Summary
Complete Guide
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Sea-based Mobility.
Recent wars have highlighted the need for the sort of mobility only the sea can provide. In both Gulf Wars, for example, around 95 percent of all material travelled by sea. Moreover, sea-based mobility can solve the central problem of the modern US military, which is the need to respond to widely separated crises without maintaining massive garrison forces in many area.
Norman Friedman The key concept is that troops can generally be flown quickly anywhere in the world, but their heavy equipment, at least in quantity, must go by sea. Sea transportation is slower, but aircraft lack capacity. For example, a single large Ro-Ro (Roll-on/Roll-off) ship might carry, say, 400 tanks with their spares and their ammunition. A single C-5 or C-17 will carry a single tank (with much less of its supporting equipment and consumables) per mission. The ship is, admittedly, much slower than the airplane, say about a twentieth as fast. In this sense a single trip by the ship is equivalent to more than twenty sorties by tr...See the full content of this document
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