An innovative approach to overseas military basing

A constant concern for the US armed forces is how to support military action in areas where you do not already have an effective base. For anything larger than a company action, success depends on ready access to food, fuel, and ammunition supplies, and this is impossible without an organized, effective support organization. A proposed solution to this problem is called "seabasing", which would use temporary lash-ups of either ships or specially designed platforms to provide ongoing support to military operations from offshore. The Economist has more:

The original approach to seabasing was extremely Legolike. Modular rafts — platforms mounted on pontoons — would be linked together by hinges to create large, flattish surfaces that could nevertheless bend with the waves. Such a system was tested in a peacetime operation off the coast of Liberia in spring 2008. Instead of armaments, hospital supplies and the materials to build a school were unloaded from a ship to the platform, and thence to landing craft which disgorged them onto a beach.

The experiment worked, but there are doubts about taking it any further. One question is how such a raft of rafts would stand up to severe weather. There is also scepticism about whether the original goal, a surface large enough to create a floating runway that could accommodate transport aircraft, is either financially or physically feasible. It would be far larger than the largest aircraft-carrier now afloat, and thus expensive to build, and it would have to be both rigid and stable enough to act as a runway and flexible enough to withstand rough seas. The difficulty of squaring these requirements has led designers to abandon the idea of strict modularity in favour of a system that uses an array of more conventional but still specially designed ships. According to Robert Button, a seabasing expert at the RAND Corporation, a think-tank, America's navy plans to build 35 ships designed for seabasing over the next decade.

The core of such a ship-based seabase would be something known, in the strangulated jargon beloved of military men, as the Maritime Pre-Positioning Force (Future). America's marines already use pre-positioning supply ships as floating warehouses. The 14 ships in the new replacement class will continue to store supplies in this way. But, in addition, they will have room to berth 2,000 servicemen, or between 20 and 30 vertical-take-off aircraft, or hundreds of ground vehicles. More impressively, each ship will carry a folding bridge, about 30 metres long, to connect it to its neighbour. These bridges — regarded as the linchpins of seabasing — will remain stable in swells of up to 2 metres. They will allow vehicles the size of lorries to drive from one ship to another.

I wonder how the Chinese PLAN design bureau is going to approach this problem . . . as they're likely watching the American efforts with some interest.