Military Review English Edition May-June 2016 | Page 57

AFRICOM QUEEN

(Image courtesy of Austal USA/U.S. Navy)

The USNS (U.S. Naval Ship) Millinocket is rolled out of its building shed 4 June 2013 in Mobile, Alabama. The ship was transferred to a
floating drydock, which was towed out to deeper water in Mobile Bay. There, the dock was flooded down, the joint high-speed vessel
floated off, and tugs towed the incomplete vessel back to the shipyard for final fitting out.

using various containerized mission modules to build
mission packages installed on the deck of the ship.
Because missions for the modularized auxiliary cruiser would change and evolve, mission packages would
be different from one mission to the next. Figure 2
(page 56) provides hypothetical examples of modularized auxiliary cruiser mission packages. Army regionally aligned forces would train with these mission
packages on the modularized auxiliary cruiser or on
land-based training facilities (or perhaps afloat on
larger barges) laid out to simulate deck positioning on
the modularized auxiliary cruiser. The military would
have the flexibility of training reservists at land-based
training facilities before overseas deployment.
The source of ships that could be converted to
modularized auxiliary cruisers is the world’s container
ship fleet. There are about five thousand in the total
world fleet.15 The top twenty container ship operators controlled over 3,200 of these types of ships, as
of 2014.16 America’s share was small, however, with
only sixty-nine in private hands in 2014.17 Therefore,
USAFRICOM could not restrict the potential pool to
American-flagged container ships.
The Department of Defense Civil Reserve Air Fleet
program presents a model for building a pool of available
MILITARY REVIEW  May-June 2016

container ships to create modularized auxiliary cruisers.
This aviation program compensates American civilian
airlines or other entities for enrolling aircraft that meet
performance requirements as a reserve source of airlift
capacity. As of June 2014, the Air Force had 553 aircraft
from twenty-four carriers contracted through the Civil
Reserve Air Fleet (CRAF).18 The Army could create
a Civilian Reserve Cruiser Fleet by paying shipping
companies to modify certain container ships to accommodate mission packages and kee p USAFRICOM
informed of their location and availability status at all
times. With a large enough pool of container ships to
draw from, some would be clear of most cargo at any
given time. For emergencies, there could be additional
payments from the U.S. government to compensate the
shipping company and cargo owners for inconvenience.
China already is seeking to make civilian ships suitable for military use. In June 2015, the state-run China
Daily newspaper reported that to facilitate the mobilization of civilian ships, China ordered its shipbuilders
to make them more readily usable by its military:
The regulations require five categories of
vessels including container ships to be modified to “serve national defense needs.” … The
regulations “will enable China to convert the
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