Strategic Sealift Topic Week

By David Sloane

In March of 2020 the Commanding Officer of the United States Transportation Command (TRANSCOM) General Stephen R. Lyons told the U.S. House Armed Services Committee’s Readiness Subcommittee and the Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee that

“USTRANSCOM’s number two readiness concern is the Strategic Sealift Fleet. The sealift fleet is responsible for moving approximately 90% of wartime cargo. Sealift readiness rates have declined to 59% compared against a goal of 85%, with vessel material condition and age as the primary factors. Most sealift ships are reaching the age where maintenance and repair costs are escalating and service-life extensions will not yield proportional increases in readiness. Starting in the mid-2020s, the sealift fleet will lose 1-2 million square feet of capacity each year as ships reach the end of their useful life.”

None of this is a surprise to anyone who has been involved with or has observed the slow and steady decline of the Strategic Sealift fleet. This article will survey some of the issues that have caused this decline, describe some mistakes that have been made in trying to correct them, and propose a few possible solutions to ensure the warfighters have the tools they need to quickly respond to emergent contingencies.

The Reduced Operating Status Model Is Broken

The United States maintains a fleet of ships on standby to be available to meet warfighter needs to mobilize equipment on short notice. These ships are Roll On/Roll Off (RO/RO) ships kept at layberths at ports all over the country. The strategic sealift ships are divided into two separate fleets, managed by two separate government organizations: the U.S. Navy’s Military Sealift Command (MSC) and the Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration (MARAD). The ships are kept in a reduced operating status (ROS 5) which is designed to have the ships fully ready to activate and load cargo five days after notification at which point the ships are in fully operational status (FOS).

Within the current strategic sealift fleet, the five ships of the BOB HOPE class are the “gold standard,” and would probably be activated first as sealift needs arise during an emergent crisis. The issues raised in this article are specific to the BOB HOPE class, which is managed by MSC, but similar problems exist within other segments of the strategic sealift fleet. These ships are operated by a private shipping company contracted to MSC to operate and maintain these ships. This arrangement is referred to as government owned and contractor operated (GOCO).

When fully operational in FOS the ships are manned with 30 U.S. citizen mariners. When in the normal ROS status while layberthed the ships are manned with only 14 mariners who are tasked with completing all maintenance tasks required to keep the ship fully prepared to activate within 5 days’ notice. These mariners work a Monday to Friday 9 to 5 schedule, living ashore at night and over weekends. It should be noted that the ships’ preventative maintenance requirements change very little between ROS periods and when the ship is fully manned for FOS periods. Consequently, it is nearly impossible for the smaller ROS crews to keep up with all of the maintenance required to ensure that these ageing ships are fully prepared to activate.

These ships, like any others, require more maintenance with age. The BOB HOPE class ships were built at the now-defunct Avondale shipyard, and are now between 19 and 22 years old. That would be very old for a commercial RO/RO ship, but these are the babies of the strategic sealift fleet.

Furthermore, ships are made to operate at sea and not sit in port for months and months at a time. When a ship sits in port the equipment and machinery that needs to be in good working order just is not exercised enough. As a result, when it’s time to go to sea much of this same equipment will either not work properly or will break shortly after getting underway. Of course, the preventative maintenance assigned to the ROS crew is designed to ensure this doesn’t happen, but there are not enough hours in a normal work week for the smaller crew to keep up under the current funding scheme. Consequently, the ships keep degrading and have a low state of readiness.

Budget Woes

The government is not funding the five ships of the BOB HOPE class adequately to support the state of readiness required by the warfighter to support contingency scenarios. The ship’s operator annually submits an operating budget to MSC for review, including funding levels for all aspects of the ships’ operation, including maintenance and repair. As the operator and employer of the mariners performing maintenance, the operator is in the best position to estimate what will be required to keep the ship’s equipment fully functioning to the international standards for safety, as certified by the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) and the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS).

Unfortunately, the last several years have seen a severe shortfall of funds authorized as compared to funds requested. Here are a few examples of the funding shortfalls for the budgets covering Industrial Assistance, Spare Parts and Crew Overtime: 

• FY20- Funding was $19.5 million short of the requested budget. The government provided 44% of the requested amount.
• FY21- Funding was $30 million short of the requested budget. The government provided 38% of the requested amount.

The underfunding problem is getting worse instead of better, but as anyone who has had responsibility for maintaining operating ships can attest, neglecting a ship’s maintenance only means the future costs will only go higher, never lower. The government claims to have “managed” the shortfalls by deferring required maintenance for critical items across the fleet. These items include but are not limited to Main Diesel Propulsion Engines and Ships Service Diesel Engines. Not surprisingly, one of the ships was issued a non-conformity – a failing grade – during a regulatory audit due to a shortage of spare parts; the ship’s under-funded budget for spares had already been exhausted. Note that the budget issues described above are only for annual operating expenses, not the periodic maintenance costs required every 30 months. These have their own funding issues.

The government has also severely underfunded the critical Repair/Overhaul (ROH) periods that are required twice every five years to keep the ships fully certified by the USCG and ABS. These are shipyard periods where the ships are drydocked in a U.S. shipyard for a typical 90 day (or more if problems are discovered while the ship is in the shipyard) repair period. Planning for these periods is a year-long process to identify the critical repairs that must be done to keep the ship in good shape for the next 2 to 3 years. In addition to critical repairs to the underwater portions of the ship, special attention is given to fuel and ballast tanks which need to be preserved, especially as these ships go past 20 years of age.

USNS MENDONCA serves as a case in point. Cost estimates for required work during her ROH period last year totaled $27.9 million, but when U.S. shipyards provided bids in line with those numbers, the government de-scoped the ship’s work package by 40% due to a lack of funding available. The 60% of approved work was completed at a cost of about $21 million. When the repair period was over the ship did not meet USCG and ABS regulatory standards and had to proceed to a layberth under a “permit to proceed” – a one way ticket to a pier that would not allow further voyages until all of the work was completed. Once the ship was at a layberth, work continued, but funded from the normal operating budgets nominally assigned to other ships, further reducing the amount of funds to keep the fleet in a ready status.

This same process repeated when BOB HOPE had her ROH period last year: The USCG and ABS did not approve the ship to leave the shipyard in a fully certificated status and the ship was allowed to be shifted to a layberth to complete needed repairs. These ships would not have been ready to meet warfighter requirements as a direct consequence of chronic and systemic underfunding. It is embarrassing that the first line of defense strategic sealift ships are not funded to meet the same standards that ships owned by private U.S. flag ship owners must meet to stay in business.

Software and Hardware

Everything discussed so far addresses hardware concerns with the strategic sealift ships themselves – and the lack of funding to maintain these vessels. Often not discussed is the software that makes these ships go, the U.S. citizen mariners who accept jobs as civilians to voluntarily make a career of working aboard ships that rarely move. Readiness discussions often only relate to the hardware, but readiness of the software is just as important.

The ROS model of keeping ships with only 14 crewmembers permanently assigned has led directly to a long term lack of readiness of all of these ships. When a ship is activated it is very likely that several licensed officers will be assigned that have never been aboard that ship before. While that may have worked in previous generations of ships where there was very little difference between critical systems, it does not work in 2021.

Imagine being a deck officer who reports to a ship never having operated ship specific critical equipment such as stern ramps, cargo cranes, navigation equipment, main engine controls and communication equipment. At the same time, these officers have likely never worked together as a bridge management team, something critical to safe ship operations, especially within restricted waters. On top of that imagine that these officers are not familiar with the ships USCG required Safety Management System (SMS). All of these issues exist, and the crew has less than 5 days to have the ship ready to depart.

Another rarely-discussed but important issue is the shrinking labor pool that is available and willing to work aboard these ships. Mariners generally want to work on ships that spend their time completing voyages at sea, not moored to a pier for months at a time. These mariners appreciate the lifestyle that allows generous vacation pay which affords them a great deal of time off when they return to their friends and families. Mariners who work aboard ships in ROS status receive the advantage of going home every night but their pay is significantly less than those working on fully active ships, as they do not receive the same vacation pay. Total compensation for a ROS mariner is about 45% lower for the officers and 25% lower for unlicensed mariners compared with what a mariner earns for working on a fully active ship for a typical 120 day assignment.

An even more troubling consequence of this self-selected labor pool is that the very ROS mariners who know the ship best are also accustomed to going home every night, and often decide NOT sail with the ship when activations occur because they don’t want to go to sea. So, when a ship gets activated the companies responsible for manning them take whoever might be available. A very brief activation of a week or so might attract mariners who are on vacation from their “regular” ships, but a mission of several months will produce a far smaller pool of available mariners. Most mariners prefer to stick with their regular jobs over these longer activations, because once the ship returns to ROS their regular jobs will be filled and over half of the FOS positions will disappear. These factors make the proper maintenance of strategic sealift ships an incredible challenge. Ships work best when they have steady crews who are given the opportunity to operate the ships at sea with steady employment.

Recapitalization

Old ships eventually need to be replaced, and the idea that the ageing strategic sealift fleet needs to be replaced is not a new one. The Department of Defense and Congress have been discussing this for many years, but nothing happens quickly in the procurement of ships for DoD. These parties, along with TRANSCOM, have realized for a long time that the only practical solution is to purchase foreign-built hulls and convert them for service in the strategic sealift fleet. The length of time it would take to design, procure and build new strategic sealift ships in U.S. shipyards is just too long for the pressing needs, given the nature of American government bureaucracy.

U.S. shipbuilding interests have strong political influence, and so it is a small miracle that Congress has approved and funded this plan to purchase ships that were not built in the United States for strategic sealift recapitalization. MARAD intends to hire a private company to procure, convert, and operate “new” ships for the fleet via a contract titled “Vessel Acquisition Manager (VAM) service for the U.S. Department of Transportation, Maritime Administration (MARAD) Ready Reserve Fleet (RRF) Recapitalization.” The original Request for Proposals (RFP) went out to industry in February 2020, but due to a series of protests that were sustained by the U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO), MARAD has been unable to award this contract to date. The eventual awardee will have to identify the ships and get approval to purchase them for the government and then convert them for service. It will take years, not months, to complete these tasks.

Unfortunately, prices for used RO/RO ships on the international market have recently surged along with the demand created by the post-COVID economy, leading to a reduced availability of commercial RO/RO tonnage. Several companies have ordered new vessels, but it will take a few years for these new deliveries to be completed and the older ships to be available. If the U.S. Government is planning on recapitalizing the strategic sealift fleet by purchasing good, used ships, the last thing that should happen is to purchase older existing U.S. flag tonnage, as this will only recreate the current situation in a matter of years. The government missed a good opportunity to purchase replacement tonnage at bargain prices, and will be forced to pay millions of dollars more for the fewer ships available on the open market.

What’s Next?

It’s not clear that there is strong political will for the Department of Defense to operate and maintain a fleet of ships that is fully prepared on short notice to be available to carry its heavy equipment to the battle as the U.S. faces growing threats in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. While it is safe to say this problem has been discussed at great length, little is being done to correct this issue other than allocate a far too little amount for replacement ships that will arrive too late. A few suggestions:

• Change the operating model for the ships that still are in the fleet- assign full crews to the existing ships to allow them the opportunity to properly maintain and exercise the equipment.
• Assigning full crews will grow the motivated and fully trained personnel pool that will be available to meet emergent mission requirements.
• Spend more days at sea- ships are much more dependable when they operate regularly
• Fully fund both annual and periodic maintenance- you can pay now or pay later but paying later will always cost more.
• Engage private industry for ideas- the firms that operate ships in the international market keep their ships operating or they go out of business. If you talk to companies that operate ships in both commercial and government service you will find out that the ships in commercial service have nowhere near the down time that ships in government service do. Maybe there are some reasons for that? Maybe that should be looked into?
• Instead of purchasing old ships consideration should be given to chartering newer ships for 5 to 10 years. These ships can merely be replaced when the charters expire. This would ensure that modern ships are always available to the warfighter and eliminates any costs associated with disposing of older and no longer needed tonnage.

It is very clear that the current model is not working. The continued use of the current model will only lead to a fleet that is less ready with fewer mariners who are capable of operating and maintaining this critical defense capability. A change in direction must be made soon and the clock is ticking.

David Sloane is a graduate of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy has worked afloat and ashore in the U.S. flag maritime industry for almost 40 years. He currently works for Maersk Line, Limited and teaches “International Maritime Transportation” at Old Dominion University. Any views/opinions represented in this article are personal and belong solely to the author and do not represent those of people, institutions or organizations that the author may be associated with in a professional or personal capacity.

Featured Image: USNS Bob Hope (T-AKR-300) at Naval Base San Diego (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

Strategic Sealift Topic Week

By Phillip Amrine

Shortly after midnight on February 3rd, 1943, the SS Dorchester was torpedoed by a German U-boat near the southern tip of Greenland. If the name Dorchester sounds familiar, it may be because its sinking made famous the selfless sacrifice of the Four Chaplains. What is also notable about the Dorchester is that the sinking of that troopship was the greatest single loss of life—674 of the 904 men on board were killed—in the Battle of the Atlantic, the Allied effort to sustain the campaign to defeat the Axis Powers in Europe. Despite the singular tragedy of the men lost on the Dorchester, it is easily lost among many such sinkings; by war’s end, nearly 38,000 Allied nation merchant sailors had perished in the North Atlantic.

A campaign like the Battle of the Atlantic, in which thousands of ships fought their way through U-boat-infested waters to keep alive the Allied war effort, seems unimaginable today. U.S. forces have not been threatened during the ‘expedition’ part of expeditionary operations since 1945, and in the three decades of unipolarity since the fall of the Soviet Union, the only threats of concern have been isolated, individual attacks on U.S. troops moving between theaters. If this historical trend were to continue, then United States Transportation Command’s (USTRANSCOM) problem of recapitalizing the sealift fleet would be straightforward; a new surge sealift fleet would require only the most basic capabilities and crews with only basic mariner skill sets. Is this a valid expectation, or should U.S. forces expect formerly permissive environments to become contested? If it is not a valid expectation, what should USTRANSCOM do to increase the defensive capabilities of its sealift fleet?

The Ever-Developing Threat Environment

Operational access is a strategic requirement for the United States. As noted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Joint Operational Access Concept (JOAC), protecting global interests as a global power requires the ability to project military force into any region of the world. In spite of the historical assumption of unfettered U.S. access to the global commons, American military planners can no longer assume that U.S. forces can move to theater free from conventional military threats. Published in 2012, the JOAC notes three challenges for U.S. force projection in the future: the proliferation of antiaccess and area-denial (A2/AD) weapons technology, the rapidly changing U.S. overseas defense posture, and the increase in cross-domain threats, specifically in space and cyberspace.

The concerns outlined in the JOAC dovetail with concerns in the National Defense Strategy (published in 2018) and the President’s Interim National Security Strategy (published in March of this year) which clearly identify strategic competition with near-peer rivals as the greatest threat to American interests. Power projection and operational access, two of the seapower functions identified in joint doctrine, are increasingly at risk from the rising capabilities of adversaries. Should the U.S. find itself entangled in large scale combat operations in a distant theater, the chances that U.S. forces could be threatened while transiting to those theaters are greater now than they have been in several decades. What does this new threat environment mean for USTRANSCOM, given its responsibility for force projection and sustainment for the U.S. military?

USTRANSCOM has given thought to these developments. Since 2016, USTRANSCOM has conducted at least 11 studies on mobility capabilities in contested environments, which yielded at least 59 recommendations for shaping future mobility capabilities (the reports are all at least partially sensitive or classified). The Government Accountability Office (GAO) surveyed just the unclassified portions of these reports to assess how effectively USTRANSCOM’s service components were adapting to the developing threat environment. The GAO concluded that while USTRANSCOM and the greater Department of Defense (DoD) were acting on information in the reports, they were not systematically implementing or even tracking compliance with the recommendations.

Air Mobility Command (AMC) has made some changes to its contested environment capabilities. In addition to adding defensive systems to aircraft, it has revamped its aircrew training programs, reducing more mundane training sorties focused on basic flying skills in favor of adding integrated mission sorties across AMC’s major missions sets (airlift, aerial refueling, and aeromedical evacuation). 

Having been assigned to an AMC tanker squadron shortly before the integrated mission sorties were implemented, I had the opportunity to witness this training evolution in action. The new sortie structure—which emphasized countering near-peer capabilities, especially of an A2/AD variety—required crews to plan, execute, and adapt missions in a way they had not in at least the previous decade. One of the key components of this training evolution is that the capabilities exercised were influenced by inputs from the geographic combatant commands (GCCs). This was a key factor in ensuring that limited training resources were directed towards skills and capabilities relevant to expected threats.

MSC’s Preparation for Future Threats

What has Military Sealift Command (MSC) done in response to USTRANSCOM’s studies? Last October, MSC added contested environment training to the program for its strategic sealift officers. In 2018, MSC also created a Tactical Advisor program to supplement the mariner crews who would operate both organic USTRANSCOM shipping and contracted commercial vessels. This program is expected to yield up to 150 advisors by this year, but given that the Tactical Advisors are Navy Reserve strategic sealift officers and surface warfare officers, there may not be enough to supplement sealift crews during a major contingency (many of these officers would be called to man surface combatants or USTRANSCOM’s organic sealift assets). MSC has also begun training enlisted communications technicians to operate mobile secure communications equipment issued to surge sealift ships in a major contingency, but as of September, only 22 such personnel had been trained.

The missing link in MSC’s preparation for future threat environments seems to be the bulk of the sealift force: the citizen mariners who will crew America’s sealift fleet should a major war break out. MSC and the Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration noted that training requirements for these crews are specified in contracts with sealift companies. Skills like ship maintenance, cargo loading and unloading, and navigation are critical day-to-day competencies, but these sailors have received effectively no contested environment training. MSC has attempted to remedy this during exercises like Turbo Activation wherein Tactical Advisors conduct training with the sealift crews, but noted that the small number of advisors and limited number of ships involved (about 25% of the sealift fleet) in the annual exercise limited the distribution of training across that force.

Similar to AMC’s efforts to replace aging platforms, MSC has made plans to replace its aging surge sealift fleet. As of February, 2021, the Navy had still not published a capabilities document for a future sealift platform, but the final phase of its sealift recapitalization anticipates initial delivery of such a platform in 2028, with service life extensions and used commercial ships bridging the gap. A capabilities document is expected to outline any defensive capabilities the Navy would require of a new sealift ship.

The Other War: Fighting to Modernize on a Limited Budget

What can USTRANSCOM do in the short term to maximize the defensive potential of its sealift fleet when replacement of older vessels with newer, more capable platforms and training systems that saturates the force with applicable skills are both years and billions of dollars away? A large-scale program to equip the current fleet with defensive systems and crews fully capable of sailing into or through contested waters is certainly out of the question; from the perspective of the resources required and current priorities as the entire military shifts focus to great power competition, it simply will not happen.

What is the alternative? One might be the measure AMC took to develop more targeted and tailored mission training for its aircrews. USTRANSCOM could survey the GCCs for what they consider to be the greatest tactical threats to shipping and aim its limited training resources to optimize the benefit to future operations. Another avenue is to consider the balance of training funds versus recapitalization; ultimately, the fleet must be renewed with new ships that can reliably deliver forces to the point of conflict, but that fleet is years away. 

What current capabilities can bridge the gap? The program to train merchant mariners with tactical advisors could be expanded, and older ships with better-trained crews could improve survivability in a threat environment for far fewer dollars than a crash program to build new ships. If the priority is high enough, those tactical advisors could be temporarily brought in from active duty Navy forces, rather than relying solely on reserve forces.

Ultimately, the GAO highlighted that USTRANSCOM does not have a program to track modernization and training prioritization as it related to contested environments. With proper oversight, USTRANSCOM could develop an overarching program that integrates analysis of likely future threats and develops training tailored to meet those threats with modernization and recapitalization of both sealift and air mobility platforms. USTRANSCOM could also coordinate these efforts with our allies through avenues like Joint Force Command Norfolk, NATO’s answer to maintaining security of the critical Atlantic sea lanes.

Conclusion: Past Performance Isn’t Predictive, but It Can Inform Us

At the height of the Second World War, the Allies were operating sealift vessels in the tens of thousands; what is remarkable is that over 3,500 noncombatant ships like the Dorchester were sunk—and the Battle of the Atlantic was still a resounding victory for the Allies! The scale of shipbuilding and crew training required to sustain such a campaign is truly mind-boggling. The industrial nature of that campaign, during the height of which over 100 new ships were built per month in the U.S. alone, is unlikely to ever happen again. 

Sealifting forces on the scale of WW2 is no longer required (a single M1 Abrams probably outmatches ten or more M4 Shermans in combat effects) and is it also unlikely to be reproduced (just nine construction shipyards are active in the U.S. today; during WW2 there were over 50 in operation). It is not unreasonable to conclude that America does not need a more capable sealift fleet given the safety U.S. forces have enjoyed when deploying and redeploying from theater for the last 70 years. However, no one can deny that the environment in which U.S. forces operate is fluid and unpredictable; counting on the threats to remain at their current level would be both foolish and irresponsible. As the long arm of American military power, USTRANSCOM must have the capability to deliver forces anywhere in the world at lightning speed. Maintaining this capability means deliberately monitoring competitors’ capabilities and countering them when they threaten the ability to deploy military force.

Major Phillip Amrine is an operations planner at Headquarters, Fifteenth Air Force. He has combat deployments in the KC-135 Stratotanker, C-5 Galaxy, and MC-12 Liberty. He is a 2008 graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and is currently a candidate for Master of Arts in Strategic Studies at Norwich University.

Featured image: A 22-aircraft “freedom launch” took place Sept. 11, 2013, at Travis Air Force Base, Calif. Seven C-17 Globemaster IIIs, 11 KC-10 Extenders and four C-5B Galaxies from the 60th Air Mobility Wing lined up in what is historically referred to as an “elephant walk,” then launched consecutively over 36 minutes to take part in Air Mobility Command missions. (U.S. Air Force photo/Ken Wright)

Strategic Sealift Topic Week

By Benjamin Clark and Gregory Lewis

“In future wars, there will be a fight to get to the fight.” —VADM Dee Mewbourne, TRANSCOM Deputy Commander

“We’re going to have to fight to get to the fight.”—Gen. Robert Neller, 38th Commandant of the Marine Corps

The U.S. Transportation Command (TRANSCOM) Deputy Commander and the former Commandant of the Marine Corps are in one accord. These leaders have effectively parsed out two distinct dilemmas — an “away game” fight and a battle to get to that fight. The wicked problems facing the Marine Corps, its fellow services, and TRANSCOM are, in fact, components of a collective dilemma. The strategic competition milieu no longer differentiates between the frontline and the homefront as if there were combatants and non-combatants. It is a singular fight.

As the TRANSCOM component that bears the preponderance of sustainment requirements for the Joint Warfighting Concept, Military Sealift Command (MSC) faces a boatload of wicked problems. The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments’ 2019 report “Sustaining the Fight: Resilient Maritime Logistics for a New Era” clearly articulates these challenges. The 18 May 2021 House Armed Services Committee’s hearing on “Posture and Readiness of the Mobility Enterprise” was another prescient reminder for General Lyons, TRANSCOM’s commander, and Congress of the myriad national security challenges weighing on MSC. 

MSC’s ships are too big and too tired – and those are the ships that work, but they must fight with the fleet they have, not the fleet they want. It is time for Congress and the Defense Department to build a sealift force capable of handling the multiplicity of challenges presented in competition, crisis, and conflict by giving MSC warfighters, a fleet, fuel, flexibility, and friends.

The Fighting Sustainers

A dangerous mindset has crept into sustainment organizations like MSC. “Warfighter support” is a moniker these organizations should find patronizing. Sustainment is a warfighting function; ergo, those organizations which sustain forces are warfighters. The notion that there is somehow a divide between combatants and sustainers as de facto non-combatants has led to casualties throughout history, from the English baggage train at Agincourt in the Hundred Years War to ambushed refueling vehicles during Operation Enduring Freedom. 

Maritime sustainers should consider the hulking watery graves of “warfighter supporters” littering the harbor entrances along the Eastern Seaboard, casualties of the Battle of the Atlantic. If the wrecks off America’s coastline are not enough of a harbinger, the hunter-and-prey carnage of the 2020 movie Greyhound illustrates the even grimmer tale of combat in the North Atlantic sea lanes. 

Alongside these sunken graveyards, however, are the rusting steel coffins of U-boats, a testament to the eventual shift in mentality when sustainers became part of a convoy system of hunter-killers. 

Today, sustainment organizations are under attack from the factory to the fleet and the fighting hole through cyberattacks and disinformation. America’s pacing threats are already in our “backyard.” MSC must embrace a warfighter ethos now, as the sustainment gun trucks of Vietnam did after taking significant casualties, or risk joining its predecessors on the ocean floor. The Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration (MARAD) has begun taking steps to change this by recruiting veterans through its Military to Mariner program. MSC and MARAD should capitalize on these veteran warriors’ expertise to hone the next generation of Strategic Sealift Officers into fighting sustainers.

The Fleet: Joint Sustainment Ships

Warfighters need weapons. While the primary mission of MSC is sustainment, it should be well-prepared to have its mission contested as aggressively as any other warfighting unit. MSC must clarify its need for defensive resources in the budget debates for research, development, and operational funding. In a contested military campaign, enemies will target sustainment vessels, arguably more than their surface Navy counterparts. Adopting platforms and training that better prepare MSC for wartime will dramatically improve the strength of the joint force as a whole.

MSC is responsible for transporting the equipment sets associated with the Army’s Multi-Domain Operations, the Naval Services’ Advantage At Sea, and the Air Force Future Operating Concept. Not surprisingly, these concepts envision tanks, trucks, and aircraft consuming significant amounts of fuel to accomplish their tasks. To move these forces and the fuel they need for combat, MSC’s fleet will need its own separate ocean of fuel. The projected escort requirements to protect the volume of convoys needed to support these force flows would be astronomical. In a major conflict with a peer competitor, it is anticipated the surface Navy will have no resources to spare for escort of shipping. Expected shortfalls in surface combatants so severe, the Navy has essentially told MSC “you’re on your own” when it comes to a major war.

To address this challenge, MSC needs the maritime equivalent of gun trucks that can self-secure convoys across the seas. These ships would be the naval equivalent of the Army and Marine Corps Logistics Vehicle System Replacement (LVSR), the backbone of sustainment operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Like the LVSR, these ships should carry containers and come equipped with an onboard crane to support transferring cargo where no external lighterage equipment is available. MSC’s new fleet must also include container-capable connectors, perhaps leveraging wing-in-ground effect technology to rapidly close the last tactical sustainment mile from seabasing platforms such as the USNS Hershel “Woody” Williams.

General Lyons has stated that MSC needs ships capable of moving into the smaller ports of the world with “shallow draft kinds of vessels,” based on rapid mobility to support dynamic fleet operations. The Navy’s research and development for the Overlord–class unmanned surface vessels and the Coast Guard’s Fast Response Cutters provide foundational designs with the mobility required to fulfill the needs of maritime platforms for fighting sustainers.

Defensive capabilities are essential for self-securing sustainment ships. Due to their smaller size, these ships may be more challenging to detect from long range and could use torpedoes for defense in open water. They could be outfitted with missiles like the Harpoon or the Naval Strike Missile for protection while providing limited strike capabilities close to advanced bases. By investing in multiple smaller ships instead of larger platforms, MSC would be in more places at once, thereby enhancing the sustainment force’s self-protection posture while increasing the ability to provide intelligence to the larger force.

The Fuel: Energizing the Fight to get to the Fight

Ever since there has been combat at sea, fleets have needed energy. Robert Fulton’s steamboats revolutionized commerce and control of the seas in the age of sail, with iron-clad steamships making their debut as weapons fighting for the inland waterways of a divided United States. Wood and coal were the dominant fuels until Winston Churchill navigated the shift from “Coal to Oil.” As nations learned to harness the atom, nuclear power became a critical energy source for fleets during the Cold War and beyond. 

Nuclear power has been the primary technological enabler of the Navy’s submarines and aircraft carriers, allowing the Navy to achieve key advantages over comparable conventionally-powered platforms. Most critical for logistics is extending refueling cycles up to twenty years, relying on the large quantity of energy stored in the highly-enriched uranium fuel. This technology has not been extended to other maritime applications partially due to cost, but more importantly due to weapons proliferation risks of increased production of highly-enriched uranium, which could be used either as a fuel or in nuclear weapons production. Generation IV reactor designs, adapted for ship propulsion and power, have the potential to solve both the issues of proliferation concerns and high costs. Fast spectrum nuclear reactors designed for maritime applications are already in development, and based on current projections, will eventually be more economical than fossil-fuel powered shipping, while still maintaining a refueling cycle of up to 20-30 years.

Fleet sustainment is at the crux of naval strategic thinking, and reduced sustainment chains are the real strategic advantage achieved through this technology. Until fleets can economically convert to something akin to nuclear power, refueling on the timeline of decades, energy sustainment will continue to impact war at sea and capital costs will remain high for ships in harm’s way. 

While there is no magic bullet for the myriad challenges facing MSC, part of the solution may come from a single element with a single electron— hydrogen. Hydrogen has been used by the military since World War I, and since the Clinton Administration, every president has pursued a national hydrogen roadmap. Today, hydrogen energy looks increasingly feasible as a replacement for existing fossil-fuel-based power systems. 

The International Energy Agency’s Hydrogen Projects Database tracks “320 green hydrogen production demonstration projects worldwide.” Even Saudi Arabia, where Marine Colonel William Eddy brokered the enduring U.S.-Saudi petroleum relationship, is now seeking to “rule the $700 billion Hydrogen Market“. China has publicly stated that it intends to be carbon neutral by 2060 and has showcased its vision to “harness the rock star of new energies” in its hydrogen-powered Qingdao Port Facility. A cynical observer could view this apparent international race to develop green hydrogen technologies as energy profiteers simply taking advantage of climate alarmism in the Western world, but even a cynic should not deny the potential for technological advantages offered by alternative energy. No advantage should be abandoned simply because of the lack of an obvious reward in the short term.

Hydrogen-fueled engines can be part of deepening the concepts of standardization, resilience, and self-reliance in naval ship design. The “Liberty Ships” of WWII exhibit many elements of design that were adopted solely for ease of manufacture and maintainability, enabling them to be deployed in great numbers at short production lead time, fulfilling logistical needs that supported more intense combat operations in geographically disparate theatres. Energy advancements in the current day should be viewed as a similarly powerful enabler. Hydrogen is a flexible fuel that can be burned directly by engines as a fuel, or in fuel cells to produce electricity, allowing it to be used as either a fuel or an energy storage medium. If designed as the fuel supporting ship designs utilizing Integrated Power Systems, the result would be greater standardization and maintainability supported by the electrification of propulsion.

Hydrogen fuel for large vessels is unlikely to be practical without first being combined with a carrier liquid (like ammonia) due to hydrogen’s low volumetric energy density, but for smaller vessels employed in defensive or escort missions compressed hydrogen used in fuel cells should be considered a viable option. Fischer-Tropsch processes produce synthetic fuel from a wide range of possible feedstocks, like captured carbon dioxide, making them a potential direct replacement for existing fossil fuels. The highest aim would be to achieve a process that can use feedstocks easily procured or produced anywhere in the world. 

Technologies like electrolytic cation exchange modules could reduce the need for feedstocks dependent on sources other than water. The yield relative to the energy required will likely remain a challenge, one which could be solved by the employment of hydrogen and synthetic fuel production in nuclear cogeneration plants deployed close to the point of use. 

A recent Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory “BruteCast” provides a plausible system design for production and use of hydrogen at the front lines of deployed ground units, a system which would mesh neatly into a larger upstream supply chain of hydrogen-based production and transportation. Designs currently under development, including some already approved by the American Bureau of Shipping, would have advanced nuclear reactors (such as those discussed above) employed as floating power plants. If built as a cogeneration plant for hydrogen and synthetic fuels, these floating power plants could become a self-sustaining source of fuel for a wide variety of vessels and other military equipment stationed close to any theatre of operations. The ultimate goal of this design philosophy, whether or not the technologies discussed here are actually adopted, is deliberate development of a fuel system of systems, a network of independent processes which are simultaneously self-sustaining and mutually supportive.

Earlier in the 21st Century, the Navy explored ways to “flip the fleet” from fossil fuels to biofuels with the “Great Green Fleet.” This endeavor ultimately proved untenable, mainly because of supply constraints of biofuels, but also because the focus of the program was on creating a market for politically-popular biofuels, instead of improving the Navy’s ability to sustain itself. Bureaucracies, politics, and budgets will always be a constraint for applications of new technology. 

Despite the failures of the Great Green Fleet, the Navy should nevertheless confidently endeavor to forge a fleet based on advanced energy systems and bold new designs, with stubborn insistence on the goal of increased resilience and flexibility of the fleet. Following the advice of Admiral Rickover: “Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous impatience.”

Astute sustainment planning and technological prowess can turn energy risk into a strategic advantage. Technological dominance in weapons of the more traditional sense has contributed to the rules-based international order, energy superiority can also contribute to achieving global peace and cooperation. 

The Flexibility: Creating an Afloat Containerized Sustainment Kill Web

The Defense Department has developed the concept of cross-domain kill webs to address strategic competition dilemmas. Whereas kill chains have exploitable weak links, kill webs are flexible, resilient, and lethal. The INDOPACOM Commander, Admiral Aquilino, stated that he does not need another carrier. Instead, he and every geographic combatant commander need sustainment forces fully integrated into Joint All Domain Command and Control kill webs. Ultimately, America needs an MSC with the capability and capacity to put boots on the ground and boats on the water to ensure the nations’ deeds can match its words. America’s ability to sustain its resolve is a powerful deterrent and a quintessential part of ensuring freedom of navigation.

A fleet carrying containerized command and control nodes and missiles becomes a potential floating kill web. Modular capabilities are not new to the Navy’s ship designers, but use of the concept to deploy weapons on platforms where they would not be expected is novel. The joint force should focus on designing modular capability sets that are rapidly deployable, transferrable, and even operable from MSC platforms. 

A containerized kill web offers the flexibility of keeping capabilities afloat or putting them ashore for missions like airfield damage repair. These containers could contain the initial operating capability for an Army Multi-Domain Task Force, a Navy Carrier Strike Group, a Marine Littoral Regiment, or an Air Force Deployable Air Base System.

Containerized flexibility for sealift is not solely about lethality, it must also be included in the Navy’s artificial intelligence and information warfare planning, as well as its “presence” and sustainment missions. 

The need for flexible manufacturing systems in modern industries has enabled technology built for ease of assembly and configuration changes. This same innovation applied to equipment for a modern machine shop, including additive manufacturing, could enable depot-level repair capability closer to advanced bases. The aggregation of these capabilities would give MSC a fleet that is leaner, meaner, and smarter.

MSC is at the forefront of supporting whole-of-government efforts led by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Containerized humanitarian assistance, disaster recovery, and Expeditionary Medical Facility sets remain crucial to America’s response to disasters at home and abroad.

The Friends: Engagement through Sustainment

The shipbuilding effort for this fleet could be part of an International Armaments Cooperation program much like the Joint Strike Fighter. Partner nations build these fighters domestically, deploy them on each other’s carriers and receive maintenance and upgrades at each others’ facilities. 

The Navy’s new fleet of sustainment ships could follow a similar cooperative program. Although such programs are complex, they incentivize defense industries to innovate with the promise of a larger market with economies of scale for their production, which, in turn, keeps the American industrial base warm. International defense partners, in return, are provided with reliable, well-supported systems, greater interoperability, and overall greater confidence in the cooperative partnership. 

This revitalized MSC fleet would be a key component of what Admirals Foggo and Greenert described in “Forging a Global Network of Navies.” For example, the U.S. Navy and the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force (JMSDF) established a Logistics Interoperability and Integration Strategic Framework, opening more significant avenues of cooperation in fleet sustainment. 

MSC is crucial to operationalizing agreements like these as its Indo-Pacific headquarters, as CTF-75 has done with their JMSDF counterparts. With a more agile and dispersed fleet, MSC could increase these partnerships because of its ability to deploy and sustain itself longer. Combatant commands are recommended to map out engagement plans that consider how MSC can contribute to further optimization of relationships established by the Navy’s Maritime Partnership Program and the National Guard’s State Partnership Program. MSC has the unique ability to engage local civil and military partners close to the spheres of influence of great power rivals without implication of commitment to a binding military alliance, allowing the Navy to maintain long-term presence in key regions without high-profile, large-scale exercises.

MSC’s new hydrogen-fueled fleet could leverage the Defense Logistics Agency’s existing energy partnerships and tap into the burgeoning hydrogen infrastructure evolving around the globe. MSC would then be well-positioned to facilitate “whole of government” maritime sustainment networks analogous to the Northern Distribution Network’s contribution to the State Department’s Silk Road Initiative. Built to sustain operations in Afghanistan, the Northern Distribution Network was an excellent case study demonstrating how to leverage short-term, concrete logistical needs of building and maintaining sustainment networks to create a wider network of engagement in regions of strategic importance.

Conclusion

The same day General Lyons briefed Congress on TRANSCOM’s readiness dilemma, the Marine Corps Commandant, General Berger, addressed the Brookings Institute on the future of warfare and his warfighters’ sustainment dilemma. If properly equipped, MSC can address these interwoven challenges. Congress and the Navy have the opportunity to rekindle the innovative spirit of America’s first fleet, as told in Ian Toll’s Six Frigates as it designs and builds a fleet for the 21st Century.

America needs a warfighting sustainment fleet organized, trained, and equipped to shoot, move, and communicate in a major combat operation or add value during a humanitarian response. China has weaponized its supply chain. America needs its own afloat sustainment kill web hinged on MSC’s fleet. Such a fleet would move the Joint Concept for Contested Logistics from aspirational to operational. Moreover, building this fleet would reinvigorate American shipbuilding. Most importantly, launching this fleet will signal America’s friends and foes alike that it is committed to maintaining freedom of the seas, even in the face of the threat of total war.

Benjamin Clark is a contract electrical engineer for the U.S. Coast Guard and a five-year U.S. Navy veteran. He earned his Master’s in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Riverside, specializing in power systems and electrical power markets. He is a 2012 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. His views are his own and do not necessarily represent the official views of his employer or the government departments he is associated with. He can be contacted at clarkbenjamin71@gmail.com.

Greg Lewis is a contract Operational Logistics Planner and Instructor at the Navy Expeditionary Combat Command’s Warfighting Development Center. He is a retired Marine Logistician and Regional Area Officer. He earned his Master’s in National Security Affairs from the Naval Postgraduate School and is a 1996 graduate of Norwich University. His views are his own and do not necessarily represent the official views of his employer or the government departments he is associated with. He can be contacted at gregway@hotmail.com.

Special thanks to Commander Bill Balding (USN, ret.), Lieutenant Commander Chris Blake (USN), Major Brent Jurmu (USMC), and Captain Walker Mills (USMC).

Featured image: Capt. David Gray, the military detachment officer in charge of the Military Sealift Command expeditionary sea base USNS Hershel ‘Woody’ Williams (ESB 4), gives guidance and direction to Sailors while leading a training evolution aboard one of the ship’s ridged-hull inflatable boats while the ship was at anchor in the Chesapeake Bay, Sept. 15, 2019. (U.S. Navy photo by Bill Mesta/Released)

Strategic Sealift Topic Week

Read Part One here.

By Salvatore R. Mercogliano, Ph.D.

Peer-to-Peer Conflict #3 – The Cold War

In the third peer-to-peer competition in the Cold War, from 1949 to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States possessed a large and capable military with a global presence, bases in multiple countries, and an ability to power project on a scale never before seen. The United States Navy did not initially face a peer, as noted by Samuel Huntington in his 1954 article in U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, “National Policy and the Transoceanic Navy.” As he stated, “This new doctrine as it emerges from the writings of postwar naval writers and leaders basically involves what may be termed the theory of the transoceanic navy, that is, a navy oriented away from the oceans and towards the land masses on their far side.” 

To ensure that the United States was able to meet this need, and in alignment with efforts to create a tri-elemental military, the new Department of Defense created the Military Sea Transportation Service (MSTS) in 1949 under the Navy. Bringing together the Army Transport Service with its large fleet of troopships and cargo vessels utilizing government employed merchant mariners; the Naval Transportation Service with its fleet of auxiliaries and amphibious craft with naval personnel on board; and a vast tanker fleet under the office of the Chief of Naval Operations operated by four commercial shipping firms; the new MSTS possessed a fleet larger than the pre-World War II American merchant marine. Initially protested by commercial shipping firms, MSTS proved its worth the following year when it supported the rapid shifting of U.S. forces from Japan to Korea, the amphibious invasion at Inchon, and the dual reinforcement of both Korea and Europe with the latter establishment of the North American Treaty Organization.

As the Navy and merchant marine faced the block obsolescence of their World War Two-built fleets, both had to face difficult choices. The first head of the new Maritime Administration (MARAD), Edward L. Cochrane, initiated the Mariner program to build 35 C-4 freighters across seven shipyards. These ships, owned by the government, would be leased to commercial firms for their operation, with options to purchase. The military retained the first opportunity to charter. They were used late in the Korean War to replace many of the Victory-ships broken out from the vast National Defense Reserve Fleet of laid-up ships left over from the Second World War. The Mariners proved so successful that five were taken by the military for conversion into auxiliaries and the other 30 were purchased by commercial firms and became a basis for nearly all future American freighters until the advent of containerships. To provide tankers for the fleet, MSTS in conjunction with MARAD conceived a build-and-charter program. By assigning operating contracts to companies for a set period, usually five years, companies were allowed to build ships in U.S. shipyards knowing they had assured business.

Throughout the first half of the Cold War, MSTS provided the necessary logistical support for the Department of Defense. The Vietnam War witnessed not only a name change for the organization, from MSTS to Military Sealift Command (MSC), but a new operating concept. Between 1965 and 1975, both the fleet of MSTS/MSC and the American merchant marine decreased by half in terms of ships and personnel.

Following the Vietnam War, the fleet of troopships and government-owned freighters were largely eliminated, with movement of personnel shifting to aircraft and contracts awarded to American shipping companies to handle cargo. MSC also rediscovered an old mission when the oiler Taluga was transferred to their control and the Navy crew replaced by merchant mariners. Civilian crews on Navy supply ships date back to the age of sail, and in the modern Navy to 1899, when the fuel ship USS Alexander received a merchant marine crew. That mode of crewing ended at the start of the First World War. But with the Navy facing personnel issues and the priority to crew warships over auxiliaries, the Navy resurrected this concept.

Over the span of decades, civilian crewing of auxiliaries grew with MSC operating not only shuttle ships – those that provide fuel and supplies from shore facilities – but to station ships providing underway replenishment to strike groups. The first MSC station ship went online in 1991. By the time of the Iraq War in 2003, half of the oilers, store and ammunition station ships supporting strike groups were operated by MSC. In 2010, the last Navy auxiliary transitioned over to civilian merchant marine crews. This change, along with a realignment of missions in the mid-1990s that transferred container operations to U.S. Transportation Command, oriented MSC to more of a Navy fleet support vice cargo mission.

The end of the Vietnam War coincided with a rising threat from the Soviet Navy. In 1979, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Thomas B. Hayward wrote his views on this subject in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, “The Future of U.S. Sea Power.” While the Soviets did not possess the ability to contest the U.S. Navy everywhere on the world’s oceans, according to Hayward:

“It does mean that we must control those areas which we need to use in peace and war, against whatever forces may challenge that control. These essential sea areas include the strategically critical waters around the Eurasian periphery, and the economically vital sea lines of communication (SLOCs) through the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans on which the advanced industrial economies of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan so heavily depend.”

As the Navy embraced the concepts espoused by Admiral Hayward, the merchant marine continued its decline. While the Soviet merchant marine operated more as a naval auxiliary and not as a true commercial entity, the Merchant Marine Act of 1970 with the objective of building 300 American ships in 10 years fell short of its goal. Added to this, the Reagan Administration announced, as one of its goals, to deregulate industries and end government support. This equated to the end of construction and operational differential subsidies created under the Merchant Marine Act of 1936 for vessels in international trade. These helped offset the higher costs associated with building and operating a ship under the American registry. Additionally, the call for a 600-ship Navy and the end of construction in naval shipyards meant the displacement of American merchant ships by naval contracts in private shipyards.

In the coastal trade, which had been a bulwark for the merchant marine and national sealift in the previous two peer-to-peer conflicts, the construction of the Interstate Highway System, along with a network of interstate pipelines, and the shifting of passenger travel into airliners and freeing up space on railways for freight meant a marked decline in cargo for ships in the protected cabotage trade. All of this, the decline of the MSC fleet, the end of differentials for ships in the international trade, and the massive reduction of cargo along the American coast resulted in the U.S. merchant marine declining from 16.9 percent of the world’s fleet in 1960 (2,926 ships) to 3.7% (857) in 1975, down to 2.6% (619) in 1991, and in 2019 sitting at only 0.4% (182).

The reduction in the merchant marine was offset by the creation of several programs to ensure that military operations could be executed again. New programs such as the Afloat Prepositioning Force, the Fast Sealift Ships, and the Ready Reserve Force provided the military with the means to rapidly deploy forces, while still relying on the commercial merchant marine for their supply and sustainment. This was tested at the end of the Cold War when the U.S. dispatched over a half a million personnel to Saudi Arabia in the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91.  Due to the rapidity of the operation, about a quarter of the cargo went on ships chartered from the open market, which was better than that achieved in World War One or World War Two.

With the end of Operation Desert Storm and the end of the Cold War, the United States faced a new situation. The Navy underwent a massive downsizing and the American merchant marine accelerated its reduction while global maritime trade grew ever more expansive. In 1990, maritime trade stood at 4 billion tons, doubling the total from 1970 and eight times that of 1950. By 2000, it stood at 6 billion tons and in 2018 topped 11 billion tons. To meet the needs of the military, the Department of Defense at the end of the Persian Gulf War obtained twenty Large Medium-Speed Roll-on/Roll-off vessels (LMSRs —15 newly built and five converted from existing ships; the latter a questionable decision). Additionally, MARAD bought 17 “ro/ros” from the commercial market to augment the Ready Reserve Force. To prevent the disappearance of the American international cargo fleet, the Maritime Security Program provided a yearly stipend to 47 ships, later increased to 60, to maintain a network of ships on the world’s ocean, but lacked a means to ensure the domestic shipbuilding of such vessels.

With the dawn of the new millennium and the perception that Francis Fukuyama’s notions in The End of History and The Last Man were taking hold, there seemed little need to worry about the future with the U.S. Navy remaining the dominant force on the world’s oceans and world commerce in the hands of multi-national corporations with their ships flying the flags of open registries, such as Panama, Liberia, and the Marshall Islands, all headquartered and established in the United States.

Peer-to-Peer Conflict #4       

In 2019, I penned an article for the Chief of Naval Operations Naval History Essay Contest entitled, “Suppose There Was a War and the Merchant Marine Didn’t Come?” In it, I reviewed the capabilities of American sealift forces and the U.S. merchant marine to wage a war but did not play it out to its conclusion. So, what if there was a need of the United States to stage an operation similar to Operation Desert Shield/Storm of transporting a half million forces in approximately six months to an ally in the Far East opposed by a potential peer, such as China? Could the United States sealift and merchant marine perform this mission? 

In the area of Naval Fleet Auxiliary Force, MSC has 15 Henry J. Kaiser-class oilers (soon to be exchanged for new John Lewis-class vessels), 12 Lewis and Clark-class dry cargo/ammunition ships, and two Supply-class fast combat stores ships. As the Supply is roughly equal to one Lewis and Clark and a Kaiser, this translates to roughly the equivalent of 14 resupply groups: all devoid of any self-defense protection.

During the Cold War, in operations in Korea, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf, the United States had the luxury of utilizing secure supply bases, well forward in Japan, the Philippines, and in the Gulf States. A potential war with China in the Far East could involve missile strikes on forward supply infrastructure, and may necessitate an abandonment of such forward bases in Japan, Okinawa, or Guam, and relying on resupply from Hawaii or even as far as the continental United States.

Add to this the distances from past forward bases were in the hundreds of miles, whereas Hawaii and the continental United States are in the thousands of miles, and there is a potential for these to be unsecure sea lines of communications – threatened by submarines or ballistic missiles. This means that the 14 resupply groups, which are split between the Atlantic and Pacific, will be hard pressed to maintain the Navy’s frontline assets, particularly due to the tyranny of distance.

The Afloat Prepositioning Force of 14 ships supporting the Marine Corps, two for the Air Force, and eight for the Army are split between Maritime Prepositioning Squadron Two at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and Maritime Prepositioning Squadron Three in the Marianas. These ships provided the initial heavy equipment in both Operations Desert Shield and Iraqi Freedom. Squadron Three finds itself based within range of China’s medium-range ballistic missiles and generally exposed to potential naval threats being moored in open anchorages off the Marianas. Squadron Two could have to navigate through the Strait of Malacca and the South China Sea to be of use and therefore expose themselves to potential threats by Chinese bases within the Nine-Dash Line. They could divert and sail around Australia, but that would entail a longer sea voyage and delay their arrival. As with the ships in the naval fleet auxiliary force, these ships are also unarmed and vulnerable.

To deploy forces from the United States across the Pacific, there are the 41 ships in the Ready Reserve Force and 13 vessels maintained by the Military Sealift Command. These 54 vessels are intended to provide 10 million square feet of cargo capacity to a combatant commander, such as Indo-Pacific Command. At issue is the decreased readiness of this force. Just recently, there were 61 ships in the surge fleet, but MARAD and MSC are in the process of purging older and poorly performing vessels. MSC is expected to phase out more vessels, further shrinking this fleet.

In September 2019, General Stephen Lyons, the commander of United States Transportation Command – which overseas MSC for its sealift mission – and Mark Buzby, the Maritime Administrator, orchestrated a large-scale test of the surge sealift fleet. Known as Turbo Activation 19+, it activated 33 ships (27 MARAD and 6 MSC) between September 16 and 21. Each ship was brought from reduced operating status, to full, and then sent on a three to four-day sea trial. The goal for the surge sealift was to have an 85 percent availability. The after-action report highlighted the issue, “The low Cumulative Fleet Success Rate (40.7%) suggests the Organic Surge Fleet is challenged to be immediately available for a large-scale inter-theater force deployment without delays/impacts to force closure due to degraded readiness.”

While one would think that a 40 percent vice 85 percent availability is damning, in truth, this test did not even adequately assess the true capabilities of the fleet. For example, there was no discussion on where the crews of the vessels came from, meaning would they be available for an oceanic voyage versus a short test sail. Many of these crews were between sailing contracts and could accommodate a few days at sea, but not several months. There was no determination if ship performance would degrade beyond the three to four days at sea. One ship, SS Regulus, was stuck in harbor due to insufficient air draft to exit the port as a result of flood waters in Beaumont. Many of the ships activated, two-thirds, were based on the East and Gulf coasts, necessitating a passage through the Panama Canal if they were to deploy to the Pacific. As we have seen recently in the Suez Canal with the case of MV Ever Given, access and use of the canal is in the hands of the host state, and whether China could exert political, economic, or military exertions against Panama (the single largest registry of ships in the world are under Panama) to prohibit transit of American sealift vessels could substantially slow any deployment.

Finally, there is the sustainment issue for forces once they arrive in theater. In Korea and Vietnam this was provided by Victory-ships broken out from the National Defense Reserve Fleet until replaced by Mariners in the Korean War and containerships of Sea-Land in the Vietnam War. During the Persian Gulf War, MSC contracted with seven commercial firms under the Special Middle East Shipping Agreement to ensure the transportation of containers to the regions, later incorporated into the MSP and Voluntary Intermodal Shipping Agreement (VISA).  

An examination of the current MSP contracts indicates an issue regarding a war in the Far East. In term of containerships, Maersk Lines Limited, Hapag-Lloyd, and APL provide specific services. Hapag is focused on the North Atlantic and Maersk performs similar services, plus to the Middle East. The only container line focused on the Far East is that of APL with six ships on the trans-Pacific route (although MV President Eisenhower is currently out of service due to a recent engine room fire) and three for local service between Japan, Korea, and Guam. US Ocean provides heavy-lift capacity world-wide. In terms of roll-on/roll-off ships, American Ro/Ro Carriers, Waterman Steamship, and Liberty Marine provide global service, with many of the ships recently involved in the Defender exercises in Europe.

Behind the ships of the Maritime Security Program come the vessels in the cabotage trade, those supplying Hawaii – Matson and Pasha – and Alaska – TOTE, along with tanker companies such as Crowley and OSG. In a peer-to-peer confrontation, as in the world wars, these ships could be shifted into sustainment operations and the off-duty crews used for the 54 surge sealift vessels. But perhaps the greatest underlying issue is whether the U.S. merchant marine would even support a contested sealift operation. John Konrad in a May 2019 editorial for gCaptain, entitled his piece, “Admiral, I am NOT Ready for War,” and highlighted some of the significant concerns expressed by merchant mariners on their readiness.

Conclusion

Today, China is in the position that the U.S. found itself on the eve of the Second World War, with a large maritime infrastructure supporting a growing Navy and commercial merchant fleet with a global presence. China’s COSCO Shipping is the single largest maritime company in the world. At the same moment, U.S. Navy programs are foundering and most of the protections once in place to ensure a large domestic merchant marine and industrial base have been dismantled. One must envision what the next peer-to-peer naval conflict could look like for the United States, with a U.S. Navy that is first in the world, but severely challenged, and a merchant marine that is 21st and declining, versus a nation like China whose navy and merchant marine ranks second in both categories and climbing.

The challenge for the United States in a fourth peer-to-peer conflict would be the same in the previous three: to ensure that there was a requisite force of merchant ships to support their maritime strategy (there is not). Next, it would have to ensure the safe transportation of cargo, via these ships across a contested sea, necessitating a system of convoying and escorts (which the Navy currently lacks). Finally, without sufficient ships, the nation has to fall back upon its domestic maritime infrastructure to build new cargo vessels (which is also not present). Lacking all this, the nation may face a situation akin to the first peer-to-peer conflict and have to charter from foreign firms (if they are willing to risk their vessels) or seize commercial shipping and replace their crews with personnel from a depleted American merchant marine or stretched U.S. Navy. Based on history, it appears that the United States is ill-prepared to sustain a large military force overseas, across a contested sea. 

Salvatore R. Mercogliano is a former merchant mariner, having sailed and worked ashore for the Military Sealift Command. He is an associate professor of history at Campbell University and an adjunct professor at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy. He has written on U.S. Merchant Marine history and policy, including his book, Fourth Arm of Defense: Sealift and Maritime Logistics in the Vietnam War, and won 2^nd Place in the 2019 Chief of Naval Operations History Essay Contest with his submission, “Suppose There Was a War and the Merchant Marine Did Not Come?”

Featured Image: November 11, 1990 – A Military Sealift Command-chartered vehicle cargo ship prepares to offload equipment during Operation Desert Shield (Photo via U.S. National Archive)