FEATURE ARTICLE

January 2005

Deployment of Sea Bases Faces Technical, Budgetary Challenges

by Roxana Tiron

The notion that ground forces can be launched, supported and sustained solely from ships at sea initially was conceived by the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, but now is attracting attention from the other services. The idea, however, is still new to the Army and the Air Force, and the Defense Department has yet to figure out how to pay for this capability.

The sea-base concept hinges on fast ships and heavy lift aircraft to connect troops with the combat zone. These capabilities have not yet been developed and are prey to competing funding lines.

Moreover, the development of any new technology to support this concept must go hand-in-hand with the development of a common communications network, officials said.

At the behest of the Defense Science Board, whose study last year recommended that sea basing become a joint effort, the services have begun to explore this novel approach to fielding ground forces. For its part, Joint Forces Command is working on experimentation and gaming of the concept.

While the Defense Science Board lobbied for a joint program office, the services still have to develop their requirements, according to Adm. Vernon Clark, chief of naval operations.

“The joint program office should not build the requirements,” he told reporters during a National Defense Industrial Association conference in Panama City, Fla. The services’ requirements cannot “be formulated without analyses and gaming,” he said. “After that, we can talk about a joint program office.”

He pointed out that the commitment of the services should be driven by their needs. “When the services see areas they can benefit from, they will participate,” he said. For example, the Army would find the concept beneficial to solve logistics issues, he added.

The Navy and the Marine Corps’ outreach to the other services, however, should not be misconstrued as a campaign to get support from the other branches, he cautioned. “If sea basing is going to help … they will jump in,” he told National Defense.

The services have “made a conscious decision that the integration is going to occur at the joint staff and among the services, rather than at an office within the office of the secretary of defense,” he said.

The Army, meanwhile, has started analyzing the potential benefits of sea bases. “Joint sea basing is a critical initiative for the Army,” said Lt. Gen. James Curran, deputy chief of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command’s Futures Center.

“The Army is in the conceptual stages with JFCOM and the other services in defining what this concept would be and how we could maximize the potential of it,” he said in an interview. “We are working this year on the joint sea basing concept, and, if we get the concept straight this year, we will then be able to go into looking at what the gaps will be.”

Consequently, parallel developments such as shallow draft, high-speed craft, and vertical take-off landing aircraft must be considered along with sea-basing to get “a holistic view of joint force projection and sustainment requirements,” he said. The VTOL will provide a “quantum leap” to the sea base, he said.

An Army-led team is studying whether the military should start a program to field a new heavy-lift aircraft that could transport troops, vehicles and supplies from sea bases. This aircraft could be a quad tilt-rotor, a traditional cargo plane or a hybrid of the two. Whatever the outcome, this aircraft must be able to carry up to 50,000 pounds, said Lt. Gen. Michael Hough, Marine Corps deputy commandant for aviation.

Meanwhile, the Army is collaborating with the Navy on the high-speed vessel program, said Curran. “My understanding is that there has been discussions and work between the two services to ultimately set up a program office.”

Closing the gap between initial entry forces and the follow-on forces has been an Army problem for many years, said Col. Ron Isom, chief of the logistics division at the Futures Center. “We think that sea basing allows a way for us to do that,” he said. “You could load an Army force onto an amphibious ship and point it to a theater of operations. We have some research and development work that is being done right now on things like ultra-large air lifters to involve air ships.” He pointed out that connectors—ships and airlift—are key to carrying out the sea-basing concept.

Sea bases would allow the Army to project intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets without putting a footprint on the ground, said Brig. Gen. Philip Coker, director of capabilities development at the Futures Center.

“Every soldier you put down on the ground eats and drinks water and shoots ammo and requires protection and needs a place to live and needs to be re-supplied,” he said at the conference. “If you can give us the capacity from an offshore position to achieve effects, I think we will logistically restore ourselves on the sea base.”

Sea basing, he said, has “great potential,” but protecting those floating bases will be a concern. A “stationary ship is a temptation” for the enemy, he said.

The Air Force is approaching the issue more slowly. “We have to make sure that we ask the right questions about sea basing,” said Lt. Gen. Ron Keyes, deputy chief of staff for air and space operations and the next commander of the Air Combat Command. Asked how the Air Force would benefit or contribute to joint sea basing, he said: “Right now, it is too early to tell, because I could not draw you a picture of what sea basing is about.”

He said the Air Force is willing to contribute to a joint effort. But first, he said, there are some “hard questions” to be answered such as “what does a sea-base concept do for me in the future that I can’t do now?”

If the sea-basing concept is further developed and implemented, the Navy, as the executive agent, has to make sure it works within joint war-fighting concepts, cautioned Marine Lt. Gen. Robert Shea, director for command, control, communications and computer systems at the Joint Chief of Staff.

“One of the basic tasks of sea basing is to deploy and employ joint forces from the sea,” he said at the conference. “We want to be able to establish this in a timely manner.”

The services, however, have to find the right balance between the concept and the technology. “That is a major challenge,” he said. “In many cases, we have technology outstripping our operational concepts, and, in my mind, I am not sure that we are choosing the right technology.”

Regardless of how technology supports the sea basing concepts, it is the network that will become the “center of gravity,” Shea contended. “It is a key enabler for virtually every transformational concept under consideration, to include command-and-control, logistics, sensor-to-shooter,” he said.

“Our approach to building networks at the operational tactical level is too complex. We need simple solutions,” he said. “In the end, at the operational and tactical level, I want to see the joint network management piece no more complex than installing and operating a home entertainment system. Okay, I want it simpler than that,” he added.

Shea explained that all networks should be built from a single basic framework. “I am talking about a homogenous operational tactical network,” he explained. “If we are going to network-centric operations, we need to change the way we do business. The push has to be towards simplicity.”

Apart from developing the appropriate technology, the services also have to establish training standards for those who use, operate and maintain the networks.

While a series of so-called transformational communications networks, such as joint tactical radio system, mobile user objective system and the global information grid program are under development, they all could run the risk of not being completed, said Shea. “The challenge obviously is staying the course,” he said. “If we do not maintain a consistent funding line, it is very difficult to keep a program.”

In the case of JTRS, for example, the technology is too rushed, he said. “We are trying to make this radio for all people too soon,” he said.

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