Desert Shield
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Birth of the Maritime Prepositioning Ship Squadrons
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n 1979, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown put the Prepositioning Program into place. General Robert H. Barrow, 27th Commandant of the Marine Corps, later recalled how Dr. Brown first brought the concept up to him: I think it was at an Armed Forces Policy Council meeting. That would be on Monday morning at eleven o’clock. Harold Brown said to me, “Bob, could I see you for a minute?” I’ve already described Hal Brown. I like him very much, but he’s not given to small talk so I knew it was something apart. He got me aside, and he said, and I’m paraphrasing obviously, “Do Marines always have to storm a shore?” Isn’t that a strange question? He’s not given to such small talk. I read a lot into it. So, I fired back. I said, “No, sir. They surely do not. An amphibious operation is but a means to an end. Marines do most of their fighting after they have gotten ashore. Getting ashore—we want that to be as little fighting as we can possibly make it, but knowing that you cannot always expect to go for some undefended place, somebody has to know how to do it, and we call that amphibious warfare, but it’s a mean to an end. So, to answer your question, no, sir, we don’t.” He said, “In other words, Marines, if you had their equipment aboard some other kind of ship that could be brought into a port or somehow moved over to the shore
the same day that aviation and ground forces are loaded into a theater; that naval ships, MPS [Maritime Prepositioning Ships], can be moved before the decision is made. And it is a very prudent decision, in our belief, to move those forces earlier so they are available to the National Command when the time comes. We believe that we would have been better positioned to have operated had those ships been moved, say, on the second or third day of August.”6
7th Marine Expeditionary Brigade Marines of the 7th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, commanded by Major General John I. Hopkins, arrived in Saudi Arabia in mid-August, where they
in an environment that was not threatening, the Marines would do that, do you think?” I said, “We would do that extremely well because it still has a maritime character about it, and we’re accustomed to having one foot on the beach and one foot in the sea.” He said, “Well, that’s very interesting.”4 The Prepositioning Program was a response to a perceived weakness in America’s strategic posture; the Iran hostage crisis put a spotlight on America’s inability to project power into the Persian Gulf region, despite the region’s relative importance. In Europe and the Pacific, the United States maintained large bases on the territory of allies, but this was neither practical nor feasible in the Middle East (see chapter 1). The new program was tied into the creation of the Rapid Joint Deployment Task Force. The Prepositioning Program put all of the equipment for a Marine expeditionary brigade as well as enough supplies for the brigade to fight for 30 days on a squadron of purpose-built vessels of the U.S. Military Sealift Command. The personnel and personal equipment of the brigade would be deployed by the Military Airlift Command to the region where it could rendezvous with a Maritime Prepositioning Ship Squadron. The concept required a friendly host nation with welldeveloped airfields and ports; a great deal of aid was given to the various Gulf states and Saudi Arabia to build up the infrastructure required to support a rapid military deployment in the region if required.5 joined with the equipment from Maritime Prepositioning Ship Squadron Two.7 General Hoar later noted: The 7th Marine Expeditionary Brigade was the first ground element that had tanks and armored personnel carriers. It was the first element that was capable of meeting the threat that existed in Kuwait. But it was more than that; it was an air-ground team as we all know, that had fixed wing, rotary wing . . . had an air-ground task force headquarters. It had its full suite of logistics for 30 days, so it was self-sustaining for 30 days. . . . Marine forces were arriving not only with that combat
