The powerful underwater earthquake that occurred off the coast of
Sumatra on 26 December 2004 generated the most destructive tsunami
ever recorded, drowning more than 150,000 people without warning in
exposed littoral areas from Indonesia to South Africa. The
destruction was particularly severe in the Aceh Province of
Indonesia, at the northwestern tip of the island of Sumatra. There
entire villages were destroyed within minutes as waves of thirty
feet or more advanced far inland, while destruction of the main
coastal highway made the entire region virtually inaccessible to
Indonesian authorities ashore. In these extraordinary circumstances
of human suffering, the U.S. Navy was able to play a key role in
organizing what was to become a massive, multinational humanitarian
relief operation, one based and executed virtually entirely "from
the sea." Working closely with the Indonesian government and
military, the Navy delivered, beginning within days of the
disaster, vast quantities of emergency food and other supplies and
provided on-the-spot emergency medical treatment to thousands of
injured and displaced persons along the Aceh coast. Humanitarian
relief has long been recognized as a mission of the American armed
forces and of the U.S. Navy in particular. The scale and complexity
of the tsunami's impact, however, posed particular and in some
respects novel challenges to the Joint Task Force 536 (JTF 536)
that was created to deal with the situation, not least of them the
requirement imposed on it to operate exclusively from an improvised
"sea base," to use a term that has gained some currency in recent
discussions of naval missions and capabilities. In Newport Paper
28, Waves of Hope: The U.S. Navy's Response to the Tsunami in
Northern Indonesia, historian Bruce A. Elleman provides the first
comprehensive history and analysis of what would become known as
Operation UNIFIED ASSISTANCE. Elleman, a research professor in the
Department of Maritime History at the Naval War College, has
produced a valuable and indeed unique study, one that makes use of
a variety of internal Navy documents, oral histories, and
interviews with a number of senior naval officers, including the
then Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Vern Clark. It is to be
hoped that it will prove of immediate benefit to planners in the
naval and joint worlds of the U.S. military, as well as to those of
other nations potentially interested in exploiting its lessons to
improve their own capabilities in this frequently neglected yet
vital-indeed, life-saving-military mission.
General
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