Nobody Asked Me, But … Working around the sealift problem

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By Lieutenant Colonel Ky L. Thompson, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired)

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Working around the sealift problem

The August deployment of U.S. forces to the Persian Gulf area demon­strates to the dubious, as nothing else has been able to in the past, the inabil­ity of the United States to project and sustain forces at extreme distances.

One hopes, for the sake of the forces involved, that we won’t be found want­ing. But why must we always wait for the fire to discover if the hose works? Each year millions of dollars are spent on research and analysis—seemingly only to bolster arguments during bud­getary battles and turf fights.

The reports of the Commission on Merchant Marine and Defense are a case in point. The Commission, estab­lished by an Act of Congress in Octo­ber 1984, produced four major reports between February 1987 and January 1989. In the third one (September 1988), the Commission concluded, based on extensive analysis of Defense Department scenarios, “There was in­sufficient strategic sealift, both ships and trained personnel, for the United States, using only its own resources as required by defense planning assump­tions, to execute a major contingency operation in a single distant theater such as Southwest Asia.” But few in positions of authority listened and fewer seemed to care about something as plodding and mundane as strategic sealift. Two years later, Operation Desert Shield provides an unwelcome opportunity to test the Commission’s conclusions.

To meet the sealift demands of Desert Shield, the Navy requested that the Maritime Administration activate 40 ships from the Ready Reserve Force (RRF). These 40 ships augment the 13 Marine Corps-associated maritime pre­positioning ships, 13 afloat preposition­ing ships preloaded with multiservice materiel, and 8 Algol (T-AKR-287)- class fast sealift ships previously committed.

The RRF policy has not provided the nation with modern, immediately de­ployable ships that incorporate the lat­est in militarily useful technology, ar­gued the Commission. Instead, it has encouraged the buying up and main­taining of a large fleet of obsolete, unmannable, and nondeployable ships: “The effort to address the sealift short­fall by increasing the number of inac­tive reserve ships is an insufficient and inadequate response to the strategic sealift problem.” The Commission con­cluded that by the year 2000, and prob­ably sooner, “the United States mer­chant marine workforce will be insufficient, both in numbers and in skills, to man, operate, and deploy the ships, whose reliability may be increas­ingly suspect because of age and mate­rial condition.”

Initial reports from Desert Shield appear to confirm the Commission’s conclusions. An interview on ABC’s “Nightline,” on 29 August, between Sam Donaldson and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, offered this example:

Donaldson: "There are reports that the buildup has been delayed and interrupted because ships have bro­ken down at sea. There’s one ship, the Antares [T-AKR-294], carrying a load of, what, M-l tanks, that both boilers blew up. Is this a sig­nificant retrograde effort?”

Cheney: “There’s no question that we are overcoming obstacles as we undertake this deployment. 1 would not want to say that it’s an abso­lutely flawless operation, it’s not.” Donaldson: “Well, you couldn’t say that!”

Cheney: "... We’ve never done this kind of thing before in terms of moving this much, this fast, this far, and we’ll learn a lot of lessons from that. I think the amazing thing is that it’s gone as well as it has, and that our people, given their cre­ativity and flexibility, are able to work around these problems. We’ve got some 95 or 96 ships in what are called the ready reserve fleet [sic]

. . . now we’re bringing some of those back to haul troops to the Middle East. We’ve called up what’s called the fast sealift ships, about eight of those, and in many cases, in terms of trying to find crews to man them with the appro­priate training, or to have them function 100 percent effectiveness, or course, they’re not able to do that. And we are, in fact, working around those problems.”

Virtually all of the troops dispatched in support of Desert Shield have flown to the Gulf, but 90 to 95% of their equipment and supplies are going by sea. This percentage is not unusual, but the sealift is not arriving in a timely fashion. On 14 August the media re­ported, “Most of the heavy armor and other mechanized equipment needed for ground defenses has only begun to be loaded on ships. Military officials said it could be 30 to 45 days before ade­quate ground forces are in place.” On 30 August, the projection was worse, “U.S. armed forces will not have amassed a fully credible defensive force for another six to eight weeks.” General Charles Horner, Deputy Com­mander of the U.S. Central Command, was quoted as follows: “Every night we say, ‘What if they attack tonight? What do we do?’” Would Secretary Cheney advise General Horner “to work around these problems”?

Secretary Cheney is correct, we will “learn a lot of lessons” from Desert Shield. It’s too bad we have to learn them the hard way.

Colonel Thompson’s 25-year career included com­mand, staff, and joint staff assignments. His last assignment, before retirement in 1989, was as a staff member of the Commission on Merchant Marine and Defense.