This is good:
The Navy's new hulking Expeditionary Sea Bases, also referred to as Afloat Forward Staging Bases, are amazingly versatile motherships that can rapidly set up shop in the most troubled of neighborhoods. Their big flight-decks can be used by any helicopter in the Pentagon's inventory. Although their primary mission is to support lumbering MH-53E Sea Dragon mine-hunting helicopters, they also regularly play host to submarine hunting and utility helicopters, and even attack choppers. Case in point, late last March, U.S. Army AH-64E Apache Guardians flew out to USS Lewis B. Puller (ESB-3) in the Arabian Gulf to work on clearing the waters of enemy small boat swarms with the help of other assets forward-deployed to the region.
I'm also happy it wasn't in the Persian Gulf doing that. I'm always going on about that issue as I did here recently.
We have other ways of operating helicopters there as we demonstrated during the First Gulf War (the Iran-Iraq War), as I noted in this post about using the converted Ponce for a similar purpose.
This latest experience of Army helicopters on a Navy ship might--I hope--be an experience that the Army might want to replicate for itself in AFRICOM where that regional command faces the need to carry out its mission with fewer assets as EUCOM and INDOPACOM suck up resources. A mobile reserve at sea might help shift assets quietly to where they are needed.
I wrote about modularized auxiliary cruisers as power projection platforms for AFRICOM in Military Review. Is the Pentagon testing the concept?
Because I doubt the Navy--which is earmarking one each to the Atlantic and Pacific--would want to deploy such a scarce resource to AFRICOM, whose unofficial motto I'm reasonably sure is "Thank God for SOUTHCOM!"
