In an article that ties together many of the themes I’ve tracked here at OSD, we get a profile of the USS Peleliu, which is reported to be the first US warship to embark on a purely humanitarian mission.

The amphibious assault ship represents a superior soft-power projection platform. The carrier may have ruled the waves of WWII for force projection in major combat operations at sea, but the amphibious assault ship rules the SysAdmin mission.

Using a government/non-government collaboration to fill the needed skill sets, the Peleiu’s “crew and medical staff [are] drawn partly from civilian charities…such as Project HOPE, the Aloha Medical Mission and dental students from the University of California San Diego.” This crew, combined with the medical capabilities of the Peleiu, will allow the medical staff to treat ten times as many patients as a typical tour would be able to.

While the doctors are treating minor medical ailments, Navy construction battalions will build or repair local clinics and water systems.

While some analysts like Norman Polmar and James Jay Carafano criticize the mission as lacking in military benefit and a waste of activty duty personnel, this use of the Peleiu is a direct result of the reasoning in DoD 3000:

The military’s aid missions didn’t become official policy until Nov. 30, 2005. At the time, acting Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England signed a directive ordering the armed forces to make stability operations – Pentagon lingo for postwar or post-disaster nation-building – a “core mission.”

England largely wanted to make sure that U.S. military forces knew how to plan and carry out reconstruction work of the kind needed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There is military value in building these skills and there is a critical national security need - in addition to the moral imperative - for this capability. That is why having a bureaucratic document like DoDD 3000 is so important: you don’t have to reargue this issue every time an idea like this arises.

And, just as Barnett has said, our military enjoys the SysAdmin mission:

The excitement grew this week as the Peleliu’s sailors loaded supplies for their deployment.

“I prefer to do this kind (of mission),” said Petty Officer 3rd Class Hector Camarino, 26, of Brawley. “It makes you feel good. You get a warm, fuzzy feeling.”