Tenth Fleet Summit
| Tenth Fleet Summit | |
| Flag Event (FE) | |
| Type: | Fleet muster & annual gathering |
| Status: | Active |
| Location: | Rotating — conventions within the Tenth Fleet area of responsibility |
| When: | Annual |
| First held: | 2015 |
| Host: |  Tenth Fleet
|
The Tenth Fleet Summit is the annual in-person gathering of the Tenth Fleet. Rather than being tied to a single venue, the summit is held each year at a science-fiction convention somewhere within the fleet's area of responsibility — which spans California, Oregon, and Washington — and is hosted by a local echelon or chapter. It serves as the fleet's principal muster, bringing together the crews of its member chapters for a program of meetings and ceremonies over the convention weekend.
Format
As originally designed in 2015, the Tenth Fleet Summit is not a single meeting but a series of separate sessions held across the convention weekend, each aimed at a different tier of the fleet — so that there is something for essentially every level of the membership:
- State of the Fleet Address — delivered by the Fleet Commanding Officer or their designated proxy, an address to take stock of where the fleet is presently by examining recent events, and setting goals for the remainder of the year until the next summit.
- Commanding Officers' Meeting — chapter commanding officers and echelon commanders meet with Fleet Staff to work through the how of executing the fleet's plan, with open questions and discussion on making things work at the chapter level in alignment with fleet direction.
- Senior Enlisted Meeting — the same format as the officers' meeting, but run by the FSMCPO specifically for bosuns, gunnies, and senior enlisted advisors. The enlisted track runs parallel to, and separate from, the officers' track.
- Flag Officers' Meeting — a smaller, more focused session for flag-rank officers and echelon command only, addressing higher-level topics such as echelon-support alignment and troubleshooting that do not need to be raised in front of the full room.
- Awards Ceremony — led by the Fleet Commanding Officer, presenting promotions, awards, and recognition for service over the previous fiscal year. It closes out the summit and sends members back to the convention floor on a positive note.
- Track Programming — panels spread throughout the convention weekend covering a myriad of topics with broad appeal (military history, the business of organized fandom, social media management, recruitment & retention) to invite non-members to discuss and engage with Fleet personnel.
In addition to these sessions, summits have hosted commissioning ceremonies for newly formed chapters and vessels — for example, HMS Cerberus was commissioned at the 2015 summit.[1]
Host conventions
Because the Tenth Fleet's area of responsibility is geographically vast — spanning California, Oregon, Washington, and beyond — Fleet leadership (the Commanding Officer, Deputy Commanding Officer, and FSMCPO) established a practice of alternating the summit between northern and southern locations to keep travel distances equitable for the fleet's widely dispersed ships and members. Accordingly the summit rotates between northern venues in the Pacific Northwest — such as NorWesCon (SeaTac, Washington), OryCon (Portland, Oregon), and RadCon (Pasco, Washington) — and southern venues in California, principally BayCon (Santa Clara), with a nearby echelon or chapter serving as host each year.[2] In the north the host has typically been Battlecruiser Squadron 96 (SeaTac's NorWesCon, 2016 and 2018) or a local chapter such as HMS Eardsidh Kamerling (RadCon, 2020); in the south, Task Group 91.1 (2015, 2017, 2019) and the fleet flagship HMS Medusa (2022). No fleet summit was held in 2023, when the TRMN-wide MantiCon was co-located with BayCon and the entire fleet travelled south to attend.
Separately from the fleet-wide summit, when the summit was held in the north Task Group 91.1 convened its own Task Group 91.1 Summit for the task group's own (largely California-based) members at BayCon in 2016 and 2018. The destroyer HMS Chainshot was commissioned at the first of these, BayCon 2016.[1]
Summits by year
| Year | Convention | Location | Host echelon | Notable events |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | BayCon | Santa Clara, CA | Task Group 91.1 | Commissioning of HMS Cerberus |
| 2016 | NorWesCon | SeaTac, WA | Battlecruiser Squadron 96 | |
| 2017 | OryCon 39 | Portland, OR | Task Group 91.1 | |
| 2018 | NorWesCon | SeaTac, WA | Battlecruiser Squadron 96 | |
| 2019 | BayCon | Santa Clara, CA | Task Group 91.1 | |
| 2020 | RadCon | Pasco, WA | HMS Eardsidh Kamerling | Held that February, before the pandemic shutdown |
| 2022 | BayCon | Santa Clara, CA | HMS Medusa | |
| 2023 | No fleet summit — subsumed by MantiCon at BayCon 2023 | The whole fleet travelled south for the TRMN-wide MantiCon | ||
| 2024 | BayCon | Santa Clara, CA | — | |
| 2025 | OryCon | Portland, OR | — | |
| 2026 | BayCon | Santa Clara, CA | — | Designated a Flag Event by Tenth Fleet Order 2511-01[3] |
No fleet summit was held in 2021, when BayCon was cancelled/virtual and its northern conventions were likewise disrupted by the pandemic; the 2020 summit had gone ahead at RadCon that February, before the shutdown.[4] Host echelons for the 2024, 2025, and 2026 summits are not yet recorded here.
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Task Group 91.1 — task group history documenting the 2015 summit and its commissioning.
- ↑ Tenth Fleet — fleet history documenting the host chapters and their home regions.
- ↑ Orders:Tenth Fleet Order 2511-01
- ↑ BayCon — convention history, including the 2020 cancellation and 2021 virtual event.