Time for a Seabee Resurgence

In a world of competing fiscal priorities, risk must be taken somewhere. Researching, developing, and building advanced weapon platforms remains the priority. However, the infrastructure to support those platforms across the vast Indo-Pacific theater is lagging. The United States must prioritize expeditionary construction so logistical hubs are available when conflicts arise. The Seabee force, gutted by cuts and decommissionings over the past decade, is a means to accomplish this.

A Storied History

At the peak of World War II, the Seabees operated 151 regular construction battalions, 39 special construction battalions, 164 construction battalion detachments, 136 construction battalion maintenance units, 5 pontoon assembly detachments, 54 regiments, 12 brigades, and 5 naval construction forces.¹ More than 350,000 Seabees built airfields, roadways, staging areas, supply depots, and training areas and rapidly reconstructed damaged facilities. At Iwo Jima, they cleared a path to the top of Mt. Suribachi, a task even the Japanese had not attempted.²

Following the war, the Seabees focused on large-scale infrastructure construction. At Cubi Point in the Philippines, this included a 600-person camp, storage warehouse, potable water supply, ammunition pier, airstrip, barracks, and a roadway system. Lester Walker, quoted in The Seabees in War and Peace, noted the Seabees had “cut a mountain in half to make way for a nearly two-mile long runway. They blasted coral to fill a section of Subic Bay, filled swampland, moved trees as much as 150 feet tall and six to eight feet in diameter, and even relocated a native fishing village.”³ At Diego Garcia in early 1971, they began construction of the Naval Communications Station. Naval Mobile Construction Battalion (NMCB) 40 had constructed a 3,500-foot interim runway only four months after the first Seabees had arrived.⁴ In addition, they built out an array of utility systems to support a 6 megawatt power station and a 60,000 gallon-per-day desalinization plant, a cold storage plant, and a general warehouse.

An Inflection Point

While the Seabees are famous for doing more with less, the force arguably has reached an inflection point. Today there are just 1,600 Civil Engineer Corps officers and 14,000 Seabees across the Navy, both active and reserve.⁵ To put that in perspective, the Cubi Point effort employed Mobile Construction Battalions 2, 5, and 9 as well as other detachments through the build-out.⁶ That workforce is the equivalent of the entire Pacific Seabee contingent today, or half the current total active-duty Seabee force.

The Indo-Pacific theater encompasses some 100 million square miles, making logistics extremely complex. Major bases in Hawaii such as Joint Base Pearl Harbor–Hickam have been developed after years of construction, but Guam, expected to be a major hub for the joint force, is struggling to overhaul aging infrastructure or install new facilities, with billions of dollars expected to pour into it in the future. Contracted construction efforts are plagued by the remoteness of the Pacific islands and the lack of available local labor.

Surprisingly, the Department of the Navy is not turning to the Seabees even as an interim option to help alleviate the bottleneck. Military labor is hardly even a consideration when discussing large-scale infrastructure efforts across the Indo-Pacific theater. This seems myopic given the Seabees’ history. Looking to the future, the Navy should build back this construction force and task it to build out the Pacific.

Procuring sea-based weapon platforms is, without question, critical, but the investment is short-sighted if the logistical infrastructure is not in place to support them. Overreliance on private contractors for major construction projects has resulted in a lack of throughput and ballooning costs. Shore infrastructure is not something for which the Navy can afford to take risks.

The Department of the Navy needs to start tasking Seabee battalions with constructing infrastructure projects across the Pacific. The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act added 10 USC §2817 to provide enhanced flexibility to use operations and maintenance funding for construction in friendly foreign countries.⁷ This flexibility is tailor-made to pair with military labor. As the Navy continues to deliberate and test various methods to enhance construction speed, such as modular construction and tension fabric structures, labor will continue to be the most expensive and limiting resource, resulting in a continued construction backlog.

Using Seabees for infrastructure construction is a proven strategy. Large-scale projects would be difficult with current manning, but building the force up to the necessary manning levels will take time, a luxury the United States might not have. Nevertheless, it is better to act now. As General Douglas MacArthur said more than 70 years ago, the only problem with Seabees is that we don’t have enough of them.