Forward Progress

The sea basing scheme that would revolutionize U.S. power projection moves toward Joint Chiefs’ approval as a joint warfighting concept.

By DAVID W. MUNNS, Assistant Editor

The Pentagon planned in August to release a document by a little-known team of midlevel military strategists that marks a significant step forward for the sea basing concept intended to transform the way the Pentagon structures and manages its forces, plans its operations and projects power ashore.

Called the “Seabasing Joint Integrating Concept (JIC),” the document adds enriching detail to the idea of using the sea, rather than land, as a staging area for future major combat operations, thus eliminating the huge headquarters and iron mountains of materiel ashore that now support large contingencies such as the war in Iraq.

Prepared by a multiservice Integrated Product Team chartered by the Joint Staff, the document recasts sea basing as a multiservice concept under assessment by the Joint Chiefs rather than a transformational scheme solely for the Navy and Marine Corps. The JIC focuses on operational capabilities from 2015-2025 and cautions that “U.S. options to extend global influence through forward basing of military capability are diminishing. … The challenge for our national and military leaders will be to be able to maintain global presence and security in the face of decreasing access.”

Left unsaid in the report is that two longtime allies, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, in 2003 refused the use of their ports or air bases as the United States prepared to topple the regime of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. That scrapped the Pentagon’s initial plans to open a northern front into Iraq and fueled the determination of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to create new, more flexible warfighting capabilities for the future.

Flinty and tenacious, Rumsfeld continues to pound away from atop the Defense Department’s hierarchy to craft a basing policy that places “more emphasis on the ability to surge quickly to trouble spots across the globe, and making U.S. forces more agile and expeditionary.”

“The new challenge,” he told the Congress this year, “is to project joint power more rapidly to confront unexpected threats.”

Rumsfeld has been pushing for faster, lighter forces since 2001, when he became the Bush administration’s defense chief. But it was after the assault on Baghdad in early 2003 that he began talking in earnest about shaping the services into a force able to move to world trouble spots in 10 days, defeat an enemy in 30 days and move on. By then, Marine Corps and Navy leaders believed they had a warfighting concept that would help make Rumsfeld’s vision a reality.

Since the late 1990s, naval leaders had been discussing an old idea called sea basing. Some saw an adaptation of it as the wave of the future, and retired Adm. Vern Clark, then-chief of naval operations, made sea basing part of his Sea Power 21 plan to overhaul Navy goals and operations. In 2003, Clark and Gen. Michael Hagee, commandant of the Marine Corps, made it the centerpiece of their efforts to transform their respective forces.

However, sea basing was still a broad mandate for the naval forces that needed operational detail and the embrace of all four military services — a prerequisite for a world in which joint operations are the rule.

In June 2004, the Joint Chiefs directed the development of a joint integrating concept for sea basing that would involve all the services and meet the needs of the nation’s nine combatant commanders. That job fell to a JIC Integrated Product Team led by the Navy and comprising strategists of the four services, including the Army’s requirements office, the Air Force and the Marine Corps Expeditionary Force Development Center. The team sought ideas from the policy development offices of several Pentagon organizations, including the Central and Pacific Commands.

The JIC document, an interim step in the development of a sea basing strategy for the future, is intended to create a picture for the Joint Staff and services of ideas available for sea basing and the capabilities of each of the four services that would help bring the concept to life. It describes how sea basing will enable the military to operate jointly throughout the littoral with “minimal or no access to nearby land bases” and with no long-term U.S. presence on foreign shores.

“Many nations may find it politically untenable to host U.S. bases or allow access through their territory,” the document states, noting that even longtime allies such as Japan, Saudi Arabia, Greece, South Korea and Italy have a reduced tolerance “for basing of U.S. forces in their countries.”

A central element of sea basing is that it remains an operational scheme; it is not a location or fortress at sea. The Defense Science Board’s seminal 2003 report on sea basing described it as “a hybrid system of systems consisting of concepts of operations, ships, forces, offensive and defensive weapons, aircraft, communications and logistics” that are distributed, networked and operating in concert.

Most tasks now done ashore — such as staging of forces, joint forces command and materiel support — would be moved to the sea base. Connector craft, such as heavy-lift rotorcraft and fast, light, shallow-draft transport ships, would ferry forces ashore, or perhaps hundreds of miles inland, and keep them supplied.

Cmdr. Mark Becker, leader of the JIC Integrated Product Team, said, “In dealing with an insurgency, we can move the sea base anywhere along the adversary’s coast that is of benefit to the counterinsurgency, while at the same time minimizing our footprint ashore, which starts to take away from the insurgents’ ability to exploit our presence.”

Units of a sea base would remain at least 25 miles offshore, fostering the ability to quickly and covertly insert a joint force into the battlespace. The ability to strike from virtually any direction while keeping support units and materiel beyond the horizon increases uncertainty on the part of adversaries.

The JIC document states that joint force commanders “will use sea basing to rapidly build, integrate and project combat power from over-the-horizon with distributed and netted forces to seize the initiative.”

It lays out concepts, risks, capabilities and attributes of a future offshore base that accounts for the needs of all military services. Becker told Seapower that sea basing is essentially “expanding maneuver warfare into the sea.”

The Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) has representatives on the JIC Integrated Product Team and “is rapidly trying to develop their concept of operations for sea basing. One of their primary concepts is called Operational Maneuver from Strategic Distances,” said Becker.

A TRADOC document on joint operations published in April states that “forces will often flow from locations outside the theater directly into objective areas rather than through intermediate staging bases. ... Future force integration with joint sea basing capabilities will further improve responsiveness and operational flexibility.”

The Army has for years been working on its version of offshore basing, and is developing platforms that would facilitate the sea basing concept, including the Austere Access High Speed Sealift, a high-speed, shallow-draft vessel for inter-theater sealift.

Additionally, Army Prepositioning Ships are transforming to the Army Strategic Flotilla, which will operationally mirror the Navy’s Maritime Prepositioning Force–Future to be built beginning in 2007.

The Army also is acquiring new platforms to operate from an offshore base, such as the Army Afloat Staging Base, which is used to project an air assault brigade combat team vertically into the fight, and the Supply Support Activity Afloat, a platform that will be used to sustain troops on the ground.

“We’ve got to include more of a joint force in everything we do,” Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes, then-TRADOC commanding general, said in the JIC report. “Our commitment to a capabilities-based joint force will give combatant commanders the right options in the right place at the right time.”

The Marine Corps has made vast contributions to the release of the JIC, and views sea basing as central to its future operations.

“If, in 2020, we had to do Operation Iraqi Freedom, ships would come into the Gulf, we’d do the arrival and assembly at sea, the Marines would launch, instead of from Kuwait, from the sea base directly into” the conflict, Hagee said during a June interview with the Pentagon Channel.

The Air Force helped prepare the JIC but has no formal involvement or programs to date that contribute to sea basing.

The next steps for the “Seabasing JIC” include a thorough vetting by a Joint Staff assessment group and consideration by a Joint Chiefs “tank session,” leading to its official approval as one of seven joint operational concepts for U.S. forces. Operational concepts already exist for global strike and integrated air and missile defense, for example.

Headed by Air Force Col. Gregory Cook, chief of the Studies, Analysis and Gaming Division within the Joint Staff, the Capabilities Based Assessment team will analyze the JIC, looking for gaps and redundancies in the concept.

The team is also identifying strengths of the concept as it affects military planning and strategy. For example, by basing offshore, “you may reduce force requirements to support military action because there’s a cost to move and transport various elements needed by the warfighter in conflict,” Cook told Seapower.

One of the greatest challenges in developing an agreed-upon concept is that many requirements each service requests are service-specific, meaning that they are operationally feasible only for a particular branch of the military.

“As soon as I start looking at undersea superiority, I’m in someone else’s lane,” Cook said. “As soon as I start looking at air and missile defense, or logistics, I’m in someone else’s lane. I don’t want to repeat their work. What I’m trying to do is integrate the work, and therein lies the challenge.”

An approved JIC for sea basing also could lead to the establishment of a joint sea basing and force projection program office reporting directly to Rumsfeld or, more likely, one of his undersecretaries. In January 2004, Rumsfeld’s acquisitions office proposed such a step, but it was blocked by the Joint Staff because creation of the office had been done outside the Pentagon’s joint capabilities and integration process intended to eliminate duplication between services and ensure that new proposals are relevant to the needs of joint commanders.

“Seabasing unifies our capabilities for projecting offensive power, defensive power, command and control, mobility and sustainment around the world,” John J. Young Jr., assistant secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition, told Congress last year. “It will enable commanders to generate high-tempo operational maneuver by making use of the sea as a means of gaining and maintaining advantage.”