A recent two-day meeting between LT Nathan Peck (CTF-53 Scheduler within Fifth Fleet), LCDR Gentry
Debord (CTG-73 Scheduler within Seventh Fleet) and a shipping consultant in Singapore, colloquially
termed “RASPCON” by the schedulers, yielded some advance discussions in the way to operate the
Combat Logistics Force (CLF) fleet.
“RASPCON is not as formal as the name may suggest, instead it was just a
meeting of two schedulers and a shipping consultant to discuss all things
ships.” stated LT Nathan Peck who saw the meeting between LCDR Debord and
the consultant as an opportunity to see how things are done in other fleets.
The conversations ran the full breadth of shipping from obstacles the
schedulers overcame in the beginning to the processes that they hope will
persist after they depart the pattern.
An introduction of supply and demand metrics for the respective Area of Responsibility
(AOR) was one such process they will endeavor to capture. “It’s not about micromanaging or
second guessing someone else with these metrics, it’s about measuring and
assessing fleets and continually improving on current process” LCDR Debord
explained as his counterpart in CTF-53 added, “we’ve heard it before, that
you can’t manage what you can’t measure.”
Beyond sharing ideas of how the future fleets will look in their respective
AORs, the schedulers also commented on challenges in supporting the littoral
crafts and the one rule of shipping: there are no rules. As LCDR Debord put
it, “everything east of the Suez Canal became a talking point.” And after
the nuances of the respective fleets were covered, the discussions
progressed to advance concepts in shipping.
“When you’re no longer talking about customer cycles, port queues and
instead discussing ton-mile demand and CLF repositioning costs, you’ve
entered an entirely new level of shipping.” LT Peck explained. When asked
why these concepts were being thought about now and if they have been
thought of before, they replied that the decision support tool that they are
using, the Replenishment at Sea Planner (RASP), has enabled them to focus on
these type questions and not daily hand-jamming of info into messages and
How their job was done before RASP was uncertain but LCDR Debord
added “it probably wasn’t fun.”
