Plans and platforms designed to meet the Soviet threat will not do in today’s environment. Sea basing—often envisioned as a massive, mobile offshore base—would allow U.S. forces to project decisive joint combat power without restrictions imposed by other powers’ decisions.
The emergence of the President's National Security Strategy late last summer initiated a series of responses from the various government agencies having interests in and oversight of U.S. foreign policy. The dramatic new direction taken by the present administration guaranteed that formulating supporting strategies would be challenging. Currently, the Department of Defense is focused on the creation of a new National Military Strategy, with the aid and support of the various Joint Chiefs of Staff and service plans departments. Working hard to piece together the lessons learned from Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the transformational plans of the individual military services, today's strategists seek to create a unifying construct. While no final product has yet emerged, when it does, it should have at its core one of the most transformational strategic ideas of recent history: Sea Basing.
Sea Basing, a supporting tenet of the Chief of Naval Operations' "Sea Power 21," seems to resist definition, though many have tried. Marine long-range planners, who believe themselves (with some justification) to be the true authors of Sea Basing, view the concept as the means to marry the Navy to a new vision of ship-to-objective maneuver. It is a vision clouded by layers of logistics and lines of combat support to ground forces ashore. Tactical in nature and bureaucratically limited, it is incomplete in its application. Naval planners, alternatively, seem eager to use Sea Basing as a justification for platforms defined in the current program of record: aircraft carriers, amphibs, maritime prepositioned vessels, and their immediate successor platforms. Focused on the challenges of the here and now, they too miss the full strategic implications of Sea Basing.
A New World
Communism's sudden demise as a worldwide political entity had the ancillary effect of releasing the tension that characterized the international arena during the Cold War. Smaller nations, even those that had possessed historical great power roles, had felt compelled to align their inter-ests with one or the other "superpower." After the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the emergence of the unipolar system, that impetus evaporated. Agreement with U.S. policies, while happily accepted in Washington, was not required. In reality, resistance to the United States' wishes increased dramatically.
The United States' influence in the world went far beyond its military power. Its political, economic, and cultural systems trumpeting liberal, democratic ideals became so pervasive that they began to undermine local traditional norms throughout the developing world. Resentment mounted, and nations reflexively sought to encumber U.S. influence. Some attempted to build up the United Nations, while others sought the more immediate effect of restricting the activities of U.S. agencies operating within their borders, to include elements of the U.S. armed forces.
Throughout the 1990s, nations at all levels of development sought to alter U.S. policies by selectively extending and retracting access to facilities within their borders. Italy denied U.S. F-117 stealth fighters access to Aviano air base during the 1999 Kosovo campaign. Bowing to domestic pressures, Saudi Arabia forbade the launching of tactical aircraft in support of operations in Iraq. In Britain, if Tony Blair's support for President George W. Bush's policy in Iraq had cost him his leadership position, it is possible that a new Labour government, radically opposed to the war, could have denied the United States access to the strategically important island of Diego Garcia. We could well have found ourselves in the same situation as in the fall of 2001, when Navy planes carried the brunt of air sorties while DoD officials frantically pursued a series of surveys and negotiations of Air Force basing rights in Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyztan. As the access debacle in Turkey unfolded in March of this year, thoughts turned to what kind of permanent, mobile, sovereign sea base could have been built for the $30 billion in grants and loan guarantees offered to the Turkish government in exchange for temporary access to their interior.
Defining Capabilities
During Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, Army Special Forces received permission to operate from a Navy carrier. The success derived from mating the flexibility of special forces with the versatility of one of the Navy's floating airfields was astounding and led Special Operations Command at McDill Air Force Base to put the Navy on notice that it would be requesting its services in the future. A special operations unit, however, is too small to serve the purposes envisioned in a sea-based strategy.
Before we can design the sea base, we first must define the capabilities it should possess. We could begin with our present platforms, and describe the sea base in terms of what is, or we could cast our vision beyond the current Program Objectives Memorandum, shrugging off preconceived ideas in an attempt to create a truly transformational capability. The latter should be our intention. Beginning with the type of force embarked, and moving on to the size of that force, how long it will be embarked, and the inherent support capabilities of the platform (command and control, information, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems, weapons), a picture of the future sea base can emerge.
At present, Defense planners are wrestling with the size and structure of a conceptual Standing Joint Task Force. It will be composed of elements of the ground, air, and naval services, and will possess the capability to be a decisive force in battle. To achieve this, its ground force probably will be larger than a brigade, but smaller than a division. Air components will closely resemble the Air Force's Air Expeditionary Force, and the Navy . . . well, that is the question.
A Navy supported joint sea base must be capable of providing transportation, support, and basing capabilities to all of the services of the U.S. armed forces. Ideas ranging from a collection of ships to a massive mobile offshore base (MOB) should aim to sustain the force for 60 days (30 days of transit, and 30 days of tactical positioning) and accept logistical support from the continental United States. The MOB concept, with its ample runway, has the additional advantage of being able to land and launch C-130-like cargo aircraft, but to decide to pursue the MOB based on this fact ignores the advantage of our temporal positioning. Instead of stating that we need a platform that a C-130 can land on, we should say that we desire a transport and landing platform combination that is capable of carrying and accepting the size and mass of materials presently carried on a C-130. Some energetic designer, leveraging technology from the MV-22, might come up with a vertical take-off and landing cargo plane that could meet our criteria and allow us to build a multitude of smaller platforms rather than one massive one.
As we envision the sea base, we also must consider what we do with it after the Standing Joint Task Force is disembarked. If we build in strong command and control, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, as well as medical support capabilities, the sea base can continue to provide utility well after the other forces have moved ashore. It also will act as a logistical node, facilitating resupply from distant U.S. bases.
The permanent nature of the sea base capitalizes on the platform's relative longevity. Compared to smaller combatants, the large-deck amphibs and carriers have nearly twice the expected life spans, approaching 50 years in the case of the carriers. While many would think that ships approaching 50 years in age must be fairly antiquated in their combat capabilities, the Nimitz (CVN-68)-class carriers' cavernous nature in fact has allowed them to become models of spiral development. Large naval vessels have and will continue to have daunting up-front costs, but spread over the lives of the platforms they are fairly economical. If dollars spent on securing access to foreign bases, along with facilities improvements and upkeep, are factored in, the sea base begins to approach a net cost savings over time.
Another critical advantage of the sea base is its mobility. Even the MOB concept, with its theoretical top speed of 15 knots, could be within combat reach of any position on the globe within 30 days. Once there, unlike a base built on terra firma, it would move continuously, complicating enemy targeting. In addition, its mobility would confuse the enemy as to the origin of attack, forcing him to dilute his efforts and defend against all axes of approach.
The sea base also would have the inherent advantage of all naval ships of being sovereign U.S. territory—giving it, as Admiral Vern Clark likes to say, "the ability to go anywhere in the world without a permission slip." There are some restrictions while operating in the territorial waters of foreign powers, but vessels operating in international waters historically carry the full legal standing of national territory. The sea base's ability to project decisive joint combat power without restrictions from other powers fundamentally alters the international strategic climate and fills an emerging requirement.
The Strategic Imperative
The events of 11 September 2001 altered the direction of U.S. foreign policy, its ancillary security strategy, and, by extension, called into question several precepts of modern diplomacy. Fundamental concepts such as national sovereignty, the right of self-defense, and the interdependent structure of the international order are under examination.
On the evening of the attack, President Bush declared that the United States would "make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them." Forthwith, nations that sponsored terrorism, or allowed terrorists to live unmolested within their borders, were notified that their sovereignty, the bedrock of 400 years of Westphalian diplomacy, was forfeit. Within months, words became reality as the Taliban in Afghanistan fell before coalition forces. In June 2002 at West Point, in the most dramatic departure from diplomatic norms since Theodore Roosevelt announced his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, President Bush renounced the strategy that had guided our nation for 50 years, observing that "deterrence . . . means nothing against shadowy terrorists networks with no nation . . . to defend. Containment is not possible" with "unbalanced dictators." With stark words, he proclaimed that the United States must be prepared to take "preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives."
One year after the perfidy of 11 September, the Bush Preemptive Doctrine formally emerged within a National Security Strategy issued by the White House. Given the President's previous hesitance to place full faith in the international system, it was somewhat surprising to see formulations that sought the cooperation of allies and upheld the existing system of international laws and organizations. However, even after the success of the international coalition in Afghanistan, the Bush national security team soberly noted that "we must be prepared to act apart when our interests and unique responsibilities require."
Independent, preemptive actions require a different approach to military operations from those currently employed. Plans and platforms designed to meet the Soviet threat will not do in the new environment. "To support preemptive options," the National Security Strategy states, "we will continue to transform our military forces to ensure our ability to conduct rapid and precise operations to achieve decisive results."
Afghanistan, it seems from recent statements by senior officials, remains the template for future planning. In a world where bases and access cannot be guaranteed, future weapon programs and capabilities must focus on "transformed maneuver and expeditionary forces." Certainly recent operations in Iraq support the contention that "military capabilities must ensure access to distant theaters."
Sea Basing represents a strong response to the major operational and conceptual requirements of the National Security Strategy, but to fulfill its promise, it cannot be designed as a purely "naval" platform. All services feel the strategic pinch caused by a lack of access to overseas facilities. If the sea base is to establish itself at the center of the future joint concept of operations, the Navy must participate heavily in the design of the Standing Joint Task Force. Its size, capabilities, and support requirements will establish the entering arguments for the sea base's design. But our fellow services must meet us halfway and alter the designs of their own future platforms to enable them to operate from the maritime environment, as well as land bases. DoD comptrollers can assist by placing the sea base at the center of access funding lines. The bottom line is that an investment of the magnitude envisioned by Sea Basing planners must incorporate the needs of all aspects of U.S. military power from its inception.
The sea base can be the critical strategic step forward for the United States and its military services. With its permanence, mobility, sovereignty, and decisive combatant power, it promises a way for the nation to be independent of foreign restrictions that could encumber its movements. It meets and exceeds the requirements set forth in the President's National Security Strategy and provides a transformational force structure that will allow the U.S. military to slip its chains and sail outside the flow of history. It should be at the core of the nation's National Military Strategy.
Lieutenant Commander Hendrix, a naval flight officer, is assigned as the Navy Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.