During the meeting, Ferguson was among the United States Fleet operations workforce leader who has taken the initiatives to comprehensively discuss interoperability of the United States Navy Maritime and Japan Maritime self-defense force. The main purpose of Ferguson’s meeting on September 5th (which happened to be the seventh Fleet Naval operations meeting) was to deliberate with sailors on the value-based importance brought about by forward-deployed naval forces. The meeting was addressed by Mark Ferguson who served as the Vice Chief of Naval operations with the help of April Beldo who was responsible to oversee issues of manpower, skill upgrading in human resources,s, and naval force education. A total of 3,000 sailors were in attendance drawn from the two main countries-U.S and Japan. Ferguson’s keynote address revolved around the Navy’s force forward presence. He observed that this mechanism in operations of sailors would enable the Navy force to be always at the point of action any time it matters to them as such. He asserted that “the Navy has to be where it matters” (Guzman 9). His main future goal for the Navy was to sustenance the operationality of the force as a way of assurance, aggression deterioration, and provision of stability and protection of the U.S interests. These aspects were captured in topics related to U.S Navy Fleet operations and sequestration. The measurable output anticipated from this meeting, according to Ferguson, was a consistent pattern of flow of resources, investments, and the latest technology to the greater Asian-Pacific region.
Although these naval aspects were provided by the keynote speaker, they had little relationship with how the U.S government was going to facilitate these moves. This is because, from George Washington’s assertion during the question-answer session, among the key objectives of the panel meeting was to brief the Naval team on the position of the government operations and their possible effects on the Navy and military (Guzman 9).
Work Cited
MC3 Ricardo Guzman. “VCNO Ferguson Discusses Big Navy, Regional Topics with GW Sailors”. The Flagship September 5 2013. Web. <http://issuu.com/militarynews/docs/fs0905/5(2013)>Accessed on 12 Sept 2014.