The Army has abandoned the idea that we can do away with heavy armor and infantry fighting vehicles. So how do we get the equipment there?
One, we deploy our troops in those distant theaters where we think we'll need them. The areas where we need to fight to defend our national interests aren't too difficult to determine.
Two, we preposition equipment in those areas to meet flown in troops, or put them on ships to quickly sail to areas where we can fly in troops:
The navy MSC (Military Sealift Command) maintains sixteen of these [Maritime Prepositioning Force] ships, to carry heavy equipment and supplies for the U.S. Marine Corps. These ships are organized into three squadrons, one each stationed in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Each group of ships carries the equipment for a marine brigade and enough supplies it going for 30 days. All you have to do is fly the marines in, land the equipment, and you have a marine brigade ready to fight. The process takes less than a week.
The Army, too, maintains equipment organized in unit sets:
The army has weapons and equipment for seven brigades stored around the world, most of them on land. Three are in Europe, two in the Persian Gulf, one in Korea and one afloat in the Indian ocean. Most of the army's ships carry equipment for setting up ports and supplies for supporting troops and providing peacekeeping services. The air force, navy and Department of Defense each have three ships carrying fuel to support their operations in distant areas. The navy group includes a hospital ship.
With all these prepositioning ships, you can get a brigade of heavily armed troops, and another brigade of lightly armed paratroopers to an out of the way hot spot within a week.
But even this isn't enough. With a total of about 84 active and reserve brigades and regiments in the Army and Marine Corps, getting the first 3 or so brigades on the ground in a week is a start, but no way to win a war. In the event of a major war, whether against a peer competitor or a theater war against the likes of North Korea, Saddam's Iraq (twice), or Iran, we have to send the bulk of the troops and supplies by sea.
And that is where the basic--but least interesting for procurement decisions--method of getting troops to a war zone from the United States comes in: sea lift:
A war, rather than peacekeeping or dealing with a small squabble, requires heavy (armored and mechanized) divisions. These have to be moved by ship and one major new development in sea movement since World War II is the high speed (twice as fast as regular transports) Ro-Ro (roll on roll off) ships. The U.S. has eight of these high speed Ro-Ro's, enough to carry an armored division.
The Roll on/Roll off angle is important, as it speeds up loading and unloading the ships considerable. It takes a day for military vehicles to drive ("roll") onto the ships, and less than a day to roll off. That's less than half the time required with a regular transport. The eight fast Ro-Ro ships carry as much as over a thousand C-5 or C-17 heavy air transports. The military would like to buy more fast Ro-Ro's. But over $10 billion was spent on new transport ships in the last 30 years. New fast Ro-Ro's cost over $100 million each.
Finding the money for something as unsexy as fast Ro-Ro's is difficult. If there's a major war, the current fleet will be adequate. Not just to move the troops, but also to carry the enormous amount of supplies (over a hundred pounds per soldier per day) to keep the troops in action. The 1991 Gulf War required the movement of seven million tons of stuff to supply half a million troops for six months.
Well, it's enough if we don't lose any of those ships. It has been a while since an enemy could interfere with our deployment by sea. What if we fight an enemy capable of trying to interdict our long, thin, line of supply at sea?
This is why I've long been unimpressed with the persistent but now discarded idea that we can replace 70 ton Abrams tanks with 19 ton exotic-technology fighting vehicles that would be as lethal and survivable as our heavy armor. Don't spend whatever it takes to develop that technology--buy more fast ships to move the heavy stuff. If we need to be somewhere, we need to be somewhere in strength.
