page_title: Henry C. Mustin (1933–2016)
section_title: USS Conyngham (DDG-17)
hierarchical_section_title: Henry C. Mustin (1933–2016) / Middle career / USS Conyngham (DDG-17)
caption_attribution_description: English: The U.S. Navy guided missile destroyer USS Conyngham (DDG-17) during an underway replenishment by the battleship USS Iowa (BB-61) in the Atlantic Ocean on 1 August 1985.
context_page_description: Henry "Hank" Croskey Mustin was a vice admiral in the United States Navy and among the namesakes of USS Mustin. He distinguished himself during both the Vietnam and Cold Wars. As a flag officer he commanded Cruiser Destroyer Group 2, US Second Fleet, NATO Striking Fleet Atlantic, and Joint Task Force 120, where he was responsible for 225 ships and 2,100 aircraft spanning over 45 million square miles from the Arctic Circle to the Equator. Vice Admiral Mustin directed US Navy arms control planning, including the START negotiations with the Soviet Union. He led high-level US interagency delegations to Moscow, London, Paris, Lisbon, Oslo and Seoul. As Commander, NATO Striking Fleet Atlantic, he instituted major strategic changes to the defense of NATO that shaped the nation's maritime strategy. He also served as the senior US military representative to the United Nations. He retired from the navy on January 1, 1989, after nearly 34 years of active duty service.
context_section_description: The executive officers of the new-construction guided missile destroyers were all lieutenant commanders with at least five years' seniority on Hank. On the other hand, he had served both as both chief engineer and weapons officer on the commissioning crew of the second ship in the class. He knew the ships extremely well; he was well versed in the dealings with New York Shipbuilding, and he had gained invaluable experience with the missile navy, as Maclane had appreciated. "Al had gone way out on a limb by sending this very junior officer to such a job," said Mustin. "I was the only lieutenant ever to be XO of a new construction DDG." After a lot of hard work, the ship "set all kinds of records, had the best INSURV that anybody had ever had, won all the Es as we did in the Lawrence: everything we did, we did superbly."
  Solid state components had entered the fleet during construction of the Conyngham, so maintenance of the weapon systems was not the great challenge it had been on the Lawrence. With the arrival of the King and the early version of the NTDS, Hank and his fellow officers were able to focus more on tactical development that incorporated the new capabilities. By the early 1960s, with the introduction of missiles, the idea of anti-air warfare was to launch a guided weapon that could make a kill in a single shot. The anticipated targets now were missiles instead of airplanes. The new threat required further refinements to anti-air warfare tactics.
  When the navy came to appreciate that missiles presented increasingly long-range engagement issues, anti-air warfare became an aviation as well as surface Navy issue. Only aircraft could engage enemy aircraft beyond the surface to air missile range. The idea was to "shoot at the archer and not the arrow." One very real risk in a crowded sky was in shooting down friendly planes. Both the surface and aviation unions now had a stake in tactical development.
  At the time, the navy leadership came primarily from the aviation community. It believed that aviation could prevent Soviet aircraft from getting within two hundred to three hundred miles (320 to 480 km) of a battle group to shoot a missile. The debate over whether manned aircraft or missiles would best perform the intercepts devolved into a fight between unions over who would get the funds to structure the force.
  Hank thus found himself involved in the genesis of fleet air defense against missiles, the tactical threat that would absorb the rest of his career and the next two decades of Navy development. After wrestling with these missile-navy issues, a tremendous number of ship captains and department heads, notably weapons department heads, would rise to flag officer rank into the 1970s.
  In the 1960s, however the navy was paying scant attention to anti-surface tactics, naval gunfire support, and gunnery in general. In July 1964, halfway through his tour, Hank made lieutenant commander a year early. Remembering Shoup's point that the surface Navy could not support an amphibious invasion of Cuba, he thought the Conyngham ought to spend a lot of time on gunfire support. The computers in the Conyngham, one of the last of the Adams-class, Hank knew, were digital and worked on Cartesian coordinates. The procedure "was borderline unworkable," he said. "The fire support doctrine had guys cranking north-south-east-west dials trying to get a vector at 45 degrees, so I invented a whole new procedure in which you used north-south-east-west coordinates instead of polar coordinates." To avoid the hand cranking, he had his department use a Cartesian plotting board that cut time by 70 percent and increased accuracy. Wholly counter to the commander's existing doctrine, his solution, despite record scores, earned the ship penalties during the force competitions at Guantanamo for not following procedure. He persisted and eventually got approval for his new gunfire support procedure, which was used throughout the destroyer force and later employed extensively for naval gunfire support in Vietnam. For this work, he got a Navy Achievement 
caption: USS Conyngham (DDG-17)
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