DARPA wants to use ISO containers for operational flexibility, self-building floating bases
least, is already well-accustomed to carrying out various military tasks using (often temporarily) modified merchant ships. Sometimes these ships are in regular Ministry of Defense service as Royal Fleet Auxiliary vessels, but sometimes they are just hastily converted merchantmen, as happened in many cases during the Falklands War.
Having a ready-made ISO container set all ready to go would be handy. A set of modules could be kept parked up on road trailers, ready to be hauled out to a container port and swiftly put aboard ship for deployment. As DARPA points out, some would be standard for every job: communications shack, command cell, living quarters, power, and so on. Others — perhaps pop-up weapons stations, UAV or aircraft hangar/pad units, etc. — would be added depending on the job.
“A fleet of cheaply-chartered container ships kitted out with helicopter-pad and marine boarding team units would be able to fight the pirates of the Horn of Africa far more cheaply and effectively than frigates and destroyers can,” Page writes.
DARPA, though, wants to do more. It is also interested in building floating bases out of ISO boxes offshore:
Modular Sea Base is a concept for large, at-sea logistics structures formed from standard 20-foot ISO container-sized modules. Each module, deployed from a commercial containership, would have self-contained propulsion, a means of connecting to other modules, and low-level autonomy algorithms allowing the modules to self-form structures in the water.
Ten modules could theoretically be arranged in a 40-foot by 40-foot pad with 170 tons of collective buoyant capacity, enough to serve as an ad hoc helicopter landing pad. Since even smaller containerships would be capable of carrying thousands of modules, if individual modules could be produced at a cost low enough to justify procurement, larger numbers of modules could form more interesting structures such as large scale joint force deployment bases.
The self-assembling modular seabases could also, as DARPA notes, provide docking-bay facilities for useful inshore craft such as the Mark V Special Operations Craft gunboats and other vessels favored by the U.S. Navy SEALs, or the various hover and landing craft employed by the U.S. Marines.
More ambitious concepts in the past have envisioned locking together a line of oil rig-sized specialist units which could cruise to the target area on pontoon hulls, then part-flood and submerge these so that only the support pillars were battered by waves. This would allow a row of units to be mated together and form a mighty floating fortress that could even include a runway for jets.
Page notes that this would be a rather slow-to-deploy and unwieldy affair, however, compared to DARPA’s ISO-container idea — modern container ships are much faster than mobile oil platforms, and the Modular Sea Base units would be tipping off their carrying vessels and forming into a unit while the big flood-up flood-down jobs were still weeks away.
Note that there is a real-world precedent for this general kind of caper too - Operation Prime Chance and Operation Nimble Archer during the 1980s tanker wars in the Gulf. U.S. special-operations units used two converted civilian oil-servicing barges as bases for helicopters and SEAL gunboats, effectively crushing covert Iranian mine laying efforts directed at the tanker traffic in and out of the Gulf.
DARPA does not mention it, but Page writes that the TEMP Modular Sea Base concept is plainly aimed to produce a modernized version of the platforms Hercules and Wimbrown VII, which did such effective work more than thirty years ago. “The Falklands, too, was a long time back,” he writes. “In many ways the TEMP program serves more to illuminate just how slow and reluctant western navies have been to move away from their World War II force structure than it is an example of DARPA being forward-thinking.”
