U.S. Reactivates 4th Fleet for SOUTHCOM. Two Views of This Development: Army Times v. World Socialist Web Site

Almost 60 years after closing shop, the Navy’s 4th Fleet, which oversaw the hunt for German subs in the South Atlantic, is coming back. Only this time, the prey is drug runners in the Caribbean.The Navy announced April 24 the re-establishment of 4th Fleet, to be based at Naval Station Mayport, Fla. The command will operate as the naval component of U.S. Southern Command and will have a SEAL at the helm.Rear Adm. Joseph Kernan, head of Naval Special Warfare Command in Coronado, Calif., has been chosen to command the new fleet. Kernan will take control of 4th Fleet and the current Naval Forces Southern Command.

Effective July 1, the command will oversee maritime operations in Central and South American waters, similar to the command structure of 5th Fleet, which is also dual-hatted as Naval Forces Central Command, the naval component of U.S. Central Command. With the fleet’s creation, sailors can expect to spend more time in that part of the world, not only taking part in counternarcotics operations, but also humanitarian relief and goodwill tours.

“I am thrilled that the secretary of the Navy and [Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead] have chosen to stand up the 4th Fleet, with a focus on Latin America and the Caribbean,” said Adm. James Stavridis, commander of the Miami-based SouthCom, the organization set to benefit most from the new numbered fleet.

“While I am clearly a joint commander in every sense, as an admiral, I am personally very pleased and proud to see the Navy stand up an organization like 4th Fleet to operate with partner nations in the region.”

The move excited local lawmakers who hailed the move as key to ensuring more ships will be homeported in Mayport.

“I think this announcement shows the importance of Naval Station Mayport [as a] national security asset,” said Rep. Ander Crenshaw, R-Fla. “Locating the headquarters there is a key asset for Southern Command as Mayport is two days closer to the Caribbean and Latin America [than Naval Station Norfolk, Va.]. This positioning is key to having an impact on threats that could come from that region.”

Stavridis said the Navy needs 4th Fleet to operate at a higher level than Naval Forces Southern Command does now. That extra layer of support, he said, “would allow a much better and more concerted response to problem sets that range from hurricanes to medical diplomacy to counternarcotics [and] counterterrorism kinds of operations. Speed is very important in all those scenarios.”

The fleet, Stavridis said, will be focused on preventing and responding to mass migration of refugees, as has happened in the past from Haiti and Cuba, as well as stopping the flow of illegal drugs and partnering with countries throughout the region.

“We will also seek to build the ability of the 4th Fleet to work with interagency partners like U.S. Department of State, [U.S. Agency for International Development] and Department of Homeland Security,” he said.

Numbered fleet commanders have an official role in allocating training and resources.

The standup would not bring new sailors or billets with it to Mayport, said Rear Adm. Jim Stevenson, the current commander of Naval Forces Southern Command, set to retire this summer. However, the command is expected to get a plus-up of 30 billets in 2009, the result of a Fleet Forces Command manpower study a couple of years ago.

“That plus-up was already in the works,” Stevenson said. “The reactivation will be done without any additional resources needed.”

Being a numbered fleet commander also increases that command’s stature in SouthCom – a joint command – by adding what Stavridis calls an “appropriate counterpart” to 12th Air Force and 6th Army.

A SEAL was an unusual choice for the command, but Stavridis called it an “important and expeditionary job.”

“He is the right officer for the challenging tasks in the region, and additionally has a strong sense of theater security cooperation and interaction with our partner nations.”

Although he’s a SEAL, Kernan isn’t a stranger to the conventional fleet. As a junior officer, he served aboard the cruiser Horne.

Stavridis said anti-drug operations, humanitarian missions and cooperative training missions are expected to be the new command’s primary engagements.

“One particularly important mission for the 4th Fleet will be medical diplomacy, as exemplified by the voyage last summer of [the hospital ship] Comfort, which conducted nearly 400,000 patient encounters during a four-month cruise to 12 countries in the region,” Stavridis said.

This year, the amphibious assault ships Boxer and Kearsarge will “return on similar missions in the region this summer,” he said, “all under the aegis of 4th Fleet.”

Navy Expeditionary Combat Command also could play more of a role in the region as part of what Stevenson calls “soft power” projection.

“We’ve had Seabees down here the past couple of years, building clinics, digging wells and refurbishing hospitals and schools, and we expect that to continue,” Stevenson said. “We’ve also reworked our training exercises down here to have maritime interdiction operations, diving and small-boat evolutions – things that are more brown-water than our traditionally blue-water operations.”

But it’s the Navy’s riverine warfare commands that could see an even greater role in the coming years in SouthCom.

“There’s tremendous river systems in South America where our partner nations are responsible for security,” Stevenson said. “As you know, our riverine forces are being ramped up, and in the future, I could see them operating down there in cooperative training missions where our sailors may learn as much from their river forces as they do from us.”

Washington announced at the end of last month that it is resurrecting the long-ago moth-balled Fourth Fleet to reassert US power in the Caribbean and Latin America. Created at the time of World War II to combat German submarines attacking merchant shipping convoys in the South Atlantic, the Fourth Fleet was seen as no longer necessary after the Second World War and was disbanded in 1950.The Pentagon’s a statement on the revival of the fleet gave a far vaguer indication of its new duties, saying it would “conduct varying missions including a range of contingency operations, counter narco-terrorism, and theater security cooperation activities.””Rear Admiral James Stevenson, commander of U.S. Naval Forces Southern Command, said the re-establishment of the Fourth Fleet will send a message to the entire region, not just Venezuela,” AHN news reported.

The “message” began to be transmitted just weeks after Venezuela, Ecuador and Colombia came into sharp conflict over a border provocation caused by the Colombian military’s bombardment of an encampment of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrillas inside Ecuadorian territory.

The Fourth Fleet will begin operations on the first day of July out of the Mayport US Naval Station, a nuclear facility in the state of Florida. The fleet, which will operate as part of the Pentagon’s Southern Command, will be comprised of various ships, including aircraft carriers and submarines, and will operate from the Caribbean to the southern tip of South America.

While the new naval unit does not yet possess large numbers of arms and personnel, it will be equipped and granted similar importance as the Fifth Fleet, now deployed in the Persian Gulf, and the Sixth, operating in the Mediterranean.

The thrust of this decision is to give the US Navy a far broader role than it currently plays in Latin America. While Washington can point to no imminent military threat in the region, the reactivation of the Fourth Fleet has a powerful symbolic significance, indicating a return to gunboat diplomacy.

It is a demonstration of US intentions to maintain absolute military dominance over the region, and in particular over those countries with large reserves of petroleum and natural gas, including those that are governed by supposed enemies of Washington, like the governments of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia.

The central objective of the Fourth Fleet will be to further the military and political “security and stability” of the region, according to the commander of naval forces for US Southern Command, Vice Admiral James Stevenson. The fleet will “certainly bring a lot more stature to the area and increase our ability to get things done,” Stevenson told reporters.

“This change increases our emphasis in the region on employing naval forces to build confidence and trust among nations through collective maritime security efforts that focus on common threats and mutual interests,” said Admiral Gary Roughead, chief of naval operations.

According to the official statement issued by the Pentagon, the reactivation of the Fourth Fleet “demonstrates US commitment to regional partners,” among which Colombia stands out, given the billions of dollars of US aid granted its right-wing government to conduct the so-called “war on drugs” as well as its counterinsurgency campaign against the FARC, an organization that the US classifies as “terrorist,” on the same level as Al-Qaeda.

Significantly, the officer tapped to head the new fleet is Rear Admiral Joseph Kernan, the current commander of the Naval Special Warfare Command, which includes counterinsurgency units like the Navy SEALS, which are utilized in the so-called war on terror.

The Navy distributed a press release in which it enumerated more specific and immediate objectives for the resurrected fleet, including “acting together with the navies of allied nations on bilateral and multilateral training operations and operations against narco-trafficking originating in the region.”

According to the Pentagon, in recent years the Colombian drug cartels have gone so far as to utilize secretly built submarines to get their product to foreign markets.

But it is not merely the drug cartels that are in the Pentagon’s sights. The Venezuelan navy is also a potential target. In June of last year, President Chavez signed an agreement with Moscow to acquire nine Russian submarines at a price which is estimated at between one and two billion dollars. According to the Pentagon, the reactivation of the Fourth Fleet is also justified by this change in the correlation of forces in the region.

To lend this expansion of military power in the region a veneer of legitimacy in international circles, the Pentagon needs to promote the pretext that the Colombian FARC or the crisis-ridden government of Hugo Chavez represent a similar danger to the world and “democracy” as that which Washington has attributed to Al Qaeda and other Islamist groups in the Middle East.

As far as democracy goes, a far greater danger is posed by Washington’s closest ally, the government of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, who is personally implicated in the operations of drug traffickers and right-wing paramilitary death squads which, with CIA and US military training, have specialized in the killing of trade unionists, peasants and university students.

The drive by the Pentagon to expand its military control over Latin America is not new. For a number of years, it has sought to establish new military bases in the region. The presence of drug trafficking – which has continued unabated despite the decades-old “war on drugs” – and Hugo Chávez and his “arms race” represent only most convenient pretexts for promoting this expansion.

The US appears likely to lose its only permanent military base in South America – located in Ecuador’s port city of Manta – when the Pentagon’s lease on the air force facility expires in November of next year. Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa has vowed not to renew it, while the country’s constituent assembly is drafting a new constitution that is to include a prohibition against any foreign bases on Ecuadorian soil.

In the meantime, the American military is searching for other possible bases, including in Paraguay. “We’re always looking for opportunities for what I call lily pads – places we can go in for a week or two and then get out,” Lt. Gen. Norman Seip, commander of US Air Forces Southern Command told the US military newspaper Stars and Stripe. “It increases our presence, and makes us more unpredictable in operations.”

Reestablishing the Fourth Fleet, with its aircraft carriers as well as US Marine and Navy Seal contingents, provides a floating base for US interventions throughout the continent.

Behind the resurrection of the Fourth Fleet lie the same fundamental tendencies underlying the explosion of American militarism on a world scale. It is the attempt by US imperialism to offset its relative decline as an economic power by reliance on its continuing military supremacy. Europe and increasingly China are playing a growing role in Latin American trade and investment at the expense of US interests.

Trade between Latin America and China topped $100 billion last year, a 46 percent increase over 2006. Meanwhile, the European Union, which is second only to the US in terms of Latin American trade and foreign investment, is increasingly outstripping Washington in the negotiation of free trade agreements on the continent. Today, the US accounts for less than 20 percent of the exports from Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Peru.

The one area where US imperialism can still demonstrate unquestioned superiority against its economic rivals is in the deployment of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines, which is just what it is now preparing to do off the coasts of Latin America.