Seabasing

A term never really seen outside the USMC or Navy. But what it means, can be truly revolutionary to America's war fighting in the 21st century. As Defense Tech notes,

The idea behind Seabasing is to avoid the diplomatic complications of basing ground troops and aircraft in host countries.

The concept uses currently employed technologies and sea equipment to bring together what effectively is a Seabase, and even more so a Forward Operating Base (FOB). Here is what Defense Tech says about it:

Seabasing hinges on hardware, oh yes, but it's mostly old hardware. In contrast to the pet projects of other services like the Air Force's F-22 or the Army's Future Combat Systems, there is no single Seabasing budget line to attract the attention of critics. Rather, Seabasing calls for using existing big-deck assault ships -- the Tarawas and Wasps and their eventual replacements, the LHA(R)s -- to support the aviation component, and San Antonio-class LPDs and Maritime Prepositioning Ships (MPSs) to support the people and cargo part. Lewis and Clark-class logistics ships, designed to support carrier battle groups, will shuttle between ports and the Seabase with fuel, dry goods and ammo

It seems like a great system, or as the army says system of systems.

Now you may ask yourself, like I did, how does one get between the ships and between the ships and land. The military seeks to employ connectors for this job. Many connectors or derivatives, thereof, are in use today. The V-22 (even though that is a questionable performance aircraft) can be used as a connector or in the simplest sense a helicopter, and those are just two examples. Some future connectors may come from the littoral ships currently in development by the Pentagon. These ships are both flexible and able to travel in the low depth oceans just off shore, the types of places these connectors will want to be. One type of these advanced connectors can be seen here (in what looks like it being operated). The site references the USMC High Speed connector, the thing looks big, however most of the site is under password protection.

The possibilities with this system are endless, I just wonder who was the brain child of this. You don't find many of those military types hashing out these types of brilliant organizational plans that often.

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