Pvt. First Class Daniel Creamer from Panama City Beach, Fla., mans a gun aboard The USS Mount Whitney, the command and control center for a U.S.-led task force for the Horn of Africa, Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2002, as the ship circles in the Gulf of Aden. The U.S.-led combined task force to combat global terrorism in and around the strategic Horn of Africa formally opened for business last Friday with the arrival of the USS Mount Whitney in the Gulf of Aden off Djibouti.
Point of information, and a peeve: USS is a title. No American-English speaker would say "The Dr. Chemist_Geek". USS is a title, like "Doctor," or most accurately, "Miss." Different, huh?
Thus endeth the naval grammar lesson...
Homeported in Norfolk, Virginia, USS Mount Whitney (LCC/JCC-20) was constructed by the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company and is named for the 14,946-foot peak in the Sierra-Nevada range in California, the highest point in the lower continental United States.
It is the first ship in the U.S. Navy to bear this name. Mount Whitney serves as the Flagship for Commander Second Fleet/Commander Striking Fleet Atlantic and has a complement of 600 enlisted personnel and officers. Mount Whitney was the first U.S. Navy combatant to permanently accommodate women on board. As the most sophisticated Command, Control, Communications, Computer, and Intelligence (C4I) ship ever commissioned, Mount Whitney incorporates various elements of the most advanced C4I equipment and gives the embarked Joint Task Force Commander the capability to effectively command all units under the command of the Commander, Joint Task Force.