Military Review English Edition May-June 2016 | Page 55

AFRICOM QUEEN

any significant distance, USAFRICOM needs additional shipping capacity. According to a report by Sam
LaGrone, “The marines are also looking to buttress the
land-deployed SPMAGTF [special purpose marine airground task force] units in Morón and Sigonella, Italy,
with a maritime component that would include nontraditional ships from which to launch marines into regions
further south, including the Gulf of Guinea.”10 LaGrone
quotes Lt. Gen. Kenneth Glueck, commander of Marine
Corps Combat Development Command: “We must
continue to mitigate the amphibious shipping shortage
by looking for other ways to do business.”11
If marines cannot count on Navy hulls to operate
in Africa, how low a priority will Army units have?
The helicopter-mobile 101st Airborne Division, with
ample helicopter assets organic to the unit, will face
similar restrictions if deployed to Africa. The United
States needs low-cost hulls for a broad range of missions in war and peace around the African continent.
Modularized auxiliary cruisers can mitigate the amphibious shipping shortage for deploying land power
throughout USAFRICOM’s area of responsibility.

The Design of an Auxiliary Cruiser
(Photo courtesy of NATO)

Two Standing NATO Maritime Group Two (SNMG2) ships, the
flagship, Federal German Ship (FGS) Hamburg, and Her Danish
Majesty’s Ship (HDMS) Absalon, arrive for a port visit to Haifa,
Israel, 7 December 2015.

on their autonomy. Until then, our footprint on the
ground must necessarily be small and temporary,
capable of shifting, surging, and receding with the
specific missions.
The result is that USAFRICOM lacks sufficient
ground maneuver units deployed within its area of
responsibility to achieve its missions. In early 2015,
when the Army reported it had an infantry battalion
stationed in Djibouti, that unit remained far from most
of the African continent.8 Even the newly established
Marine Corps African rapid reaction force in Morón,
Spain, with MV-22 air assets assigned at the request of
USAFRICOM, has a restricted radius of action limited
to northwest Africa.9
To deploy the marines from Spain beyond the range
of their aircraft or to move ground units in Djibouti
MILITARY REVIEW  May-June 2016

Auxiliary cruisers were once a common type of
improvised warship for navies that needed to expand
their numbers quickly. Civilian ships with light cannons bolted to their decks, along with other equipment, supplemented navies during times of war.
Such simple conversions are not feasible today
because of more complex ship systems. The U.S.
Navy has forged a path toward effective conversions,
however, with the littoral combat ship (LCS), which
opens up possibilities for modern auxiliary cruisers.
The basic LCS hull, with only limited organic combat
capabilities, is designed to incorporate what the Navy
calls removable “mission packages” built from “mission
modules” that allow a LCS to be specialized for mine
clearing on one deployment and antiship missions for
the next after changing the mission package.
For the purposes of the proposed modularized
auxiliary cruiser, I modify the Navy term for the
building blocks (mission modules) to “containerized
mission modules,” to emphasize their portability. I
adopt unchanged the Navy term “mission package” to
mean a collection of containerized mission modules
focused on one type of mission.
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