Mobile Bases
Although it is now almost eight months since the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers in New York City and the Pentagon, Phase One of the U.S.-led war against international terrorism--defeat of the Taliban and al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan--is still far from over, according to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, and may well continue for several more years.
Thanks to the spectacular initial successes of the U.S./coalition precision bombing campaign, though, it seems safe to suggest that Afghanistan itself can be removed from the list of more than 60 countries around the world known to have supported terrorism in various ways in recent years. In many of the other countries on the list the presence of al Qaeda and/or other terrorist groups is relatively small. In others--Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, primarily, with Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, the Philippines, and Indonesia only a few paces behind--terrorism is a growth industry that represents a clear and present danger not only to the United States and its allies but to overall global peace and stability.
The eight countries named, and about a dozen others--including several in the Middle East of particular economic and political importance to the United States--share two common characteristics. The first is that, except for the Philippines, where U.S. troops are already on the ground helping to train Filipino counterterrorism forces, all have been extremely hostile to the United States in recent years. The second characteristic is that all of the countries named are easily reachable from the sea--much more so than Afghanistan is.
This second characteristic is of immense strategic importance--but seems not yet to be fully understood by U.S. defense planners at the Pentagon and/or by the nation's political leaders in the executive and legislative branches of government, and is certainly not reflected in the current "How Much Is Enough?" debate about the funding priorities in the fiscal year 2003 version of the administration's future years defense plan.
Another major factor has entered the equation since President Bush warned the American people, and U.S. allies as well as adversaries around the world, that the war against international terrorism will be both long and costly--namely, the increasing likelihood that, in many and perhaps most areas of the world, the United States will not have land bases available in-country for its forward-deployed air and ground forces. For that reason, many members of Congress, as well as the Pentagon's own contingency planners, have been giving more serious consideration to what might be called the sea-based option.
One possibility, supported by the Marine Corps, is the building and deployment of huge self-propelled Mobile Offshore Bases, or MOBs. It might take a decade or more, though, before an all-purpose MOB could be designed, built, and deployed overseas--and the war on terrorism is here and now. Fortunately, the U.S. Navy now has in its active inventory more than two dozen Mobile Bases that have already been paid for and have already been proven in combat. They operate offshore, and they are extremely mobile--but they are not called MOBs. These Mobile Bases--which is exactly what they are--are called aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships. Unlike the conceptual MOB, these Mobile Bases are very fast--the Navy's nuclear-powered Nimitz-class carriers can soar over the water at well over 30 knots, and even the slowest of the Navy's large-deck amphibious ships can do more than 20 knots. They are, in short, probably the most mobile war-fighting platforms ever built.
They are immensely lethal as well--except for ballistic missile submarines, they are the most powerful warships fielded by any nation in all world history. Operating offshore in international waters, they are extremely difficult to detect, much less target, and almost impossible to sink.
Of almost equal importance is the unusual degree of flexibility possessed by these Mobile Bases. Their armament and combat suites can be tailor-made for almost any mission anywhere in the world. As was proved in Afghanistan, their area of operations extends from the middle of the ocean to the offshore littorals of the world to landlocked countries hundreds of miles inland. That is mobility without limit. What is more, they have--thanks primarily to the refueling and replenishment capabilities of the Military Sealift Command's fleet oilers and combat stores ships--virtually infinite staying power. Those same MSC ships, it is worth noting, played a key role not only in supplying and sustaining U.S. Army troops, as well as Marines, in Afghanistan but also in transporting thousands of tons of ammunition and hundreds of millions of gallons of aviation fuel to the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force units flying strike sorties against the Taliban and al Qaeda.
No other nation, and no other service, can come close to duplicating the unique combination of capabilities represented by the U.S. Navy's current fleet of mobility assets--aircraft carriers, amphibious ships, and MSC resupply and replenishment ships. These capabilities are truly "transformational," to borrow a term now much in vogue at the Pentagon--but they are not being used as fully as they might be. What is needed, perhaps, is a transformation of the 20th-century mindsets still dominant at the upper levels of the Department of Defense and, to a much lesser extent, in the defense committees on Capitol Hill.
Timothy O. Fanning, National President
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