Editor's Notes
It is said that when amateurs discuss naval and military affairs they talk about tactics and technology, grand strategy and global politics, but when professional soldiers and sailors get together they talk about logistics.
Which is why, while the print media and Sunday morning talk shows have been focusing their attention on Afghanistan--and, more recently, on the latest Israeli/Palestinian conflict--the Pentagon's contingency planners have been concentrating on Phases Two, Three, and beyond of what may well be a decades-long war against international terrorism.
One or more of those future phases may well require--sooner rather than later, in all probability--a low-to-medium-intensity overseas conflict involving one or more Marine Expeditionary Brigades and several Army divisions. The overseas deployment of 100,000 or more U.S. service personnel translates into a need to supply and sustain them for an extended period of time ranging from several months to a year or more. That requires sealift--in substantial quantities. But the United States does not now possess the sealift capabilities that would be needed. And, in many areas of the world, air and ground bases probably will not be available in-country to U.S. forces.
What it boils down to is this: U.S. defense leaders--at the Pentagon, in the White House, and on Capitol Hill--will have to make two major, expensive, but unavoidable logistics decisions in the very near future. The first, well-articulated by NLUS National President Timothy O. Fanning in this month's President's Message (page 7), is to make more extensive and innovative use of the U.S. Navy's own "seabasing" capabilities--now resident primarily in aircraft carriers and large-deck amphibious ships, massively augmented by the multipurpose, multitalented, and seemingly ubiquitous ships and personnel of the Military Sealift Command.
The second decision should be to start the long-overdue rebuilding of the U.S.-flag Merchant Marine, which for far too many years has received virtually no attention from the American people or their elected leaders--few of whom seem to remember what Thomas Jefferson said two centuries ago about the then-fledgling U.S.-flag merchant fleet: "As a branch of industry it is valuable, but as a source of defense essential."
JDH
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