Sealift key to Military Capabilities

Sealift key to Military Capabilities

TRANSCOM is also facing other, less well-known modernization challenges. The Ready Reserve Force (RRF), a group of cargo ships held in readiness by the Maritime Administration, is aging and will need to be modernized with newer ships at some point in the not too distant future. Sealift may not be quite as glamorous as airlift operations, but sealift support is critical to our Nation's capabilities. We have relied on sealift to deliver more than 90 percent of the cargo to Iraq and Afghanistan, similar to previous contingencies.

Sealift key to Fighting Capability

Minimized assets cause decreased seabasing abilities- that hamstrings our ability to fight on foreign soil

JNI 12 Intelligence, consultancy and advertising firm for the defense, national security and transport sectors (“Making connections: US marines return to the high seas”, Jane’s Navy International, April 1, 2012, 117. 3, http://search.proquest.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/docview/947094520) RaPa



Although the expression 'seabasing' was not officially codified as a verb in US doctrine until 2006, the genesis of the Department of the Navy's plan to equip, deploy and sustain a land force from a network of prepositioned ships in fact began as a US Army trial as early as 1964 in Okinawa, Japan. Known as Exercise 'Quick Release', it was "the first ever arrival and assembly exercise for afloat prepositioned equipment", said Jim Strock, director of the US Marine Corps' (USMC's) Seabasing Integration Division. "It was conducted by the army as part of their forward floating depot concept, which they envisaged to support operations in southeast Asia. "They planned this exercise in 1963, well before Vietnam became a household word," Strock added. "It's remarkable that some of these basing ideas were crafted nearly 50 years ago. Seabasing is by no means new." Now the eyes of the US naval service are turning again to Asia, given its increased prominence in the new national security strategy published by the Obama administration in January 2012. This document is intended to set out the framework for bolstering US presence in its Pacific Command (PACOM) and Central Command (CENTCOM): a policy that is likely to further increase demand for amphibious assets. Landing helicopter dock ships (LHDs) and other amphibious platforms are already in heavy demand from operational commanders in the Pacific and Middle Eastern regions. Between 2007 and 2010 the number of requests for three-ship amphibious ready groups (ARGs) and their accompanying marine expeditionary units (MEUs) rose by 86 per cent, while requests for individual amphibious warships increased by 53 per cent, according to Fleet Forces Command. The increased focus on PACOM and CENTCOM will require an ability to deploy men and materiel from the sea, Strock told IHS Jane's on 20 January. "Last time I checked there's a whole lot of water out there," he said. The new national security strategy and the recently released Fiscal Year 2013 (FY13) budget mark an inflection point for the USMC in particular. The service has long voiced a desire to return to its maritime roots after a decade of land warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan; however, the budget provides a new backdrop of austerity to the corps' seabasing plans. In the 1990s the US Navy (USN) and USMC developed an ambitious future vision based on the Maritime Prepositioning Force (Future) - MPF(F) - concept, which was designed to take prepositioned sealift and transform it into prepositioned amphibious lift by exploiting purpose-built shipping and advanced at-sea vehicle and cargo transfer systems. By 2007, the MPF(F) was envisaged as a single prepositioned squadron consisting of 14 vessels - two purpose-built 'flattop' assault ships and a legacy LHD, three dry cargo/ammunition replenishment ships (T-AKEs), three Large, Medium Speed, Roll-on/Roll-off (LMSR) ships (T-AKRs), two container ships (T-AKs) and three Mobile Landing Platforms (MLPs) - intended to provide a marine expeditionary brigade (MEB) with rapid reinforcement and sustainment from over the horizon. The proposed seabased force has now been significantly reduced in scale and re-orientated, losing the LHD and the purpose-built landing helicopter assault (LHA) ships. Each maritime prepositioning ships squadron (MPSRON) will consist of about seven vessels: a single Lewis and Clark-class T-AKE, one or two Bob Hope- or Watson-class LMSRs, a number of legacy T-AKs and a single MLP. The FY13 budget cut an additional MPSRON from the force structure and designated the third planned MLP as a future Afloat Forward Staging Base (AFSB) to support mine countermeasures (MCM) helicopters and special operations forces, primarily in CENTCOM. Presented with less than ideal building blocks for their seabasing concept, the USN and USMC nonetheless have cobbled together a plan to maximise existing assets to provide logistics support to forces ashore without the benefit of the uncontested ports and airfields that drove the entry into Iraq and Afghanistan. "The challenge that we have in seabasing - a major challenge that we're working through - is all of these piece parts were developed as independent programmes," Strock said. Modular, mobile and scalable Development of the seabasing concept began at the conclusion of the Cold War. The utility of forward-deployed US land forces diminished after the departure of the Soviet threat and the incentive was to push towards a modular, mobile and scalable force to exploit fully the sea control that the US had already established, according to a 2009 White Paper entitled 'Seabasing for the Range of Military Operations', written by the USMC's Combat Development Command. That shift was foreseen by naval historian Samuel P Huntington in 1954, according to the White Paper. "The base of the USN should be conceived of as including all those land areas under [US] control and the seas of the world right within a few miles of the enemy's shores," he wrote. "The objective should be to perform as far as practical the functions now performed on land at sea bases closer to the scene of the operation." While the rationale for this strategy is often popularised as the need to conduct forcible entry operations from the sea against a determined enemy ashore, both the USN and the USMC stress that seabasing capabilities are required in peacetime too. "Seabasing spans the full range of military operations from most likely to most dangerous. You certainly assemble MEBs to go fight the most dangerous places in the world, but what's most likely is the day to day things that we're doing with the new style of MPF ships," Strock said. "It's not some monolithic thing. It's tailored. It's task organised." The capability is something the marine corps in particular clings to. "This inherent flexibility and utility isn't widely understood or isn't appreciated, as evident by the frequent and erroneous assumption that forcible entry requirements alone define the capability of amphibious ships," the USMC's commandant, General James Amos, told the Surface Navy Association's annual symposium in January 2011. Amphibious lift certainly has wide utility in operations other than war: from peacekeeping and peace-enforcement to the provision of personnel and equipment for crisis management tasks, humanitarian aid/disaster relief (HADR) and military training to other nations. Recent examples of major US amphibious operations include the HADR responses to the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti and the March 2011 earthquake/tsunami in Japan. Minimising US military presence on the ground is part of the appeal of the sea base. During Exercise 'Bold Alligator 2012' (BA12) in January-February - which was billed as the largest US amphibious exercise in 10 years - logistics and C2 capabilities for a force of almost 4,000 marines were maintained by a group of ships off the US eastern seaboard as a proof of concept. "The idea is to avoid the perception of a long-term presence ashore. We like to keep our footprint as small as possible, not large enough to appear to the public that we're going to stay there for a long time," said exercise planner Lieutenant Commander George Pastoor of the Royal Netherlands Navy, speaking to IHS Jane's onboard the assault ship USS Wasp (LHD 1) on 3 February. The cost of procuring vessels for the original MPF(F) concept - intended to support an MEB from the sea - was originally estimated at USD15 billion.

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