Sea Basing has been a characteristic of navies since the first warships went to sea. The three most familiar examples of Sea Basing are for tactical air power, strategic nuclear deterrence, and Marine amphibious operations. Yet the Navy's history contains a number of other illustrations of Sea Basing.
Sea-Based Underway Replenishment
The Spanish-American War pushed the Navy into getting serious about Sea Basing. The Navy's blockade of a Spanish squadron in a Cuban port was jeopardized because its ships lacked the ability to refuel while under way. This lack required the Marines to secure Guantanamo Bay as a coaling station. After the war, the Navy embarked on a 15-year program to field an underway recoaling capability. By World War I, the Navy had devised a rig that enabled colliers to transfer coal from their fantails to a battleship's forecastle while under way. The shift from coal to oil ended this initiative, and during World War I refueling oil-fired destroyers while they crossed the Atlantic became common practice.
During the interwar period the Navy continued to refine its underway replenishment (UnRep) techniques. By the mid-1930s, the underway refueling of most combatants was a standard operating procedure, and in 1939 the Navy developed the ability to refuel carriers at sea (carriers already had the ability to refuel their escorts). The capability to UnRep food, stores, and ammunition was developed in the last year of World War II as the Navy prepared for sustained operations off Iwo Jima and Okinawa. These techniques were not developed further after 1945, and during the Korean War the Navy had to rely on the jury-rigged methods of the earlier war. UnRep during the Korean War was an evolution that occurred during daylight and in calm weather. It took a carrier under way off Korea ten hours to receive fuel, munitions, and stores from three different ships. These restrictions wasted valuable time.
When viewed in the context of the Navy's experience off Korea, one of the most significant developments in the history of sea basing appeared to be the development of the fast combat support ship (AOE). In 1945, the United States acquired the store ship Dithmarchen as a war prize from Germany. While not equipped with an UnRep rig, the Dithmarchen had separate holds for dry stores, refrigerated food, and ammunition, and was the fastest tanker of any nation then in service. The U.S. Navy renamed her the Conecuh (IX-301), fitted her with UnRep rigs, and tested the concept of a one-stop replenishment ship in a series of experiments in 1953 with the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. The success of these experiments led to the design and building of the Sacramento (AOE-1) class. The new AOE combined the capabilities of three ships into one. It also had a small flight deck and helicopter detachment to provide a vertical replenishment capability and a higher sustained speed that enabled the ship to keep pace with a carrier battle group. With the introduction of the AOE, the time to UnRep a carrier was reduced from ten to three hours.
Sea-Based Maintenance Support
The ultimate expression of Sea Basing in World War II was Service Force Pacific. The geography of the Central Pacific meant that support for the fleet had to be conducted afloat in remote anchorages or lagoons. Established to provide a mobile "sea base" for the U.S. Pacific Fleet, Service Force Pacific leveraged Sea Basing to provide the Navy's fast carrier task forces with the ability to conduct offensive operations against the Japanese far from the large, established bases normally required to sustain a large fleet. The first floating base in any navy, Service Squadron Four (ServRon 4), was commissioned in November 1943. ServRon 4 possessed tenders, tankers, repair ships, tugs, a wide variety of barges, freshwater distilling equipment, food, fuel, spare parts, and other supplies. Later ServRons included hospital ships, floating dry docks, floating cranes, and barracks ships. The ServRons set up shop in anchorages throughout the Central Pacific, turning them into major sea bases for the fleet. This sea-based capability was so important that 27 Liberty ships and 58 LSTs (tank landing ships) were converted into various types of repair ships at a time when the allocation of LSTs between the Pacific and Atlantic theaters was a significant factor in determining the dates for the invasions of Normandy and Southern France in 1944.
A late-20th-century version of the Service Force Pacific was the fleet of submarine and destroyer tenders maintained by the Navy for most of the Cold War. In the mid-1980s, when the Navy still was striving for 600 ships, the fleet's 9 destroyer and 12 submarine tenders represented a significant sea-based repair and maintenance capability that proved its worth often. From its station at an international anchorage off the island of Masirah in the North Arabian Sea, the forward-deployed tender Acadia (AD-42) sailed into the Persian Gulf to provide urgently needed assistance to the USS Stark (FFG-31) after the guided-missile frigate was hit by an Iraqi antiship missile in 1987. During 1991, the tenders Yellowstone (AD-41), Acadia, and Cape Cod (AD-43) deployed to Southwest Asia to provide sea-based support to naval forces during the Gulf War.
Sea-Based Prepositioning
A major portion of the nation's sea-basing capability resides in the 40 ships of the Military Sealift Command's (MSC) Afloat Prepositioning Force, which provides prepositioning support to the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Defense Logistics Agency. These prepositioning ships are deployed overseas permanently, ready to sail on short notice with the critical equipment, fuel, and supplies to support U.S. forces initially in the event of a crisis or contingency. Afloat prepositioning started in the early 1980s to improve the response time for the delivery of urgently needed supplies to vital theaters. The concept was validated in 1990 when two MSC prepositioning squadrons loaded with Marine Corps equipment sailed to Saudi Arabia in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. By the end of August 1990, about 30,000 Marines from the 1st and 7th Marine Expeditionary Brigades (MEBs) had been flown to the region to join with their sea-based equipment.
After the Gulf War, the Department of Defense decided the Army needed to invest in sea-based prepositioning. Twenty new large medium-speed roll-on/roll-off (LMSR) ships were acquired, 8 of which were set aside to provide afloat prepositioning for two heavy Army brigades' equipment and combat support, while 11 LMSRs were berthed in the United States and designated for surge sealift (the 20th LMSR is for the Marines' prepositioning force).
The Marines are developing an enhanced sea-basing concept that emphasizes the construction of a new class of maritime prepositioning ship capable of conducting the at-sea arrival, assembly, and sustainment of a MEB. The Army, too, is working on a new sea-basing concept as part of its larger transformation effort. The Army concept emphasizes the development of a high-speed theater support vessel for intratheater sealift that would help project land power into regions lacking developed ports.
Sea-Based Continental Defense
The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 sparked interest in examining Sea Basing for homeland security. Yet Sea Basing was enlisted in the interests of continental defense during the early years of the Cold War. The Navy converted about 30 destroyer escorts and 16 Liberty ships into radar picket platforms to provide sea-based early warning of attacking Soviet long-range bombers. The ships were rotated to fixed locations off both coasts. The Air Force also contributed to sea-based continental defense by building three open-ocean radar platforms off the Northeast Coast. These radar sites, known as Texas Towers, were in service from 1952 to 1963. One was lost with all hands in a storm in 1961.
Sea-Based Command and Control
The Sea Basing of command and control (C2) originated during World War II when the Navy converted 17 merchant hulls into amphibious force command ships. In the early 1950s, the heavy cruiser Northampton (CG-1) was converted into a light command ship, and replaced a decade later when the light carrier Wright (CC-2) was reconfigured as a command ship. Both ships also were configured to serve as National Emergency Command Posts Afloat for the President in the event of a nuclear war. Of the four command ships in service today, two—the Mount Whitney (LCC-20) and the Blue Ridge (LCC-19)—were the first ever designed from the keel up to provide sea-based C2.
The Navy is working on plans for a new Joint Command and Control Ship, or JCC(X), that would be the Navy's first new sea-based command capability in more than 30 years. Reportedly, it will be designed "around an advanced C4ISR [command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] mission system that can be tailored to meet specific mission requirements and would be readily adaptable to incorporate, rapidly and affordably, new technology necessary to meet the demands of sustained operations at sea."
Commander Nagy is a recalled naval reservist currently with the Strategy and Concepts Branch (N513) under the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations.