CBO Study. Sea Basing and Alternatives for Deploying and Sustaining Ground Combat Forces

摘要

A centerpiece of the Department of Defense's (DoD's) transformation efforts in recent years has been the move toward making ground forces less reliant on access to foreign-controlled facilities such as harbors, airports, or logistics bases on the ground in their area of operations. Circumstances that could limit local access to such facilities might include the following: B The absence of facilities in less-developed regions of the world; B The unwillingness of nations to provide access to their facilities because of a lack of a self-interest in (or an opposition to) U.S. military operations; or B An adversary's military ability to deny facilities to U.S. forces by attacking or by threatening to attack them. Examples of those circumstances were highlighted during the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts in 2001 and 2003, respectively. In Afghanistan, operations had to be adapted to central Asia's limited infrastructure; in Iraq, operations were restricted by Turkey's decision to deny transit rights to U.S. Army units bound for northern Iraq. Dependence on local access complicates military planning and makes U.S. forces more vulnerable to external operational constraints. capable of supporting about 2.5 Marine expeditionary brigades (MEBs). The airborne forces can respond to a crisis very quickly a brigade on alert could be airdropped anywhere in the world within a few days but their lack of armored vehicles limits their strength in combat. Amphibious forces take longer to respond: A MEB equipped with armored vehicles and air-support aircraft could take as many as four weeks to assemble and sail to a conflict far from the United States. As a further limitation, sustaining today's airborne and amphibious forces requires establishing logistics operations (bases and supply lines) on land that must subsequently be maintained and defended.