Sea Basing Concept Promises a Revolution in Power Projection

By RICHARD C. BARNARD
Editor in Chief

Ten days to the next world hot spot. That goal sums up a vision of the future shared by Navy and Marine Corps officials who intend to revolutionize the way the United States manages its forces, plans its operations and projects power ashore.

Marine Lt. Gen. Edward Hanlon Jr., commander of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, said it once took 30 to 45 days to move a Marine Expeditionary Brigade of about 16,000 Marines, their equipment and aircraft from the United States to a distant theater of operations. In the 1980s, that timeline was cut to approximately 17 to 20 days, due in part to the creation of the Maritime Prepositioning Force (MPF) of 16 ships based in Diego Garcia, Guam, Saipan and the Mediterranean. The force comprises three squadrons, each capable of supporting a Marine brigade for a month. Packaging the materiel for a brigade and basing the ships at strategic spots around the globe helped cut deployment times by half.

But 17 to 20 days is no longer good enough. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could … make it 10 to 14 days,” Hanlon said. In fact, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld wants all of the services to be able to conduct forcible entry operations over strategic distances in about 10 days. And the nation’s top sea service admirals and generals believe sea basing is the warfighting concept that will get them there.

Vice Adm. Charles W. Moore Jr., deputy chief of naval operations for fleet readiness and logistics, said, “There is probably nothing we are doing in the Navy today that excites us more than the potential and opportunity that sea basing presents to us.”

Moore and others are excited because sea basing does much more than cut their deployment timelines. It allows them, working in concert with other U.S. military services, to overcome political barriers between their forces and a battle area, such as nearby nations denying access routes to U.S. forces.

Sea basing, which officials view as a concept for joint operations, also rids military forces of one of their biggest handicaps, the iron mountain of weapons and materiel unloaded from the Navy’s transport ships and moved ashore where it must be guarded, allocated to staging areas and integrated with the force structure being constituted nearby.

Sea basing enables the military to move troops tailored for specific missions globally and at high speed, Hanlon said. It fosters the use of maneuver warfare to create uncertainty, forcing the enemy into a reactive posture.

The essence of sea basing is that U.S. military forces sent to world trouble spots typically will no longer establish beachheads, iron mountains or huge headquarters operations similar to that which now exists in Kuwait in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. All of those facilities and functions — and more — will be moved from land to a sea base at least 25 miles offshore. However, adversaries that search for a fortress at sea will not find one. The sea base is a concept, not a facility or location.

The Navy’s nominal plan for a sea base comprises an Expeditionary Strike Group, a Carrier Strike Group and Maritime Prepositioning Force (MPF) ships. The centerpiece of future sea bases will be a new MPF ship to be built beginning in 2007. Components may include a flight deck, accommodation for troops and a joint command-and-control center. When deployed, the sea base would be geographically dispersed but linked by an information network.

The sea base is scalable to each mission, capable of fast deployment and able to operate independently of in-theater ports or air bases. It must be able to sustain a fighting force 2,000 miles from the nearest friendly base. The Defense Science Board’s (DSB) August 2003 report, “Sea Basing,” states that, “Special operations forces, soldiers and Marines would assemble, together with their equipment, on the sea base to match the mission’s needs. … It entails the projection of land forces substantially beyond the beachhead …[and support] of such forces for prolonged periods.”

At the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space Exposition in Washington, D.C., in April, Hanlon said Rumsfeld had directed all of the services to find ways “to go faster, farther and deeper than we’ve ever done before.”

Vice Adm. John B. Nathman, deputy chief of naval operations for warfare requirements and programs, described Rumsfeld’s dictate as “a 10-30-30” strategy under which the services would deploy to a world hot spot within 10 days, defeat an enemy in 30 days and be ready to fight again in another 30 days.

Hanlon noted that “whatever we do in the future is going to be a joint fight,” and that the maneuver and speed now expected of joint forces will be easier to achieve because they no longer will be tied to their iron mountain of materiel. “We’ll be able to access things very rapidly from our sea base, take what we need, do our mission and get out of there.”

The sea base and maneuver warfare that it fosters will expand the range of options available to tactical units. “It just expands our maneuver space and enables us to strike the enemy in places where you can’t even believe,” Hanlon said.

Sea basing is not new. Hanlon’s briefing on sea basing includes episodes from conflicts that occurred decades ago. More recently, the Navy moved the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk into the Arabian Gulf during Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) for use by Task Force Sword, a joint special operations force that conducted operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan during the war. Navy officials came out of that war convinced that they needed to “leverage this tremendous capability that we had demonstrated so well in OEF,” Moore said.

The concept is part of the Sea Power 21 strategy of Adm. Vern Clark, chief of naval operations. Other elements include Sea Strike, Sea Shield and Sea Enterprise. What is new is that sea basing provides the conceptual foundation for a wide range of military operations by joint forces. It would make new uses of existing assets by, for example, possibly incorporating elements of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division in operations from a sea base, enabling the U.S. forces to project power ashore “with less political cost and reduced vulnerability,” the DSB report states.

However, the sea basing concept is a work in progress with major components of the sea base still to be developed under the direction of Moore and Marine Lt. Gen. Richard Kelly, deputy commandant for installations and logistics. Reporting to them are numerous concept of operations (ConOps) groups developing elements of the sea basing scheme. Included are ConOps groups on logistics, the Maritime Prepositioning Force ship of the Future (MPF(F)), and medical operations.

Top priorities include:

• Developing a joint sea basing concept that encompasses operations of all services. The DSB report repeatedly points to the need for all military forces to project power from the sea, given “emerging threats and vulnerabilities.” Sea services leaders agree that “jointness” is a key to the success of sea basing.
• Finalizing the design criteria of the MPF(F). The MPF(F) will be a multifunction ship at the center of the sea base. Prospective design features include a huge flight deck, a command-and-control center on some ships and accommodations for a joint force commander and staff.
• Aligning the logistics systems of the four military services, which are incompatible. Even Navy and Marine Corps units assigned to the same amphibious ships use separate logistics systems.
  Devising a selective offload system for sea base ships, an essential element of the services’ determination to rid themselves of the iron mountain of materiel. Today, unloading means “essentially taking the mountain of material that is on board the ship and putting that mountain on the beach,” said Jonathan Kaskin, the Navy’s director of strategic mobility and combat logistics. “We want to selectively offload the capability that is required at the time that it’s required” using flexible logistics management tools.
• Developing and buying the right “connectors” — aircraft and vessels — to move fighting units and their equipment and supplies from the sea base to shore.

With sea basing, “We’ve sort of rediscovered ourselves,” Moore said. “We’ve taken for granted this tremendous maneuver space we have on planet Earth … and we’re now focusing on it in a way that is going to give the United States the most bang for the buck in the future.”