CARLISLE BARRACKS, Pa.–The Army is taking an in depth look at focus areas such as sea basing for the Army of 2020 during its Unified Quest 2012 future wargame.
Representatives of all the services, foreign liaison officers, members of academia and civilians are discussing, debating and examining how specific issues would support strategic guidance and the implications for the operational Army in executing its role in 2020 and beyond.
Sea basing is used in the notional Unified Quest scenario as one option to overcome anti-access/area denial that can stem from political, diplomatic, or geographical factors.
The basic scenario involves the United States and coalition forces making a forcible entry into southern “Greenland,” to create a United Nations-mandated Temporary Security Zone to allow humanitarian relief. The narrow zone would separate southern “Greenland” and its “Redland” proxy supported Mujahadeen e Calipha (MeC), from U.S. ally “Ionia.”
Participants are examining the question: How does Army sea-basing enable power projection?
Clearly sea-basing is a concept with utility and appeal for the Army. After all, the service already conducts mounted vertical maneuver and airdrops, so it should be able to flesh out a maritime role.
This is not the first time it has come up in a Unified Quest wargame. The last time, some four to five years ago, raised questions of a lack of ship-to-shore connectors and factory-type technology.
For Congress, a question in resource-constrained times would be what is the role of the Army in the maritime domain, and how it is complementary to, or conflicts with the role of the Marines.
For one participant, the Army conducts “movement” from a ship to an objective, or “it’s maneuver minus the fires, and does not bump into the Marine Corps mission set–amphibious assault.
The question was not resolved, but continued to revolve around a “doctrinal mismatch,” that implies there is a need to develop joint assured access doctrine.
A sea base can support multiple activities, participants agreed, and can offers operational flexibility.
In Unified Quest 2012, sea basing is a joint interdependency.
However, in the game, four contracted ships didn’t go forward ahead of the U.S.-led operation because merchant seamen who crewed the vessels didn’t want to go into dangerous mined waters.
Thus, one participant said, “DoD needs to make a conscious commitment to resourcing” sea base efforts. Another participant said it would useful to have a policy review on crews of high-speed vessels.
The Army High Speed Vessel program was moved to the Navy, which decided to crew the ships with merchant seamen, not sailors.
The Army and Marines are talking about sea basing, and it is part of “Gaining and Maintaining Access: An Army-Marine Corps Concept,” released in March from the Army Capabilities Integration Center–Part of the Training and Doctrine Command and the Marine Corps Combat Development Command.
The concept is expected to be an interim product, further refined by input from Navy and Air Force and then expanded into a full-fledged joint concept.
“Under austere conditions or when overcoming area-denial challenges, sea-basing helps early in an operation to reduce the requirement for large ground based sustainment stocks and extended lines of communication, which could be vulnerable to attack and which require additional forces to secure,” the concept said.
Marines on amphibious ships are specifically designed to provide multi-domain capabilities, while Army forces may operate from the sea in some scenarios.
The concept describes key capabilities such as mine-countermeasure capabilities, additional high-speed intra-theater lift, improved connectors, improved interface between ships and connectors, to include unmanned cargo aircraft, and improved prepositioning capabilities for at-sea transfer and selective off-load of personnel and material.
Earlier this year, the Navy expected to move forward to deploy a mobile base to support forward operations in light of the new current focus areas of the Asia-Pacific and toward an expanded maritime role in the Middle East.
The Navy’s January budget document called for funding a “new afloat forward staging base that can be dedicated to support missions in areas where ground-based access is not available, such as counter-mine operations” (Defense Daily, Jan 31).
U.S. Central Command identified a need for these staging bases.
Senior leaders will hear discussion and implications of sea basing in coming days.