Naval Base San Diego Completes Annual ATFP Exercise

SAN DIEGO (NNS) -- Naval Base San Diego (NBSD) afloat and shore-based assets completed two days of focused anti-terrorism and force protection (ATFP) drills Aug. 29.

Citadel Protect 2012 (CP-12) is a tactical waterfront exercise designed to test and assess Navy capability to protect ships from potential threats in U.S. naval ports.

George Young, commander, Naval Installations Command (CNIC) N7F trainer, played a member of the opposing force during a series of small boat attacks.

"Our primary mission today is to test, evaluate and assess the ship and shore seam. We are commencing several small boat attacks this morning along with a VB-IED [vehicle born incendiary explosive device] and active shooter this afternoon. The goal is to make sure they can defend themselves and recover...Not only on the base, but on the waterline as well," said Young.

Chief Master-at-Arms Michael Drew, NBSD Security Department's training leading chief petty officer Michael Drew said this year's evolution will help all NBSD assets perform joint ATFP operations.

"Our focus is to basically get the shore commands, afloat commands and NBSD in-sync with how to protect the base. Now that CNIC has put the directed in-port aecurity plan in place it has helped put the shore-based and afloat assets on the same page in terms of force protection and anti-terrorism," said Drew.

Previously, ships and shore commands were not required to share assessment information with one another. Now the data that is collected will be used to evaulate shortcomings and help improve future training cycles.

"It's a great, great exercise. I wish we had more funding to do this event more often. We frequently do smaller events to stay sharp, but when you get a major event like this and you get the base assets and you have three or four ships participating it makes it a lot more realistic."

"It's exercises like this where we can use laser-designated equipment and pyrotechnics that really test the reflexes and the training of some of these sentries aboard these ships and aboard the base," said NBSD Commanding Officer Capt. Winton Smith. "If you think about it, there's a potential there could be a split or a seam between the shore defenses and the ship defenses, and it's imperative that we identify that seam and we prevent that type of asymmetric warfare."

In addition to Commander, Navy Region Southwest and NBSD, exercise participants included CNIC, United States Fleet Forces, Commander, U.S. 3rd Fleet, USS Sterett (DDG 104), USS Spruance (DDG 111) and USS Higgins (DDG 76).

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