we have a three headed console. This is where you can monitor, start, stop, pretty much almost everything in engineering. I know kids at home, all you gamers, three consoles to play games on, but I assure you, you cannot do that on this. Anyway, in order to be in an under way ship, you actually have to be self sustainable. That means you have to make your own electricity, you have to make your own water, believe it or not, even your own suit. You have to collect your own sewer. So that's something the engineering has got to take care of. So on the consoles, we can literally monitor our electrical plant status. We can go through, look at the proposal plant status. Even our fire pumps, we can start and stop fire pump from the NPC's alarms, any kind of alarms that comes up. The ship is so advanced and requires this little amount of people. There's only two engineers on watch at any time. So you have the RCO who is basically in charge of the watch and the engineering department for the watch section. And then you have one rover down here. We like to spread it out and put at least two people on watch because it's a lot of running around, go from space to space to monitor equipment even locally. As these alarms come up, as you can see, we had a fuel purifier alarm come up from the RCO, got a hold of the on watch rover to go down and they'll be reset the alarm, find it out what it's alarmed for and get it back online. And one of the other things we have to be self sufficient about is at home your little brother, little sister decides they want to make lunch. All of a sudden they catch the stove on fire. We have the luxury of calling 911 here, so we actually have fire indicators all over the ship. That's one of them. Over here. That's one of them up there. And it's multiple, all throughout the ship you're going to have at least one in every space. If it's a bigger space you're going to have multiple. So if there's smoke or if there's even a fire it will alarm give the watch standard indication and then we can get somebody down there and look at the space and if there is a fire, we go to everybody on the ship is a trained firefighter. So this is where we actually combat the fire. This is where the person in charge of the casualty control officer is going to plot. We actually have the plots behind here. We log it in there and do it the manual way. We also have the advanced way. We can log on our MPCMS and go to our decams and we can log in and we can plot everything through decams. One of the nice things about it is all of our repair lockers has the same single screen console there. So as the CCO plots what's going throughout the ship fire or flood or structural damage it comes up on the two screens so the repair locker leaders over there actually see what's going on as well. Communications is everything. It doesn't matter if you're fighting a fire or if you're just doing a normal watch station. So as you can see we have all sorts of communication devices in here and for some reason at any time we lose control of the pilot house loses control of the ability to maneuver the ship. You can take control down here in CCS and you can actually control the ship using our backups and of course we have the instruments to guide us where we need to go. So in a nutshell this is where all the magic stuff and engineering happens. Thank you Master Chief. Alright now we're going to make our way to the medical department but first we're going to stop at a door unfortunately I can't take you back there but this is our mission control center. That's where everyone's on the radar they have the ability to control all of our weapons that we have on board the weapon systems. They can control our 57 millimeter gun. We have two 30 millimeter guns that they can fire and operate from there so wish I could take you in there but I'm going to have to pass on that right now so we'll get you down to medical and we'll get to speak with Doc. Over there in the mission control center they can also control the fire scout that AirBoss was talking to you about so we're making our way. So like the skipper was saying it's pretty late here a lot of the sailors are sleeping but a lot of them are up to drinking coffee. They're galley but we'll come back here and talk a little bit more about that in a second. So also as you can see as like Master Chief was saying everyone on the ship is a trained firefighter and there's firefighting equipment everywhere because fires can happen anywhere anytime so everyone has to be ready. So here we are in medical we'll say hi to Doc. How's it going Chief? It's going great how are you? I'm going good so I'm going to pass you on over to Doc and she'll tell you about what she does. Hi everyone out there. My name is Chief Hospital Foreman Sylvia Fawson. I am our medical asset here on the crew. I've been in the Navy for 16 years and I've been what's called an independent duty foreman for four. I'm not a physician but the Navy has sent me through extensive training to learn how to take care of sailors out to see independent of a physician. So our crew members train so that they can help me respond to medical emergencies and they do a great job of that. I also work with the crew prior to deployment and during deployment to make sure that they're nice and healthy. If they happen to get sick or injured during a deployment they'll come here to the medical spaces so that I can take care of them. If they happen to get really sick I actually have a word in the back which I'll quickly show you in a minute where they can stay here to recover. Under the rare circumstance that I'm unable to provide care for them I will secure them, stabilize them and we actually have the capability to medivac them to like a hospital on land. In addition to providing healthcare I'm also very active in many of our safety programs on board to include helping my culinary specialist our cooks here to ensure that the food that we get delivered to us is safe to eat, is stored properly and prepared properly. Now I don't have to help them much the cooks do a phenomenal job at that and cook some amazing meals. I also work with our engineers to ensure that the water that they make every day is safe for my sailors or my shipmates to drink and we also monitor the temperature in many of our very warm areas to ensure that it's safe for the sailors to work in. Now you are small medical space that we have on board and have a great my exam table and on the back wall there you can see where we store things where I have all of my emergency medical supplies I keep a scale here because what medical doesn't have a scale and then I keep medical records and more supplies back in the corner I'm going to move a little slowly for you here so that it doesn't get too blurry I keep a lot of my meds here and then if you see on the back I have two racks in case I have sailors that get sick and need to stay with me for 24 hour care. Hey thanks for visiting us we appreciate your time and have a great day. I'm going to pass you back over to MC2 now. Thanks Doc alright now we're going to make our way to one of the repair lockers there's two repair lockers on board and this is where the sailors will jump into action put on their other protective equipment and fight any fires that are here and make sure our ship stays safe and here we go Chief are you going to show us around here what we got going on the repair locker? Welcome to repair 3. Actually I'll give you the headphones Chief and you can talk. Here we go we got repair 3 here. Over here we have a firefighting coveralls and sombel for major class alphas and bravo fires this actually is pretty thick material it's also steam blocking which is pretty nice for the firefighters in the space keep some cool. Over here we've got the SCBA mask we're still wearing the toxic environment and this goes in conjunction with the Scott air pack down there that's a 45 minute bottle used for firefighting or toxic gas environments. In the corner over there we've got firefighting hoses and boots, personal protective gear hoses we can run throughout the ship for firefighting purposes we have all kinds of kits for different kinds of casualties on board from flooding dewatering, toxic gas, firefighting, emergency access and rescue we've also got desmoking for those toxic environments of smoke and gases that are hazardous to personnel on board and then we've got our search and rescue equipment breathable air for going into confined spaces and that's pretty much it for a repair locker. Anything that can go wrong we'll try to fix it. Alright thank you Chief. Thank you you have a good night you as well. Alright Chief we're going to make our way over to the galley where our cooks cook the phenomenal food that Doc was talking about here's some of our sailors right here saying hi to their families sorry I'm kind of leaning around where the ship's rocking it is a smaller ship and we get some waves out there and everything starts moving so this is CS1 right here he's one of the cooks on board this is his galley he says hello to all those who want to talk can you say a few words here. How's everybody doing today I want to welcome guys on board the USS Fort Worth, I'm CS1 Phillip Justik, I've been on board for over four years best job in the world. Have a good tour. So CS1 he's a cook but he's a culinary specialist but because there's so few sailors on board and that's how LCS operates everyone has multiple jobs so even though he's in here and he's in the galley cooking operations he comes out and he has a special suit he wears he's a hot suitman that way if there is an incident on our flight deck he can go out and recover any personnel that are in an aircraft that's run into a situation here's senior Cole you'll see him again he'll be answering questions for us we got a coffee machine that's probably the most important piece of equipment I think on the boat right there keeps everyone running and keeps us all happy so that's good so sailors are coming here we have a pretty good morale welfare and recreation department not really a department but it's an organization and they keep the sailors happy they provide games on the mess decks we'll have movie nights we had a movie night on the flight deck the other night we got to go on the flight deck they had a projector playing a movie out there eating popcorn they'll set up games bingo trivia nights here we go I'm actually from the state of Texas myself so I'm a big fan I like to eat at this table look at my state every day so it's nice let's see here we got we got our mailbox just like anyone else you know everyone has to get their mail somehow so a lot of these countries we hit a lot of cool ports that we get to go to everyone that I like to firstly get some postcards that a lot of other people do and we just pop them in that box and it'll take them off the ship so how we do that when we're underway we need to you know we need food we need to refuel just like a car would need to do so another ship will come up to us and we call it a replenishment at sea and another ship drives along they pull alongside of us and then we have these special rifles that shoot over these these lines and then we start pulling lines from one ship to another ship and fuel lines and then we start pumping let's see here we got a we got our CO our EXO couple other people on the ship and they're gonna we got some questions via social media and they're gonna help us answer them so we're gonna go through these right now and we'll get started so I'm gonna pass you on we're gonna switch this camera I'm so sorry I'm terrible with this technology so let's see if we can get this I think I'm I think I'm on the front camera now so I'm gonna pass this on and we'll get our questions answered so here we go sir all right good evening everyone I'm Vincent Lamerson I'm the electro onboard the ship and so we're just gonna answer a few social media questions first question from racer ex robbers the twitter user he asked are you capable of using anti-submarine warfare onboard the ship so with lcs we have three mission packages we have anti-submarine warfare mine counter mission warfare and also surface warfare right now we have the surface warfare mission package attached and anti-submarine warfare mine counter measure warfare still the testing and development phases so with a surface warfare we we have a two mark 50 30 millimeter gun we have a visit visit board search and seizure team on board and two 11 meter red boats as well as an air department with an MH 60 Romeo helicopter and the fire scout which is the drone helicopter so I'm gonna pass on the tablet to senior Cole who's gonna answer some more questions hello world I'm a command senior chief Craig Cole been on board for a couple years now I got a question from a facebook user Justin B he asked with so few sailors crew 50 originally most maintenance duties were shifted to civilian maintenance crews on shore how does that impact everyday condition of the ship the crew and their ability to perform their job well basically the maintenance schedule in general terms is sailors still do maintenance on board we share responsibility with the civilian community which allows us the opportunity to maintain ownership as well as get the job done on board with our ability to perform our jobs and the maintenance the equipment itself the equipment operates great we've had great continuity with the civilian maintenance counterparts which allows us to be out here in the seven fleet area of operation and perform our deployment duties as assigned for our sailors with 50 core crew members we actually have 55 core crew 24 mission package or 24 aviation detachment in 19 mission package that gives us around 100 sailors to keep the ship clean do our maintenance and conduct the mission whatever we're assigned by our operational commanders we love what we do we have the best crew in the Navy and appreciate you guys being able to have this opportunity so thank you and I'm gonna pass it off to the executive officer commander Mike Desmond good morning or afternoon or evening as the case may be it's nearly midnight here my name is commander Mike Desmond I'm the executive officer on board the mighty Fort Worth and I'm gonna answer a couple of the questions that came to us the social media recently the first is from Twitter Twitter user named Ford Gal 15 Ford Gal 15 asked how long is your deployment for coming home but this deployment as the captain mentioned initially in his opening remarks the deployment this ship is actually about 16 months long which is about twice as long as notional surface warfare ship deployment schedules which is have been up to nine months long so ours is about 16 months for the ship that's broken up between crews which is why we're able to have such a lengthy deployment for this ship have it overseas for so long so the crews serve approximately four months overseas and this follows the new 321 manning initiative that the LCS squadron implemented recently and that stands for three crews two ships and one ship always deployed so we have three crews for instance we're one of them crew 103 the two ships we're currently using are USS which is back in San Diego and USS Fort Worth which is deployed here to the 7th Fleet area of responsibility that allows obviously a greater turnover but it permits many more crews to have experience operational experience overseas so we have served about half of our deployment now we deployed as the captain mentioned in February we'll be returning back to San Diego or to our families in late May at which time crew 102 will relieve us we'll have an exchange of command on board and they will follow with the rest of Fort Worth's deployment and remainder of their ship's mission for the deployment we also have a question that came via Facebook from Facebook user Jim Y he asked what tactical advantages does this ship have on the Latoral Combat Ship a relatively new type of ship very different in many regards than traditional ships such as cruisers, fast frigates, or destroyers the main tactical advantages though that the Latoral Combat Ship has first is as you can tell by the name Latoral that is that the ship has a very shallow draft about 5 meters or 15 feet which is less than what the destroyers or cruisers have meaning we can operate relatively close to the shore in the Latoral regions of the world one of the other tactical advantages we have is speed the ship is faster than just about every other ship in the Navy we have speeds over 40 knots added to that great speed and shallow draft is our maneuverability we have water jet propulsion here we don't have rudders or propellers like most other ships do we actually have durable water jet and boost propulsion systems basically like a jet ski that's right so that maneuverability and then add to those the mission package electrical officer mentioned the surface warfare mission package that we have on board now but in span of just a few days we could actually change out that mission package based on the operational commander's requirements and the mission what the mission calls for and change out to either the anti submarine warfare or mine mission areas provided that logistical support was readily available so speed, maneuverability, shallow draft, mission package change out and flexibility and also we have as you heard the air boss talk about our helicopter the first composite kilo detachment to deploy on an LCS brings unmanned aerial vehicle and unmanned helicopter as well I think probably the most important tactical advantage that we've seen recently out here in the 7th fleet is the size of the LCS we're about half about half the size of most of the other ships out here destroyers for instance and that means that we're we work much better with some of the partner nations we have improved interoperability I think that a lot of the nations that we work with over here are more comfortable working with us very fast ship great new ship and I think that's probably our greatest tactical advantage we're just learning right now what the ship can do and what the capabilities for the embarked detachments are as well with that I'll pass back to the commanding officer for some closing remarks but thanks for joining us good to see everybody goodnight so hi I'm Commander Matt Kawas again I just want to thank everybody for joining us tonight I hope you enjoyed the tour of the ship and had a chance enjoyed talking with some of the incredible sailors that manned this ship I recommend continuing to catch our adventures on our USS Fort Worth Facebook page have a great day