Navy, Marine Corps Sea Base Effort Inspires Joint-Service Cooperation

By HUNTER C. KEETER
Associate Editor

Under the cover of darkness, a squadron of stealthy, heavily armed U.S. Navy warships motored within 5,000 feet of the beach to attack an enemy bunker complex. The squadron’s precision gunfire smashed the enemy’s communication system. At the same time, fast lighters swept ashore at an unprepared, mine-free landing site carrying 12,000 combat-ready U.S. Army and Marine Corps infantry.

The battle fleet, standing off in the littoral, dropped 1,000 tons of ordnance onto the bunkers, shattering their defenses. At a signal from the joint-service — Navy and Army — command staff afloat and ashore, U.S. troops assaulted into the complex to victory amid “a hell of noise” and fire.

The scene at Fort Fisher, near Wilmington, N.C., Jan. 13-15, 1865, foreshadowed the potential of inter-service cooperation, projecting power from a flexible “base” of ships at sea. The promise of joint sea basing in the future, according to experts in the Department of Defense, is to provide options for dealing with modern challenges such as commanding and controlling joint-force action, gaining access to a theater of operations and providing joint force logistics.

“When we take a look at global close-down capability [equipping troops to create a combat-ready force] from anywhere on the globe to hundreds of miles inland, the world becomes a much smaller place,” said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Richard O. Moore, of the U.S. Joint Forces Command. “The joint force commander has multiple options he hasn’t had in the past. This changes the way we approach battle.”

The Defense Science Board — the DoD’s top panel of technical advisors — reported in 2003 that the naval sea basing concept should rank high among joint-service efforts. Following the recommendation, DoD officials have considered, but have not established, a joint sea base program office. Since 2003, however, Joint Forces Command, headquartered at Norfolk, Va., has led inter-service concept experimentation in joint sea basing.

Defense officials consider the sea basing concept part of a “global force projection and sustainment capability,” according to officials such as Darlene Costello, a naval warfare specialist in the office of the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics. Also included in that capability are land-, air- and space-based concepts that would complement the sea base.

The Army has been working with the naval forces to develop joint sea basing technologies, including future maritime prepositioning force ships. According to Navy Vice Adm. Charles W. Moore Jr., deputy chief of naval operations for fleet readiness and logistics, “The Army will be far more involved than they are today, and more integrated into developing the [sea basing] operational concepts.”

So far, the Air Force’s role in sea basing is less well defined, according to Costello.

Neither Air Force headquarters, nor the Air Force Air Mobility Command — delegated to the U.S. Transportation Command and a key logistics organization — have formal representation in the sea basing discussion. That may not change until after a formal joint sea basing program office is established.

The Air Force is developing its own approaches to power projection and expeditionary warfare. These approaches include B-2 and B-52 bomber squadrons flying from the continental United States directly to a combat operation. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the Air Force demonstrated a limited capability to reach almost anywhere in the world, provided there is sufficient aerial refueling.

Joint Command and Control

Proponents of the joint sea base say their plan not only provides global striking power, but a foundation for networked command and control. Each of the geographically dispersed ships comprising the sea base will be linked by information technologies. The network this creates could provide an embarked joint battle staff with a common operational picture necessary to direct actions on land, at sea, in the air and in space.

“The glue that pulls the joint sea base together is the networked command and control,” a DoD official told Sea Power. “This is not service-centric and it creates a mandate for a great deal of interoperability, at a higher level than we have demanded in the past.”

Networking the joint sea base together must drive information “down to the tactical level,” where DoD has historically not invested its dollars for command and control, according to the official. Much of that investment to date has been in operational and strategic headquarters levels.

The Navy already networks enormous amounts of information for its ships at sea. Broadening that capability to enable joint force command and control presents several challenges. Among them are the physical limitations of shipboard antennas to transmit and receive information. With current technology, ships’ “bandwidth pipes” are narrower than those of land bases.

Another challenge is converting raw data into knowledge upon which leaders may act. With more forces operating together, more sensors and information collection tools are providing data to the network. One solution could be reducing the amount of data analysis carried out aboard ship. Instead, a joint command staff could use information technology to “reach back” to the continental United States or other headquarters location for analytical expertise.

Joint Access

Perhaps more important than servicing command and control, the joint sea base could overcome the challenge of access that still plagues military operations. In February 2003, Turkey and Saudi Arabia refused the use of their ports and air bases in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The decisions came as a surprise to the DoD, as both nations are friendly to the United States and Turkey is a NATO ally.

Turkey and Saudi Arabia’s decisions scrapped the original war plans, which had included opening a northern front into Iraq through Turkish Kurdistan. Instead, a massive air- and sealift operation was mounted to move the Army’s 4th Infantry Division south to Kuwait.

A shortage of air bases north and south of Iraq meant fewer landing sites for Air Force tanker aircraft. That cut the number of sorties and the combat reach of U.S. and coalition strike aircraft, according to the senior military officials.

A DoD official told Sea Power, “We can no longer rely on a fixed, well-developed infrastructure to lodge large quantities of forces and equipment and sustainment. We need a capability to quickly insert a coherently joint force and support equipment into geographically challenging areas on a global scale from the sea, and to support the forces throughout the operation from the same sea base.”

The situation during Operation Iraqi Freedom highlighted the potential impact of denied access and has forced many in the DoD to rethink how it gets forces to a theater of operations. Among its other attributes, proponents of the joint sea base argue this would provide access through the littoral.

“When we have complete access through the littoral, then sea basing is viable,” Army logistician Col. Dave G. Saffold said. “Our seaborne lines of communication would become almost as responsive as our airborne lines of communication. That is going to change our thinking and how we approach maritime operations.”

Joint Logistics

For generations maritime operations were approached from the viewpoint of strategists such as Alfred Thayer Mahan. In his 1892 work, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1805, Mahan wrote that naval operations and land operations should be considered separately. He argued, as had Sir Walter Raleigh in the 17th century, that control of the open sea by destroying an enemy’s fleet was the key to winning war.

Turning from the blue-water focus of the last 100 years, naval forces have tended to steer closer to shore — to the littoral. Bordering the world’s littoral are 80 percent of the population centers and, passing through these, most of the world’s commerce. Seen in that light, the theories of British strategist Sir Julian Stafford Corbett may be more appropriate than Mahan’s as a foundation for sea basing.

In 1911, Corbett published Some Principles of Maritime Strategy, describing how land and naval forces must work jointly to control the sea, by gaining and governing access to the lines of communication and commerce in the littoral.

“The lens we look through today views developing the ability to close down a force anywhere on the globe, including in austere environments that are unreachable by normal means,” Lt. Cmdr. Moore noted. “This contrasts with our current capability, which requires world-class ports to off-load supplies from deep-draft vessels,” such as the Navy’s Large, Medium Speed Roll-on, Roll-off (LMSR) ships.

Saffold told Sea Power military logistics remains a “slow and cumbersome” process. Operation Iraqi Freedom required a huge build-up of materiel in Kuwait, the largest since the preparations for D-Day, June 6, 1944. Most of that materiel came into the theater on Navy transport ships.

The Military Sealift Command (MSC), led by Vice Adm. David L. Brewer III, deployed 167 ships to Operation Iraqi Freedom. More than 90 percent of the war’s military cargo was delivered via MSC ships, including from maritime prepositioned force vessels. From January 2003 through the end of April 2003, MSC ships delivered more than 21 million square feet of equipment, 260 million gallons of fuel and 95,000 tons of ammunition for the war effort. Naval fleet auxiliary force oilers delivered more than 117 million gallons of fuel for ships and aircraft.

Breaking the link to this “iron mountain” of materiel and moving it to ships at sea would provide military forces with greater flexibility. “Think of what would happen if we could load up I Marine Expeditionary Force and deploy it, but en route could change its configuration at sea, right there in the littoral,” Saffold said. “That exposes some options that we haven’t had before.”

Hour-to-hour, day-to-day, the components of a military team would change during an operation, requiring an emphasis on logistics. “It is important to have the capacity to reconstitute a force rapidly,” said Rear Adm. John M. Kelly, commander of Navy Warfare Development Command. “If the situation is changing rapidly somewhere else, we want to be able to pull a joint force out of an area and redeploy them in a different area, perhaps in a totally different scenario.”

An old saying goes, “Tactics wins the battle, but logistics wins the war.”

When Fort Fisher fell in 1865, the way was clear for Federal troops to outmaneuver the Confederate guardians of the Cape Fear River Estuary, forcing the surrender of Wilmington on Feb. 22 of that year. As a large seaport and the nexus of three railroads, Wilmington held open to Gen. Robert E. Lee the last lines of supply and strategic mobility. With the port’s capture, the blockade of the Confederacy was total. At Richmond, the besieged Army of Northern Virginia was doomed.

The assault on Fort Fisher, though limited in scope compared with what the Pentagon has in mind for joint sea-based operations, remained the largest combined force action in U.S. military history, until World War II.