The military services, particularly the Army and Air Force, should strive to improve readiness and save costs by using ships in dual roles of transport and storage for equipment and prepositioned containers loaded with supplies. If these containers were designed to be used tactically, were about 1/8 the size of 20-foot equivalent containers, had a gross weight of about 2,500 pounds, and were used with strategic vessels with selective offload capability, then existing airborne connectors could resupply front-line warfighting units directly from the sea. The prepositioning of supplies at sea would also be cost-effective both for items in transit and in storage. A corresponding increase in prepositioning unit equipment, like tracked and wheeled vehicles on board Roll-on/Roll-off ships, would significantly improve deployment timelines.
Strategic Sealift vs. Strategic Airlift
Both strategic sealift and airlift are required to transport the Defense Department's supplies and equipment. Nonetheless, with the increased emphasis on expeditionary warfare, strategic sealift combined with intermodal containers and equipment prepositioned afloat offers more promise than ever before. It not only is much less expensive than strategic air, it also can transport medium and heavy forces quicker while serving as a secure and flexible logistics-related, ocean-based platform.
A study in 2002 by the Rand Corporation titled, "The Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Rethinking Strategic Responsiveness and Assessing Deployment Options," concludes that if Stryker Brigade-sized forces (about 350 medium-weight armored-vehicles, 650-wheeled vehicles, and supplies and equipment for 3,400 troops) were to deploy to joint operational areas near the littorals (within 500 miles of the ocean), then deployment by strategic sealift would be faster than deployment by air.
Like the Army, the Air Force should consider increasing its use of strategic sealift and the prepositioning of its equipment and sustainment afloat, perhaps for units like those associated with its Rapid Engineer Deployable, Heavy Operational Repair Squadron Engineer (RED HORSE) forces. The Air Force Logistics Management Agency has already recommended that the assets of the Basic Expeditionary Airfield Resources (BEAR) program be prepositioned on board large, medium-speed, roll-on-roll-off (LMSR) vessels. With the current method of distribution, it takes a tremendous amount of strategic airlift and more than 250 truck missions to move the BEAR-related Harvest Falcon (designed to support 1,100 troops).
Strategic sealift has other advantages. Ship-based assets are difficult for insurgents to attack, and leaders can readily adjust ship locations based on diplomatic, political, or military-related events. In comparison, it would be cost-prohibitive to continually reposition large quantities of land-based, prepositioned assets nearer to or farther from tentative destinations by airlift. Airlift simply lacks the flexibility afforded by sea-based assets.
The two major disadvantages of strategic sealift pertain to road marches and sea state. The farther a joint operational area is from the sea, the longer the subsequent road march required to position troops, equipment, and supplies. In addition, when deep-water ports are not available, the efficacy of current strategic sealift depends on the sea state and hydrography. A few factors, however, serve to mitigate these disadvantages. First, the majority of the world's population lives within 650 nautical miles of a coastline, where navigable rivers and rail and road networks leading from the littorals to locations inland are readily available. Second, DOD is designing sealift, operational and tactical airlift, and lighter systems that can overcome high sea states and exploit shallow-draft, undeveloped ports; the latter are much more prevalent throughout the world than deep-water, sophisticated ones.
Strategic airlift has its own disadvantages. The term maximum on ground (MOG) is used to describe the area available for aircraft-related operations on an airfield. For instance, if an airfield were to be characterized as having a C-17 MOG of two, only two C-17s could be on the airfield at one time. There would simply be no room for a third. Under ideal conditions at such an airbase, only about 48 C-17 sorties could land per day (assuming that it would take only an hour for each plane to land, offload, and then depart the airfield). In contrast, two LMSRs have the hauling capacity equal to about 840 C-17 sorties. It would take more than 17 days of 24-hour, nonstop C-17 flights (involving numerous C-17 airframes since there would have to be enough of them for two aircraft to land every hour) to equal what could be offloaded once from two LMSRs.
In addition to the many benefits and possibilities presented by LMSRs and other large transport vessels, they are surprisingly cost-effective when compared to strategic airlift. According to a Congressional Budget Office study, "buying and maintaining 17 LMSRs would incur the same cost as buying and maintaining 21 C-17 aircraft." Not only can LMSRs be used for strategic transportation, they can also be large floating warehouses. This certainly can't be said for C-17s, which serve only as means of transportation.
Transportation cost savings is another significant advantage of strategic sealift. The Defense Logistics Agency estimates that it costs about $2.66 a pound to move items strategic distances (over 10,000 miles) by air and only $.22 by sea. In his September 2006 Proceedings article titled, "The Containerized Logistics Imperative," Lieutenant Douglas Tastad estimates that to move an item within Iraq by surface container costs $.25 per pound, but to move it by air costs $5.00 per pound.
Using Strategic Sealift as Floating Storage
There are numerous other strategic transportation considerations besides cost. Ensuring that equipment and supplies are positioned in close proximity to where they will be needed when they will be needed is a complicated process. However, when items are stored at sea, much of the time-consuming distribution process is completed well in advance.
For example, if all the equipment for a Stryker Brigade combat team and 30 days of supplies were stored on board vessels at sea, delivering it where needed on shore would be greatly simplified. Decisions concerning what to stock and how much would already have been made. Items would have been purchased from vendors, moved from storage locations in the United States by way of both commercial and military transportation, and loaded onto a strategic vessel. In response to early-warning indicators, the vessel probably would have been positioned within 100 miles or so (or closer) of the joint operational area. Landing the correct amount of equipment and supplies on shore at the appropriate time, providing tactical transportation once inland, and retaining asset visibility would be the only remaining distribution requirements.
If specific items could be selectively offloaded while the vessel remained offshore, then this would enhance the joint force's distribution capability even more. Selective offload would relieve vessels from berthing at ports. Prepositioning items while afloat also negates the need for the large inventories typically established with the ground-based buildup of general support and direct support supply stocks. Limited ground-based stockpiles should be established, however, to mitigate problems that might occur because of inclement flying weather or issues affecting tactical distribution originating from the sea. The retrograde of supplies and equipment during redeployment would be greatly simplified, since far less materiel would have been placed ashore during an operation.
Containerization
This goes hand in glove with sealift and can be an integral part of prepositioning assets afloat. In contrast, airlift mandates the use of manpower-intensive and costly break-bulk procedures. Since about 80 percent of all DOD cargo destined for overseas is moved by commercial vessel, it is in the military's best interest to follow the commercial practice of containerization whenever possible.
Organization for Standardization containers (20 and 40 feet) are designed to be loaded and unloaded rapidly. Since they are intermodal, they can easily shift from strategic to tactical storage and transport; the same container that was once hauled by a strategic vessel at sea can be hauled inland by a truck, rail car, or barge. Once offloaded and delivered ashore, containers provide many of the same shelter-related benefits they do as when they are prepositioned afloat. Containers also provide concealment of their contents. Break bulk cargo has none of these advantages.
Unfortunately, specialized container handling equipment (most of it owned by commercial firms) is required. On land, medium and large tractor trucks (both commercial and military) and chassis are used to haul the containers to military distribution sites. Consequently, logisticians must unstuff the contents of the containers as supplies are forwarded to end units. The supplies previously containerized are then reconfigured onto pallets or as loose cargo so they can be hauled by much more widely available smaller trucks. Since loaded 20-foot containers weigh about 47,000 pounds and loaded 40-foot containers weigh upwards of 67,000 pounds, it is easy to understand how both can be impractical in tactical environments. Neither can be moved using today's helicopters, tilt-rotor aircraft, or unit-level trucks. Furthermore, 40-foot containers are much too big for C-130 aircraft, while 20-footers are simply impractical.
Tactical Containers
All of these factors make it apparent that smaller versions of 20-foot, standardized, multi-modal containers could offer tremendous logistics advantages. The contents placed within smaller containers could remain intact throughout the entire strategic, operational, and tactical movement—from home station all the way to the user on the battlefield. Without question, the fewer the number of containers that have to be prematurely opened and their contents transferred to other transportation or storage platforms, the better. Consequently, DOD should consider fielding a smaller container, one specifically designed for the tactical environment.
This tactical container should be made sturdier than the Joint Modular Intermodal Containers (JMIC) currently under development. It should be stackable and capable of protecting its contents from the weather. Like the JMIC, eight tactical containers should fit onto a containerized Roll-on/Roll-off platform (CROP) within a 20-foot container. However, unlike the JMIC, tactical containers would not be collapsible; they would be designed to be placed on top of high mobility trailers (HMT) and towed by HumVees or other small trucks.
Fully loaded, each would weigh about 2,500 pounds and would be just shy of 8 feet long, 5 feet wide, and 4 feet high (slightly less than 1/8 the dimensions of a 20-foot container.) Units at home station could use them to organize and store supplies and equipment. On notification of deployment, departing units could then use the same containers as a means of shipping these assets. Defense Logistics Agency and other wholesale suppliers could use them instead of multi-packs and tri-wall containers. Each tactical container should have a specific permanent serial number.
Bypass the Beach
With the possibilities of containerization and the limitations of joint logistics over the shore (JLOTS) in mind, DOD is in the process of designing deployment, employment, and sustainment methods that bypass the beach and shore entirely. After all, sea ports of debarkation, to include shallow-draft ports, may not exist at desired locations, or they may be too crowded with commercial traffic to allow adequate space for military operations. Moreover, JLOTS procedures are time-consuming, complex, and require significant manpower and equipment. However, during the initial stages of force deployment, air-cushion landing craft (LCACs) could be used to move unit equipment too heavy for airborne connectors. And while an LCAC of today can carry only one M1 tank, they are currently being redesigned to haul two.
For lighter items, tactical containers stored atop CROPs on prepositioned ships (with selective offload capability) could be downloaded from 20-foot containers, transferred from one vessel to another by way of underway replenishment, loaded on board tilt-rotor or rotary-wing aircraft (either internally or by slingload), and then flown to tactical units or inland distribution centers hundreds of miles inland. Ground-based units could then place them onto HMTs for hauling by HumVees or other unit-level trucks around the battlefield. Consequently, staging areas and marshaling yards on shore could be unnecessary. Such tactical containerization of sustainment would simplify the entire distribution process.
Although open deck space is extremely limited on today's LMSRs, fast sealift ships, and amphibious and container ships, other ships (or barges) could serve as floating platforms, where tactical containers could be linked with airborne connectors at sea for delivery ashore. Either floating cranes or self-sustaining container ships with on-board cranes could be used to maneuver the larger containers on board ship or from one ship to another. Connected replenishment techniques (which use tensioned wire cable to link vessels at sea) could be used to transfer tactical containers between ships.
In addition to the myriad reasons why containerization is cost-effective and efficient, containers can be essential in facilitating accurate worldwide visibility of the locations of assets in transit or in storage. Logisticians could use hand-held portable data collection devices to document numbers of the bar codes or passive radio frequency identification tags when items were placed inside or removed from the tactical containers.
In this manner, optical memory cards or similar data-storage-media attached to the outside of the container would contain up-to-date information of all of the respective NSNs and document numbers of the items within the container. This information could then be transferred to a computer with Internet connectivity where the data would be processed by an automated information system with World Wide Web accessibility so that each tactical container (and all of its contents) could be tracked by its identification number.
Knowing What's Inside
During deployments, as these containers were being placed on board strategic, prepositioned sealift, logisticians would be able to attain total asset visibility of the entire ships' contents before the vessels ever left the sea port of embarkation. Problems associated with incorrect or missing military shipment labels, bar codes, or radio frequency ID tags, and containers without serial numbers could be remedied during the loading process.
Retrograde procedures would be relatively simple to develop for the empty containers, and of course the containers themselves could be used to transport and store other items during the retrograde process. Moreover, troops deployed to austere environments would find tactical containers extremely useful (and cost-effective) for a wide variety of uses. If designed with insertable windows, they could even be used for temporary housing.
For these reasons and more, DOD should integrate standardized, intermodal containers (particularly tactical containers) and prepositioned LMSRs, self-sustaining container ships, and other strategic vessels capable of selective offload at sea with airborne and seaborne connectors to improve the deployment, employment and sustainment process. Tactical containers would be multi-modal, however, unlike 20-footers, they would be transportable by helicopters, tilt-rotor craft, C-130s, and small trucks.
Tactical containers and ships that allow offload of selected items at sea would greatly enhance America's ability to use the world's oceans as a means of strategic- and operational-level transport; strategic, operational, and tactical storage; and as a tactical employment platform. Consequently, our forces would be able to rapidly deploy, employ, and sustain themselves on arrival at even the most remote spots, without the need for ports of debarkation or operational pauses. All of this could occur before our enemies had much chance to respond militarily to our presence.