TRANSCOM

·      TRANSCOM’s massive sealift surge, and what they do

·      Here’s every ship activated for

 

Fast sealift ship SS Algol, right, fast sealift ship SS Capella and the auxiliary crane ship SS Grand Canyon State at their homeport in Alameda, Calif.

U.S. Transportation Command announced this week the largest simultaneous activation of sealift vessels in its history, a stress test of the aging logistics fleet that would be called upon to move up to 90 percent of Army and Marine Corps equipment in the event of a major conflict.

The bulk of the ships activated are the Ready Reserve Force. That group of 46 ships is permanently kept in a reduced operating status, to be activated on short notice. The Maritime Administration has repeatedly warned that the ships are aging and difficult to man due to obsolete equipment.

In total, 22 of the 28 ships activated for the exercise are from the Ready Reserve Force, which is about 48 percent of the fleet. Crewing those ships has been an increasing challenge in recent years due in part to the requirements on mariners to maintain licenses to operate steam-powered ships, which have all but disappeared from the commercial sector.

“In the past they’ve been able to rob the other ships to sort of fill out those numbers.”

 “They’re not going to be able to do that activating 28 ships at the same time … this is going to be a true stress test of the system, both on the maintenance of the vessels and the crewing of the vessels.”

All 28 of the ships that TRANSCOM activated for the exercise, displacing more than 1.25 million tons, according to Maritime Administration and Military Sealift Command fact sheets.

Maritime pre-positioning ships, used to forward-deploy Army stores and gear for use in a crisis.

The roll-on/roll-off ships transport cargo vehicles.

Container and RO/RO ships haul containerized equipment and stores, and can accommodate vehicles.

Ready Reserve Force

Fast sealift ships

Heavy-lift ships

Crane ships

Aviation logistics support ships

RO/RO ships

The SS Curtiss arrives at Port Hueneme to support exercise Pacific Blitz 19

In the event of a major war with China or Russia, the U.S. Navy, almost half the size it was during the height of the Cold War, is going to be busy with combat operations. It may be too busy, in fact, to always escort the massive sealift effort it would take to transport what the Navy estimates will be roughly 90 percent of the Marine Corps and Army gear the force would need to sustain a major conflict.

The cruiser Chancellorsville and the roll-on/roll-off container ship John P. Bobo are underway during Valiant Shield Ops a biennial, U.S. only, field-training exercise. The U.S. has been integrating more sealift ships into its training as it grapples with how to reinvigorate its old logistics trains.

A need to support a large war effort

Losing ships and qualified mariners would rapidly put enormous pressure on U.S. logistics trains if the nation had to support a major war effort overseas. With far fewer qualified and trained mariners than existed during World War II, combined with an all-but-extinct commercial shipbuilding sector in the United States, sealift would rapidly become a massive strategic liability if Russia or China were able to begin sinking ships in numbers as Germany did during both World Wars.

Today, the Maritime Administration estimates that to operate both the surge sealift ships — the 46 ships in the Ready Reserve Force and the 15 ships in the MSC surge force — and the roughly 60 U.S.-flagged commercial ships in the Maritime Security Program available to the military in a crisis, the pool of fully qualified mariners is just barely enough.

They need 11,678 mariners to man the shops, and the pool of available, active mariners is 11,768. That means in a crisis every one of them would need to show up for the surge. By contrast the U.S. had about 55,000 active mariners in the years prior to World War II, with that number swelling to more than 200,000 at the height of the war, according to most sources.

That means that significant losses among the available pool of mariners would likely dissuade some from volunteering (bad) and would mean the loss of mariners with critical skills needed to operate the fleet for months or even years in a major contingency (worse). And even without losses, MARAD Reports’ estimates the country is about 1,800 mariners short if any kind of rotational presence is needed.

Navy Maritime Prepositioning Force ship Jack Lummus during a Group Sail off the coast of Guam.

The U.S. has been increasingly focusing on how to move logsitcs to and from large theaters such as the Asia-Pacific and Europe

       Electronic warfare

To try and offset these daunting challenges, MSC and the Maritime Administration are getting their mariners to think more like sailors when it comes to digital emissions. U.S. Navy ships have for decades had to be conscious of electronic sniffing equipment that can identify U.S. warships by the specific electronic emission made by a big fire-control radar or military communications gear.

Often U.S. ships will turn off all systems except a small commercial navigation radar to appear to be, electronically, just a commercial vessel, or even go dark all together. That kind of electronic trickery is going to be vital to preserving the sealift fleet if it has to operate with Russian or Chinese military on the prowl in the Atlantic of Pacific theaters.

US aircraft carrier Truman sail in huge NATO exercise

 

  An F/A-18 Super Hornet assigned to Carrier Air Wing launchesfrom the aircraft carrier Harry Truman in the North Atlantic