In May 2024, I was honored to be invited aboard USS George Washington (CVN-73) at Naval Station Mayport, Florida, to celebrate the commencement of Southern Seas 2024 — the U.S. Navy’s annual multinational maritime exercise operating across the waters of the Western Hemisphere. The invitation came from Rear Admiral Jim Aiken, Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Southern Command/U.S. Fourth Fleet (USNAVSOUTH/FOURTHFLT). What followed was a morning of substantive engagement with naval leaders, allied partner representatives, and crew members that offered sharper insight into why exercises like Southern Seas matter beyond their operational purpose.
The Strategic Context
Southern Seas 2024 deployed USS George Washington alongside USS Porter (DDG-78) and USNS John Lenthall (T-AO-189) in a combined task group that would navigate around South America conducting exercises with maritime forces from allied partner nations. The exercise design reflects a broader strategic imperative: building interoperability, shared doctrine, and personal relationships with partner nations before they are needed in a crisis.
The event drew over 1,000 participants — Navy personnel, allied nation officers, civilian officials, and invited guests. Conversations ranged from technical interoperability challenges to strategic alignment between U.S. and partner nation defense priorities. The diversity of perspectives in a single space underscored a point that is easy to lose in policy documents: alliance strength is built person by person, conversation by conversation.
Observations on Naval Partnership
Two observations from the day stand out as strategically relevant beyond the immediate exercise context.
First, the value of in-person engagement at operational venues remains irreplaceable. Subject matter expert exchanges — the kind Southern Seas formalizes through its program design — accomplish in hours what months of correspondence cannot: they establish shared understanding of how each partner nation thinks about a problem, what constraints they operate under, and where genuine alignment exists. For defense organizations designing interoperability programs or coalition support structures, this is not a soft benefit — it is an operational foundation.
Second, the infrastructure investment conversation around Naval Station Mayport is worth tracking. The station previously hosted USS John F. Kennedy (CV-67), and proposals have circulated for facility upgrades — dredging, updated shore power, communications, and transport infrastructure — that would enable Mayport to support modern carrier operations more effectively. As of mid-2024, visible progress on those upgrades remained limited. For federal planners and contractors engaged in naval facility modernization, the gap between strategic intent and execution at Mayport represents both a program challenge and a market opportunity.
Why Field Engagement Matters for Federal Advisors
For COGNOSCERE, exercises and operational events like Southern Seas represent something beyond a networking opportunity. They are a primary source of ground-truth intelligence about how the organizations we serve actually operate — their priorities, their friction points, and the gap between stated requirements and lived experience. Advisory work disconnected from that operational reality produces recommendations that are technically correct and practically ineffective.
The conversations aboard USS George Washington reinforced what decades of federal and defense consulting have consistently demonstrated: the most valuable intelligence about an organization’s needs comes from being present where the work happens.