

The USS Fort McHenry amphibious ship just returned from six months off the West African coast. More on that later, but first this: the deployment gave the Navy one of its first chances to try out the new "seabasing" concept, which links up large cargo ships to bare-bones ports by way of "connectors," including floating barges (aka "lighterage," pictured) and high-speed catamarans. It's a tricky maneuver, but pull it off and there's not limit to where you can go. Just ask deployment commander Captain John Nowell:

We ran a group of concept demonstrations to put together a seabase and used it to offload seven vehicles that would be used by a Marine convoy. We brought those via lighterage [from cargo ships] to Fort McHenry, finished assembly, married them with humanitarian assistance supplies (that we had on aboard from Africom) and the Marines, then took them back out to the seabase [lighterage], onloaded to [the catamaran] Swift, which served as a high-speed connector, to take them into the harbor and offload them. Then the Marines convoyed the medical supplies to four different sites in Monrovia. ... It was absolutely successful.

"Seabasing will ultimately be the most important strategic concept in peacetime in the future, and will define forward sustained presence in the 21st century the way carrier battle groups defined the naval era following World War II," Galrahn writes.