Land look on as submarine tender USS Frank Cable departs Apra Harbor in Guam for sea trials, December 16, 2019. Sailors aboard submarine tender USS Emory S. In a conflict, the release said, Ulithi "could again represent a logistical hub capable of supporting the fleet." "So this would be a way to have the ship pull into the atoll, have the tender load up the missiles in the magazine, and then the ship can go back out rearmed," Clark added. "You pretty much have to pull into port" to rearm, Clark said. ![]() they can't just send the missiles over and reload them at sea," said Clark, who was a Navy submariner and led development of strategy as special assistant to the chief of naval operations. So a ship that launches a bunch of missiles. "One thing you can't do while you're underway is rearming. While underway replenishment is common for the Navy today, calm waters inside atolls like Ulithi still make them valuable spots to resupply submarines and surface ships. "It's a convenient place to operate that's relatively close but not so close that you're going to be exposed to large numbers of either Chinese forces or Chinese missile attack, potentially," said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Ulithi, west of Guam, has an important place between the two. The first island chain is now within reach of Chinese naval and land-based weapons, while the second island chain is an important strategic line of defense for the US. It has gained renewed attention as China's influence has risen. The island chain strategy has been around for some time, developed with the Soviet Union in mind. The approximate boundaries of the first and second island chains in the western Pacific. The Philippines, which includes Leyte Gulf, and the Japanese islands, including Okinawa, are part of the Pacific's first island chain, of which Taiwan is also part.įarther east is the second island chain, comprising Japan's volcanic islands, which include Iwo Jima, and the Mariana Islands, which are administered by the US and include Guam, where the Land and fellow tender USS Frank Cable are stationed. "At the height, there were as many as 700 ships anchored there in the lagoon, including dry docks, repair ships, tenders, battleships, aircraft carriers, destroyers, and sea planes." ![]() Michael Luckett, commanding officer of the Emory S. "It was the logistical hub for the invasions in the Philippines, Leyte Gulf, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa - all of those operations were launched from the base at Ulithi," Capt. Only four of the atoll's 40 small islands are inhabited, but they all surround one of the world's largest lagoons, which was a vital jumping-off point for the Navy as it island-hopped closer to the Japanese mainland during the war. 7, 2019, it was a return to a major hub for US operations in World War II and yet another sign the US military is thinking about how it would fight a war in the Pacific. Land, one of the Navy's two submarine tenders, sailed into the Ulithi Atoll on Dec.
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