Sea Control - Sea Control 567: E-2 Hawkeyes Over the Red Sea with LCDR Nathan Sawyer

Episode Date: March 19, 2025

Links1. “Beyond Tactics: How the Hawkeye Proved the Power of Adaptability in the Red Sea,” by Nathan Sawyer, USNI Proceedings, October 2024. 2. Nathan Sawyer Linkedin profile. 

Welcome aboard the Sea Control Podcast from the Center for International Maritime Security. I'm Walker Mills, and my guest today is Lieutenant Commander Nathan Sawyer, a U.S. Navy Air Battle Manager who recently deployed in support of Operation Prosperity Guardian. on board the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower. We're going to discuss a recent article that he wrote for USNI Proceedings, Beyond Tactics, How the Hawkeye Proved the Power of Adaptability in the Red Sea. Nathan, welcome aboard. Can you start by just telling the listeners a bit more about yourself and a bit more about your background? Absolutely. Thanks for having me on the program. I'm currently the operations officer for VAW-123, the Screwtops, and a 2025 NextGen National Security Fellow at the Center for New American Security. As you mentioned, we returned last summer from an unprecedented combat deployment to the Red Sea, where we flew the E-2C Hawkeye 2000, and now we're back in Norfolk and transitioning to the E-2D Advanced Hawkeye.

Okay. Before this tour, I was a fleet scholar attending Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies as a full-time student, earning a master's in international public policy and a subspecialty in naval strategy. And before that, I was a weapons and tactics instructor developing tactics, techniques, and procedures for the fleet, as well as instructing the next generation of aviators. Awesome. Quite a resume. We're happy to have you on. Congratulations about the fellowship. I saw that pop on my LinkedIn just a couple of days ago. And as a reminder to the listeners, all the opinions are our own and not reflective of any of the institutions which we are otherwise associated. Let's start with some context. I'm sure our listeners are kind

of broadly familiar with what's going on in the Red Sea, but can you give us like a quick summary of what is Operation Prosperity Guardian and just kind of like the big picture of what the United States and our allies are doing over there in the Red Sea? Yeah, absolutely. The Operation Prosperity Guardian was established in December 2023 to address security challenges in the Southern Red Sea, specifically to address the escalation of Houthi attacks originating in Yemen. Prosperity Guardian brings together a coalition of multiple countries with the goal of ensuring the freedom of navigation through the strategic Bab-Al-Mandeb Strait, which we refer to as the BAM, which is at the southern end of the Red Sea, which the Houthis would like to hold hostage.

It's about 12 miles across, a pretty important strategic strait for shipping. And under Prosperity Guardian, our main role is to defend merchant shipping through that strait. Enter the USS Dwight Eisenhower and her carrier air wing where you were working. I know there's a lot of people that probably imagine, you know, including myself before I do a little bit more about it, that aircraft carriers just launch fighter aircraft. But we know that's not true. So what else, like the Hawkeye, makes up the wing? And how much bigger is it than just fighter aircraft? Yeah, so the typical carrier air wing has four fighter squadrons, like you mentioned. Sometimes that's an F-35 squadron. Sometimes those are just F-18 squadron. There's

normally a two-seat FA-18 Foxtrot squadron, which has a particular mission it can accomplish. There's always an electronic attack squadron, a command and control squadron, that's the Hawkeye, that's what I do, and a few logistics aircraft. And then there's also two helicopter squadrons in each air wing. Quite the large complement. And then the Hawkeye specifically and the job of air battle manager, I guess we call them MOSs in the Marine Corps. What role does the E-2 typically play? What's your piece of the puzzle? Yeah, so the Hawkeye has a crew of five, and it's involved in every mission set that the air wing conducts. So the missions that I highlight in my article are first, and always first, strike group air defense, where we track

incoming threats, work with warfare commanders to ensure hostile identification and rules of engagement are met, and act as air intercept controllers directing fighter aircraft to engage the enemy. The second mission set is dedicated strikes, where the Hawkeye acts as an airborne intelligence center, fusing data from various sensors and unmanned ISR drones to ensure that the strike element has a clear understanding of the dynamic battlefield. This is the mission you see the Hawkeye conducting in Top Gun Maverick, for example. In Yemen, we also prosecuted dynamic targets of opportunity. So in this case, the Hawkeye crews used their extensive communication suite to communicate simultaneously with ISR drone operators in the US and the dynamic targeting cell

at the Combined Air and Space Operations Center in Qatar to quickly develop targets and obtain the approval to strike. And this is critical in the defense of merchant vessels because we could often get the strike approval on Houthi missiles before they were even able to launch. And finally, the Hawkeye is always tasked with airspace management. We continuously monitor the altitudes and locations of all aircraft within hundreds of miles of the strike group to ensure that all of our assets are assigned safe transit altitudes. In this role, we can act as air traffic control, a switchboard operator, or an emergency roadside service, and we're generally the first to get a call when anyone in the strike group needs something i'm trying to kind of conceptualize

this it sounds like it's a big like air traffic control uh real time plus tactical tasking uh type authority yeah i mean is that the right way to characterize it we can see everyone we can talk to everybody and we know what everybody can do so you know even units that can't talk to each other we can coordinate their efforts to simultaneously work towards the same objective more readily. And we tie in the warfare commanders that are resident on the carrier or even at the CAOC, the Combined Air and Space Operations Center, so that they can make real-time decisions if they need to. So one of the things that you talked about in your article is how the role that you all ended up playing in the, in the air wing over the Red Sea was different than what you had trained

for or different than, than what you had prepared for. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that and how, how it was different. Yeah. So for about a year prior to deploying, the strike group conducts training intended to prepare us for what we might face. And we call this the workup to deployment. So you start by becoming proficient as an individual squadron and then you work together as an air wing to build your proficiency and then the carrier and the air wing come together to learn to work together and then you bring in the cruiser and the destroyers and you learn to operate as a full strike group and this takes a lot of time and the focus for a while now has been training to the high-end peer threat which is obviously very

important and very challenging and with the limited time for the workup it's rightfully the priority and in the workup we're given very challenging problems that must be addressed in very specific ways in order for our tactics to be effective against these peer threats. When we found ourselves in the Red Sea up against an asymmetric threat in a very small body of water, much of what we trained for wasn't relevant. So my article was intentionally broad to keep the discussion unclassified, but a specific example of that can be that we didn't gain any experience working with multinational partners during the workup. So that is something that we can definitely benefit from moving forward because it was quite a large coalition. But I can report good news.

Naval aviation is always adapting and improving its training. So even before you returned from the deployment, the next strike group was already incorporating our lessons learned into their own workup. And I've been working with the Hawkeye Weapons School personally to improve our own community's training as well. That's good to hear. You know, you guys are already kind of handing off some of those lessons learned. Asking a little more specifically about adaptability, you talked about how that was important. Can you explain that? Are there ways that you guys train for adaptability or that you prepare for adaptability? Right. So Walker, this deployment tested our adaptability and problem solving like no other.

This is my fourth deployment, and I used to train squadrons in the workup, so I know that it's really hard to be unique in every scenario. It's hard to come up with something in every event that is challenging and unique and different and unexpected. So in this deployment in the Red Sea, we were in daily combat for nearly seven months, and lives depended on our ability to make things happen, right? So the Hawkeye's responsibility is to provide solutions when complications arise. So I'll give you a sea story, a little example of adaptability. So the strike group is in the Red Sea. And as you know, the air wings fighter aircraft have a limited range based on fuel. And the Super Hornets need enough gas to get where they're going, prosecute a target, which might involve a lot of changes in altitude, which burns a lot of gas, and then return to land on a moving ship, which may take more than one try.

So one day there were indications that the Houthis were attacking a civilian merchant in the Gulf of Aden with their one-way attack drones, which is south of Yemen through the BAM, the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. So this is further than the Super Hornets could travel without refueling. So the carrier couldn't move further south to shorten the distance because then it would be in a weapons engagement zone and put its 5,000 sailors aboard at risk of Houthi attack. And there weren't any U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Aden to help out at the time. So the cruisers and destroyers that were with us in the Red Sea were obviously much slower than the fighters and wouldn't have been able to arrive in time if they had been willing to take on that risk and go through the BAM themselves. So the Hawkeye crew needed to come up with a plan. So we could divert the tanker we had and we were going to use for a different mission to this new one while simultaneously launching an alert tanker out of an airbase in Qatar. car. And then we had to think, would the alert tanker even get to the Red Sea in time? And if

it didn't, we would have to cancel the other missions we had planned for the day, which are pretty important missions. Or maybe we could get the French to help out, since they were also members of the Prosperity Guardian Coalition. So at the time, I didn't know how to contact the Mirage fighter squadron that was stationed in Djibouti, but I did know how to contact the U.S. Patriot battery in Djibouti. So I could call them and ask them to call the French to launch their firefighters. And that would solve my fuel problem. But at the same time, all this was happening, we were also simultaneously prosecuting a set of dynamic targets on the Yemeni coast and conducting a counter air defense mission to investigate air contacts approaching the carrier.

And we were also managing the airspace for hundreds of miles around. Like I said, we always have to do. So in this case, you know, we had, we had a lot to do. We had to come up with a solution and we did provide these options to the warfare commanders and they went with the alert tanker launch option. But also in this case, all the Houthi one-way attack drones crashed harmlessly into the Gulf of Aden and no merchants were harmed. So we actually cut off the mission a little early. Wow, quite a significant amount of moves, a number of moving pieces there. And if I can follow up there, I would be curious as to how much of the pre, the planning that the crew is involved with um the the e2 crew or if you know is it more that once uh there is a plan

that that aircraft are executing you're you're kind of uh quarterbacking the plan um or or to what degree y'all are involved with actually coming up with a plan uh beforehand so we always know that we're going to be conducting air defense of the carrier so no matter what the hawkeye is always going to have a defensive counter air group of super hornets that are going to go and intercept anything that's coming towards the carrier so that's one of the ways that we just we always know that's going to happen we always have one crew member kind of dedicated to that mission and then we know that the Houthis are kind of dynamically setting up missiles and launching them at merchant vessels so we know that that's happening too we just don't know exactly when

that's going to happen whether or not we'll have good enough intel good enough um you know video or good enough intelligence to get the rules of engagement met on any one of those targets at any time so that's always in the red sea going to be the dynamic part of every day's mission over there is you know how long can a fighter stay on station while we're developing that target and trying to get approval and then if they can't stay on station any longer how do we get the next set of fighters to service that target quickly and then reassess for follow-on strikes. If there's a dedicated strike, that has a, you know, a multiple day planning cycle that goes into that. So we know that when we launch on a dedicated strike, that's basically the only

mission that Hawkeye will be doing. There will always be two Hawkeyes at a minimum for a dedicated strike. You already mentioned that some of the lessons that you all had learned had got passed on to the follow-on squadron and even incorporated in their workup, which is awesome. Do you have other, I guess we say recommendations or kind of specific lessons learned beyond, right? I mean, we're talking about the kind of need for adaptability, but are there other specific things that y'all would change about, you know, future workups or even in the larger sense, the way that the Hawkeye community is trained and employed based on your experiences out there? Yeah, I'm, you know, I've been pushing for years that we need to make personnel exchange program

tours, competitive tours. We need to make that where we send our best to help train up our coalition partners so that they can eventually, you know, get up to a more proficient level that we're obviously engaged in combat operations more frequently around the world than a lot of our allies. And I feel like we can help them to build their proficiency and then incorporate them into the workup somehow. And I also think that we need to incorporate AI into our simulations and into our live virtual training that we do so that we can incorporate that kind of, I guess, unexpected element more quickly. If we had some sort of AI generated scenario instead of a instructor having to come up

with that scenario every time, I feel like there's a lot that we could do with artificial intelligence if we work it into the requirements for our simulators and those kinds of things. Those two really interesting ideas. I mean, I'm personally a big fan of exchange programs, having done one on the ground side in the Marine Corps. And then the Marine Corps' young MQ-9 community has benefited really immensely from exchange officers, both from the UK and inter-service exchanges with the Air Force. So I think that's, there's a lot to be, a lot to be gained from, from those type of programs. There are quite a few, not just NATO allies, but other partners also, I think that fly the E-2. So not even just other pilots, correct? I mean, you could do exchanges with other E-2 crews who kind of operate in the same way. Right. Japan flies the E-2 and France. And Nathan, what about morale? I mean, I can imagine that there's kind of an interesting split split screen, I guess, of these this long carrier deployment to the Red Sea where you've got aviators who are going out there every day or almost every day. And in effect, getting some, you know, tangling with these Houthi missiles or carrying out strikes and feel like they understand the big picture. But then I would imagine that on the carrier, there's also other folks who don't really get to see any of that.

And their, you know, their experience is probably, yeah, we, you know, we sailed in circles in the Red Sea for six, seven, eight months. You can tell us how long it was without ever getting to make a port call. So I'm curious if you dealt with any any of that kind of morale management or message management and maybe also for the aircrew flying out, you know, similar missions day after day after day can be taxing certainly in its own way. Yeah, definitely can. We like I think I mentioned before, this is my fourth deployment and this is the first time I've ever done anything quite like this. I deployed during COVID for the tail end of the USS Roosevelt's 2021 deployment, but I was only on board for three months out of that time, I think. So in this case, this is me and my fiance's first deployment together.

So there was an expectation coming into this deployment that we were going to have six European port calls. It was going to be a Mediterranean deployment. It was going to be basically just watching the Russians. um and then you know the attack on israel happened and everything changed and we were you know sent directly to the middle east where we ended up having most of our port calls canceled um we ended up going seven months in the red sea without a port call um constant combat uh we were attacked several times and um you know it was really hard to keep up morale and i think we

don't talk about that enough. And those are lessons learned that we also sent over to the next carrier. But I was the administrative officer for my squadron at the time. And I had the cooks in my squadron worked for me, the CSs, the culinary specialists. And I had a CS2 that did not launch off the carrier every day, that did not see the effect of his work on keeping the merchant vessels safe. And that was really hard to keep up his morale. And what we ended up doing was we had roadshows is what we called it. We had people cycle through the ready rooms and presentations were given to kind of show everybody what we were doing, sometimes at the unclassified level and sometimes at the secret level, depending on who we were briefing. But we wanted everybody

to know exactly how they were contributing to the mission. And it was, in my opinion, um a very noble mission that these innocent mariners were being attacked daily um and another thing that we did was we we found ways of getting people off the ship for a few days at a time we flew them off the ship maybe it was for some training maybe it was um you know due to connectivity issues maybe like a virtual training that they had to do but we would fly people to bahrain for a couple days those people would download the new episodes of whatever it was that we wanted to watch fly everything back to the ship um and distribute that out um so that was one of the ways that we kept morale high but it wasn't easy and definitely you know morale comes

in cycles and we had some lows yeah that that makes sense i mean i think that's always in any unit uh where there's kind of a split between the the doers and the enablers you know that can that can be key i'm thinking of our you know my my own unit which is a reaper squadron so the aircraft are not physically located with the pilots right so i would you know at a normal flying squadron even the people that are not touching the aircraft can see the aircraft every day you know taking off and going into the sky whereas for us there's nothing to see right so the pilots just go into the box and do their thing and then at the end they come out of the box and so if you're not involved with that. It is kind of a, I suppose, a leadership challenge to make sure that they're

engaged and kind of understand the role of the mission. That's good stuff to chew on and make sure that future squadrons are thinking about. Nathan, I think that's about all the time we've got for today, but I'd like to thank my guest, Lieutenant Commander Nathan Sawyer, for discussing E-2 Hawkeye operations over the Red Sea with us in his recent deployment experience. Nathan, where, if anywhere, can the listeners find you online? And what are you working on next? Do you have any other articles in the hopper? Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn and look for my upcoming article in the Foreign Area Officer Journal of International Affairs entitled, Revitalizing the UN Military Staff Committee,

Enhancing Global Security Through Active Peacekeeping, Arms Control, and Crisis Communication. awesome well we will look for that thanks again for joining us and to the listeners thanks for tuning in we'll see you next time © BF-WATCH TV 2021 Bye.