While the world looks on in the aftermath of Hurricanes Irma and Maria, time and space should allow us the opportunity to reflect on what could have been done differently. We must set politics aside and realize the Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. While it is true that the United States often has criticized federal response to natural disasters, we must recognize the uniqueness of disasters that occur in places such as Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. In addition, Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, Tinian, Saipan, American Samoa, Midway, Wake, and many other outlying islands all fall under the same special conditions of being islands or remote.
Florida Senator Bill Nelson decried the effort in October, demanding “Where the hell is the cavalry?”[1] Getting the cavalry there is not the problem. Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello responded quickly requesting that the White House suspend the Jones Act, to allow foreign ships to enter Puerto Rico’s ports and the White House responded in the affirmative just as quickly. The federal government dispatched 10,000 government workers and 7,000 troops to assist in the recovery effort under the command of a three-star general, Lieutenant General Jeff Buchanan.
Despite this, the people who are hurt the worst are not receiving the assistance they need. How can this be? The failure of the U.S. government and the military to resort to lessons learned is its general failure to deal with natural disasters. Further, this is a maritime problem at which the United States should be experts. CNN reported that there were 10,000 containers of supplies including food, water, medicine, and other vital supplies stuck in the ports. Diesel fuel is in short supply, truck drivers have not returned to work, cell towers are down, and roads are blocked. So, what went wrong? And what continues to go wrong and will impact us in future events?
The U.S. Navy and the U.S. Marine Corps have studied this matter from a military perspective for a century. The military solution has a civilian application. U.S. planners studied the British lessons learned and lessons forgotten to create their Tentative Manual for Landing Operations. From 1933 to 1934 the Marine Corps studied the issue of conducting military operations in the Caribbean at the Marine Corps base at Quantico. The primary point of their study was the failure of the British forces in 1915 at the Gallipoli Peninsula in Greece to gain a beach head and establish lines of communication and logistical trains. This manual became the standard for operations in the Pacific during World War II.[2] The failure at Gallipoli was the failure to execute combat loading, something history will show had been perfected as early as 1066 by William the Conqueror at Pevensey on the British coast. In fact, there is evidence that Julius Caesar conducted such operations on that same coast 1,100 years earlier.[3]
So, what is the lesson that we need to take away from this? The United States has a Maritime Prepositioning Force (MPF). These forces are organized into strategically forward-deployed maritime forces that allows the U.S. military to provide power-projection capability that combines lift capacity, flexibility, and responsiveness of surface ships with strategic airlift. These maritime prepositioning ships provide combat commanders with persistent forward presence and rapid crisis response by pre-positioning combat equipment and supplies sufficient to support two Marine expeditionary brigades for up to 30 days. The squadrons that form the MPF consist of 14 government owned ships operated by the Military Sealift Command. When needed, these ships arrive at a crisis point and can offload in port or offshore. Supplies are married with Marines and Sailors who arrive at nearby airfields and results in a combat ready Marine air ground task force that requires minimal in country reception facilities. They are self-sufficient for 30 days. New mobile landing platforms and littoral ships further enhance this capability.
Combat loading allows logistics officers and beach masters to control the loading of ships and the deployment of troops in such a manner as to create a needs-based assessment. In this scenario, the last supplies loaded are the first supplies needed. In a humanitarian effort, truck drivers, supply specialists, and their necessary security should be forward deployed. Motor transport, fuel depot capability, and water should take priority. Navy Seabees and other military engineers should be forward deployed to clear roads and survey and assess lines of communication and supply chains. Much like the military established during Desert Storm, ammunition supply points (ASPs) would be replaced by logistical supply points (LSPs), moving supplies and necessities forward in stages and providing security for those LSPs. Such an effort can keep ports clear and airfields open for ancillary needs. The United States has the capability and the resources to respond to our domestic needs and protect our domestic security in times of crisis.
Endnotes
[1] Patrick Gillespie, Rafael Romo and Maria Santana, “Puerto Rico Aid is Trapped in Thousands of Shipping Containers,” CNN, 28 September 2017.
[2] Matthew S. Muehlbauer and David J. Ulbrich, Ways of War: American Military History from the Colonial Era to the Twenty-First Century (New York: Routledge, 2014), 336.
[3] Bernard S. Bachrach, “On the Origins of William the Conqueror’s Horse Transports” (Society for the History of Technology, 1985) JSTOR.
