In a resource-constrained environment where we have been fighting two land wars for the last 10 years, the priorities have been elsewhere, not necessarily focused on a maritime environment,” Veazie noted. “So we have taken the guidance that comes from the highest reaches of our government and OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense], looking to partner with our Navy on the concept of a ‘common seaframe.’ This would be a little bit like what we do with the Army special operations on common helicopters and with the Air Force, where we get a slick C-130 suitable for the general purpose Air Force and make modifications that makes it more SOF-peculiar. It would be the same with the common seaframe. It may have different intelligence or communications systems. It may have different signature management. It may have other modifications that allow it to be more suitable to our needs, while the fleet will have more value in their version of the craft.

“We haven’t finished defining the requirement for this yet so there is still work ahead,” he cautioned. “But we are working it with the Navy and it has been discussed at the four-star level between U.S. Special Operations Command and our Navy.”

Afloat Forward Staging Base
“Finally, in the larger sense, we need afloat forward staging. Our Afloat Forward Staging Base allows us to have sort of ‘sovereignty of U.S. soil,’ if you will – a U.S.-leased or -chartered vessel – that allows us to mother or stage a force that includes boats, potentially helicopters, and the SEAL operators and Special Warfare Combatant Crewmen that drive the boats. And it allows us to move that vessel and that operational package to any coastline around the world. Again, that allows us to extend our operational reach,” he said.

“We have a couple of these that we call Maritime Support Vessels [MSV]. And typically what we have been using are craft that we have been leasing to give us that persistence that, frankly, we don’t get from the fleet. Now let me emphasize that’s not because the fleet doesn’t want to. But to remain for months or possibly six or seven years off a particular operational area is very tough for them. They are very agile. They are moving around. They have engagements to do. They have places to go. So they can’t give us that kind of persistence that we have by ‘owning our own craft,’ if you will. This allows for that persistence,” he said.

“The craft that service offshore oil rigs have proven to be a pretty good platform to give us that persistence,” he noted. “And the companies that we lease these from allow us to make some modifications to the hoists and cranes on them. We put our own communications package on them. And there are also intelligence suites that can be plugged and played into these craft to give us that situational awareness that allows us to direct our operations, actions, and activities in that maritime special operations environment.”

In terms of the future, he offered, “We will see what happens with our afloat force staging. We have always looked to our amphibious Navy to provide that force and we have certainly seen that off the Somali basin against the pirates, where we have gotten great support from our fleet. But we need to do better about that. Again, that persistence is a key thing we look for and these MSVs are perhaps the answer to that. There is nothing particularly sophisticated about them but that may be part of the future.

“Right now we have one MSV leased out in the Pacific, where it is providing our persistent presence there. All of our other forces around the world are land based, with the boats deploying around the theater from aircraft or other shipping,” he said.

Changing Roles and Missions
Asked about the realities of changing roles and missions over the last few years, Veazie offered, “Our principal reason to have these craft is to move special operators or special equipment into designated missions. But I think the real change to me over the years, and this is for all of special operations, is that when I was growing up in this community, we would be tasked to do kind of discrete missions that were SOF missions but may not have fit into a larger campaign or a more holistic framework. The new thinking, which has been acute since 9/11 but was actually happening before that, has had us thinking about ‘SOF campaigns.’ This was one of the great things to come with the Nunn-Cohen Act that created USSOCOM [U.S. Special Operations Command], where we really started thinking about those SOF campaigns and how we could take operations, actions, and activities to create some change in the environment, some effect on the ground desired by the national leadership of the JTF [Joint Task Force] commander/warfighter on the ground. How do we do that in time and space in an operational design/framework? So, as you look to something like the anti-piracy mission, it all begins with national policy towards one, piracy, and two, Somalia in this particular instance. That becomes the initial guide.”

Based on that initial guide and subsequent refinement from national leadership, a resulting SOF campaign plan would allow the community “to use its own skills and capabilities to help achieve a network overmatch.

“As you look at piracy or terrorism, we don’t look at the straight individuals,” he said. “We look at networks. And we try to achieve network overmatch to defeat these networks or at least disrupt them to the greatest extent possible, to where they are no longer operationally relevant.”

He continued, “But the other piece of that involves population-based operations. So one part is man-hunting as part of network defeat/overmatch. But the population piece is also integral and critical. And our activities going after the network can disrupt that if we are too aggressive.”

SWCC Community Future
“Within the SWCC community, we have traditionally had this linkage between the crews and the platforms that they operate,” Veazie observed. “But the fact is that we will have less operational craft going into the future. So we have developed the Master Mariner Program, where we basically train our guys to operate civilian craft of up to 100 tons. They get some deck seamen/merchant marine-type licenses and longshoreman-type union cards. They learn how to sail craft. They learn how to operate dhows – a ubiquitous craft along the coast of Africa and up into the Gulf region. They learn how to operate a variety of craft.

“The program provides us an ability to be ‘in the environment’ while training our operators to become master mariners in every sense of what that means as masters of the maritime environment,” he said. “And, where it may be suitable, those may be the craft that they use to execute special operations missions as directed. It also allows them to think critically and to think in a different way than just being under way aboard a very modern and well-developed combatant craft. Now they have to sort out how to solve problems on a range of boats like fishing trawlers, sailing vessels, or other craft.”