Elevated Causeway System. A sea base work around?

Elevated Causeway System-Modular.

Are we being smart in our approach to sea basing?

Since this is in essence a Marine Corps centric attempt to solve the ship to shore logistics problem, it can be forgiven for seeing this as a connector problem for use during an amphibious assault.

But lets be honest.

Even a large scale assault will bring resources to bear that will render the need for a sea base redundant.

Of course that is during the assault phase.  But what about the more obvious issues.  What about the need to provide port facilities during a time of natural disaster?  What about humanitarian assistance?

Those will be the times when the sea base will be used most often.  And the optimum solution isn't a group of ships, the optimum solution will be to further develop the Elevated Causeway System-Modular and get it to be easier to setup, quicker to deploy and if necessary have enough in storage to allow them to be left behind when the "first responders" leave/redeploy.

If necessary, Navy Research should be turned loose to tackle this issue AND money dedicated to building MLP's and other sea basing ships should be reprogrammed toward amphibious lift.  Money is tight and money should be spent for essentials.  Sea Base as its currently planned can wait.

The Elevated Causeway System is a nice, cheaper workaround.

*Note*

My friend over at Think Defence has a couple of articles that point out the history of the elevated causeway AND offer another fascinating work around for the problem of unloading our MPS ships without the high cost of LCACs...the MEXEFLOTE.  Check out the articles here and here .

The main point of all this is simple.  Our allies have solved parts of the ship to shore problem, perhaps we need to rethink the sea base.  Maybe we should simplify it by saying that its an assemblage of ships (anything from an aircraft carrier, amphibs, logistics ships...heck even LCS's) that have transitioned from an assault to providing logistics ashore.  If "kinetic" activity is absent from the equation then that same assembly is by essence of its arrival at the scene of aid, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief etc, properly named a sea base.