thedrifter
01-06-05, 01:07 PM
12-30-2004
From the Editor:
Return of the ‘Sea Angels’
By Ed Offley
I know the U.S. Marine Corps doesn’t like to fiddle with the lyrics to “The Marine Corps Hymn,” but they really ought to update their song with a stanza including the phrase, “from the shores of Okinawa to the Port of Chittagong.”
That’s because for the second time in less than 15 years, the Marines are deploying to the Bay of Bengal to save lives, joined by their comrades in arms from the other military services as part of an international response to last week’s tragedy.
Even as the world continues to reel from the magnitude of devastation from the weekend Indonesian earthquake and killer tsunamis throughout the Indian Ocean basin, the overtaxed, under-funded U.S. military has once again been ordered to drop whatever it’s doing (training, refit, operational readiness drills, actual real-time missions) and rush to the scene of the disaster with lifesaving supplies and aid.
It’s not a mission that the men and women aboard the *USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group and USS Bonhomme Richard expeditionary strike group will resent having to carry out – far from it – but this key element of the initial U.S. response should provide a useful reminder to Pentagon spending critics and overseas political foes alike that nothing beats having a well-stocked fire department when the alarm bells go off.
With some unofficial reports now anticipating that the death toll will ultimately rise above 500,000, and with millions of survivors from Indonesia’s Aceh Province to Mombasa, Kenya, threatened by malnutrition and illness, it is clear that this natural disaster will prove to be an order of magnitude worse than we had originally feared. It is also safe to assume at this juncture that the level of military assistance offered by the U.S. government so far – a dozen Navy and Coast Guard ships and the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, and a handful of Navy P-3Cs and Air Force C-130s and KC-135s – will ultimately prove far too small to carry out the job required.
The problem confronting Joint Task Force 536, which will control U.S. relief efforts, is the same that is about to bedevil the entire international community as it responds to the critical needs of the tsunami survivors: the tyranny of time, space and distance.
When Marine Lt. Gen. Henry C. Stackpole got the alert in early May 1991 that U.S. Navy and Marine Corps units were urgently needed to assist Bangladeshi victims of Cyclone Marian, he was able to quickly assemble over 7,000 U.S. military personnel from the 5th Marine Expeditionary Brigade and Navy Amphibious Group 3 and head for the scene of a violent storm that had killed over 140,000 Bangladeshis and had left over 5 million people homeless. Just 10 days after Marian’s 140-mile-per-hour winds had wrecked most of the civil infrastructure, the US. military arrived with badly needed food, water, medicine and rescue gear.
It was an anonymous Bangladeshi resident who, perched on his flood-devastated rubble saw the approach of Navy and Marine helicopters offshore, called the aircraft “Angels from the Sea,” and inspired Stackpole to formally rename his mission “Operation Sea Angel.”
The problem confronting the U.S. government and the nations in the Indian Ocean basin attempting to mount a replay of Operation Sea Angel this week, of course, is that while Marian devastated a single small country, the earthquake-driven tsunamis came ashore in a dozen separate places, including Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, several small island nations, Somalia and Kenya. With time of the utmost urgency, it seems quite clear that the initial offering of military assistance will have scant effect on the overall situation.
Everything remains in flux: The casualty list is soaring like a bull market while the individual offers of help from governments around the world continue to pour in. Non-governmental relief agencies and political leaders alike are scrambling to organize the most they can and rush people, supplies and equipment to the disaster zone as quickly as possible. It will likely be weeks before the picture becomes clear. It is also probable that flaws in government-to-government communications, less-than-perfect cooperation among various U.S. government departments and agencies, and the sheer inertia of establishing a coordinated relief effort among the ruins will act to reduce the overall effectiveness of the rescue effort.
Such a trend occurred closer to home in the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch in Central America just six years ago. After that storm devastated Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and part of Guatemala in late October 1998, the U.S. Southern Command dispatched a joint task force and military units to the scene in an equally frantic campaign to rescue stranded civilians, treat the injured and provide survivors with the food, water and medicine they lacked. One assessment of “Operation Fuerte Apoyo” (Strong Support) later concluded that despite the dedication of the personnel involved, “the ability of the [United States] to respond to such complex contingencies remains deeply flawed.”
The reasons? Essentially, there were two: First, the U.S. government had not adequately practiced and drilled for complex contingency operations such as required for the hurricane relief effort (although the military itself had attempted to do so with its counterparts in the area), and second, as one federal official later said, “The disaster quickly exceeded our ability to coordinate.”
Henry Stackpole’s mission to Chittagong, Balgladesh, 13 years ago was not a failure: “Operation Sea Angel” was credited with saving as many as 200,000 lives that otherwise would have been lost – a number greater than the actual storm fatalities.
We can expect no less of an heroic effort by the men and women of Joint Task Force 536 as they deploy to the hardest-hit regions of the Indian Ocean in what remains a frantic race against time.
But their success, however great, will also be tempered by the fact that the limitations that will impede them – the steadily dwindling number of ships and aircraft available to be diverted to this type of operation, the unavailability of O&M funds for major disaster relief training in a time of war and other budget demands – will also define the large number of people who are alive today but who will not survive the aftermath of the tsunamis.
Godspeed, Task Force 536.
Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com. © 2004 Ed Offley.
Ellie
From the Editor:
Return of the ‘Sea Angels’
By Ed Offley
I know the U.S. Marine Corps doesn’t like to fiddle with the lyrics to “The Marine Corps Hymn,” but they really ought to update their song with a stanza including the phrase, “from the shores of Okinawa to the Port of Chittagong.”
That’s because for the second time in less than 15 years, the Marines are deploying to the Bay of Bengal to save lives, joined by their comrades in arms from the other military services as part of an international response to last week’s tragedy.
Even as the world continues to reel from the magnitude of devastation from the weekend Indonesian earthquake and killer tsunamis throughout the Indian Ocean basin, the overtaxed, under-funded U.S. military has once again been ordered to drop whatever it’s doing (training, refit, operational readiness drills, actual real-time missions) and rush to the scene of the disaster with lifesaving supplies and aid.
It’s not a mission that the men and women aboard the *USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group and USS Bonhomme Richard expeditionary strike group will resent having to carry out – far from it – but this key element of the initial U.S. response should provide a useful reminder to Pentagon spending critics and overseas political foes alike that nothing beats having a well-stocked fire department when the alarm bells go off.
With some unofficial reports now anticipating that the death toll will ultimately rise above 500,000, and with millions of survivors from Indonesia’s Aceh Province to Mombasa, Kenya, threatened by malnutrition and illness, it is clear that this natural disaster will prove to be an order of magnitude worse than we had originally feared. It is also safe to assume at this juncture that the level of military assistance offered by the U.S. government so far – a dozen Navy and Coast Guard ships and the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, and a handful of Navy P-3Cs and Air Force C-130s and KC-135s – will ultimately prove far too small to carry out the job required.
The problem confronting Joint Task Force 536, which will control U.S. relief efforts, is the same that is about to bedevil the entire international community as it responds to the critical needs of the tsunami survivors: the tyranny of time, space and distance.
When Marine Lt. Gen. Henry C. Stackpole got the alert in early May 1991 that U.S. Navy and Marine Corps units were urgently needed to assist Bangladeshi victims of Cyclone Marian, he was able to quickly assemble over 7,000 U.S. military personnel from the 5th Marine Expeditionary Brigade and Navy Amphibious Group 3 and head for the scene of a violent storm that had killed over 140,000 Bangladeshis and had left over 5 million people homeless. Just 10 days after Marian’s 140-mile-per-hour winds had wrecked most of the civil infrastructure, the US. military arrived with badly needed food, water, medicine and rescue gear.
It was an anonymous Bangladeshi resident who, perched on his flood-devastated rubble saw the approach of Navy and Marine helicopters offshore, called the aircraft “Angels from the Sea,” and inspired Stackpole to formally rename his mission “Operation Sea Angel.”
The problem confronting the U.S. government and the nations in the Indian Ocean basin attempting to mount a replay of Operation Sea Angel this week, of course, is that while Marian devastated a single small country, the earthquake-driven tsunamis came ashore in a dozen separate places, including Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, several small island nations, Somalia and Kenya. With time of the utmost urgency, it seems quite clear that the initial offering of military assistance will have scant effect on the overall situation.
Everything remains in flux: The casualty list is soaring like a bull market while the individual offers of help from governments around the world continue to pour in. Non-governmental relief agencies and political leaders alike are scrambling to organize the most they can and rush people, supplies and equipment to the disaster zone as quickly as possible. It will likely be weeks before the picture becomes clear. It is also probable that flaws in government-to-government communications, less-than-perfect cooperation among various U.S. government departments and agencies, and the sheer inertia of establishing a coordinated relief effort among the ruins will act to reduce the overall effectiveness of the rescue effort.
Such a trend occurred closer to home in the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch in Central America just six years ago. After that storm devastated Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and part of Guatemala in late October 1998, the U.S. Southern Command dispatched a joint task force and military units to the scene in an equally frantic campaign to rescue stranded civilians, treat the injured and provide survivors with the food, water and medicine they lacked. One assessment of “Operation Fuerte Apoyo” (Strong Support) later concluded that despite the dedication of the personnel involved, “the ability of the [United States] to respond to such complex contingencies remains deeply flawed.”
The reasons? Essentially, there were two: First, the U.S. government had not adequately practiced and drilled for complex contingency operations such as required for the hurricane relief effort (although the military itself had attempted to do so with its counterparts in the area), and second, as one federal official later said, “The disaster quickly exceeded our ability to coordinate.”
Henry Stackpole’s mission to Chittagong, Balgladesh, 13 years ago was not a failure: “Operation Sea Angel” was credited with saving as many as 200,000 lives that otherwise would have been lost – a number greater than the actual storm fatalities.
We can expect no less of an heroic effort by the men and women of Joint Task Force 536 as they deploy to the hardest-hit regions of the Indian Ocean in what remains a frantic race against time.
But their success, however great, will also be tempered by the fact that the limitations that will impede them – the steadily dwindling number of ships and aircraft available to be diverted to this type of operation, the unavailability of O&M funds for major disaster relief training in a time of war and other budget demands – will also define the large number of people who are alive today but who will not survive the aftermath of the tsunamis.
Godspeed, Task Force 536.
Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com. © 2004 Ed Offley.
Ellie