SAN DIEGO _ Vice Adm. Tom Rowden, the Navy's top surface warfare officer, will depart the service sooner than expected, the latest fallout in an ongoing probe into a rash of collisions in the Western Pacific that killed 17 sailors over the summer.
Nicknamed the "SWO Boss" because of his perch atop all Navy surface warfare officers, Rowden also was tasked with training and equipping the crews of most of the U.S. Pacific Fleet's warships at his Coronado-based command.
On Sept. 14, Rowden asked Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson to let him retire earlier than planned _ around April instead of in the summer. It appears now that he'll depart even sooner, within the next week, and it's not by choice.
Citing anonymous sources, both the U.S. Naval Institute and Defense News claimed an ongoing investigation by Adm. James Caldwell, head of the Navy's reactor program, into accidents involving the warships McCain, Fitzgerald, Lake Champlain and Antietam last year recommended the dismissal of Rowden.
No findings or recommendations have been released publicly from Caldwell's probe. Rear Adm. Richard Brown, the current director of Navy Personnel Command and the deputy chief of Naval Personnel, was expected to replace him.
Senior Pentagon officials told the San Diego Union-Tribune that Rowden's command would issue a statement later Tuesday.
Interim investigations into the crashes already have triggered the firings of the top officers aboard the McCain and Fitzgerald and the commodore of Japan-based Destroyer Squadron 15.
The commander of the Japan-based 7th Fleet, Vice Adm. Joseph Aucoin, retired earlier than expected and Adm. Scott Swift, the U.S. Pacific Fleet's commander, also indicated he would depart early, too.
Rowden was one of the primary architects of "distributed lethality," a suite of tactics designed to deter potential enemies like Russia or China but creating an offensively-minded, nimble and lethal legion of American surface warfare officers who could strike and scoot quickly to avoid detection and destruction.
He toiled to revamp the embattled littoral combat ship program, pausing operations in late 2016 to reboot the testing and training of all the vessels' engineering departments. His innovations reconfigured the sizes of their crews and crafted new squadrons in both San Diego and Mayport, Fla.
