A Global Force for Good: Sea Services Humanitarian Operations in the Twenty-First Century

John Darrell Sherwood

A lesser-known capability of the world’s militaries is humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, or HADR. Foremost of the armed services tasked with HADR duties are the U.S. sea services: the merchant marine, Coast Guard, Marine Corps, and above all the Navy, which has engaged in such work for more than a century. The work is unglamorous, logistically complex, physically exhausting, emotionally taxing, and often dangerous. It also requires a high degree of diplomatic and political savvy as well as personal initiative on the part of the commanders on site and it can transform international relations.

John Sherwood’s A Global Force for Good—the title comes from a Navy advertising campaign that ran from 2009 to 2014—focuses on the Navy’s response to three distinct disasters: the Indonesian earthquake of 2004 (Operation Unified Assistance); Hurricane Katrina the following year; and the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami and resulting nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011. Drawing on published accounts, internal reports, oral histories, and other sources, Sherwood delivers an often-intimate look at how the sea services improvise to provide humanitarian relief in unimaginably chaotic and at times-gut-wrenching circumstances in places that have experienced catastrophic physical and human loss.

When working with foreign countries, U.S. forces strive to ensure that they are seen as supporters, not leaders, of rescue and repair efforts. Moreover, the Navy and Marine Corps are at pains to not let humanitarian assistance compromise their effectiveness as a fighting force. When they do engage in such operations, they do so as auxiliaries to the State Department and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which was established in 1961 and served—until this week—as the Department of Defense’s “key partner in humanitarian response,” starting with USAID’s disaster assistance response teams (DARTs).

Following a massive earthquake on December 26, 2004, some 150,000 to 200,000 people in Aceh Province, Sumatra, died as nearly 100-foot waves broke across 100 miles of coast. An American offer of assistance was not a foregone conclusion due to tensions over Indonesia’s human right violations in East Timor, which had gained independence in 2002, and because Aceh Province was in the throes of a decades-long insurgency.

Relations were so strained that Indonesian military planners had actually war-gamed a U.S. invasion under the cover of an HADR mission. Despite these difficulties, the United States dispatched ships from Hong Kong and Guam within days. To minimize the military’s footprint on the ground, the Abraham Lincoln Strike Force remained stationed just offshore—where “there were houses floating in the ocean, and dead animals and bodies”—and served as a heliport, refueling base, and mustering station for supplies. Sailors could transfer supplies from landing craft onto Indonesian trucks by day and return to the safety of their ships at night.

According to the World Health Organization—from which the United States withdrew last month—the Navy’s intervention prevented “a secondary disaster” that would have resulted from a lack of medical services, food, and water. The diplomatic result was incalculable: The number of Indonesians who viewed America favorably more than doubled. In the words of an American major general, “we established an unquestionable bond of friendship with the world’s largest Muslim nation”—less than three and a half years after 9/11. “That is an outcome that had value beyond what was on people’s minds when we first went there and it underscores why we engage in humanitarian assistance.”

In 2011, Japan was rocked by an earthquake and tsunami that killed more than 19,000 people. The circumstances of Operation Tomodachi (“friendship”) otherwise differed from those of Operation Unified Assistance. The United States has had bases in Japan since World War II, and there were more than 47,000 uniformed personnel stationed there. While few were directly affected by the initial disaster, there was great fear of radiation poisoning when the Fukushima Daichi nuclear reactor suffered a meltdown.

Military personnel faced multiple challenges: helping the Japanese Self-Defense Force relieve coastal communities, contain the meltdown, and ensure that no other country tried to take advantage of Japan’s vulnerability. A key concern was to ensure that ships and aircraft remained free of radioactive contamination, which was easier said than done. In the midst of this, the Department of Defense also agreed to repatriate many of the 43,000 dependents living in Japan, which added more layers of complexity both there and stateside. In the end, nearly 8,000 people left, many with their pets in tow.

Civilians and pets were also at issue in the Navy’s work following Katrina, which saw the evacuation of 1.5 million people from Louisiana, abandoning some 250,000 cats and dogs in the process. The Navy’s actions were severely circumscribed because the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 forbids the military (though not the Coast Guard) from policing activities in the United States, and the Stafford Act of 1988 limits the armed services to emergency work: “clearance and removal of debris and wreckage and temporary restoration of essential public facilities and services.”

Sherwood effectively lays out the military and civilian debates over the degree to which the Navy should engage in humanitarian work and the effectiveness of HADR as a diplomatic tool and expression of soft power, all issues deserving a wide audience. A Global Force for Good seems too detailed to be a helpful guide for the “naval personnel and policymakers” for whom he wrote the book, and civilian readers will find a text awash in abbreviations and sympathize with an Army major quoted as saying that “working with the Navy is almost like learning a foreign language.”

A shorter, less jargon-forward edition would be welcome, though in today’s political climate, that is wistful thinking.

John Darrell Sherwood. A Global Force for Good: Sea Services Humanitarian Operations in the Twenty-First Century. Naval History and Heritage Command, 2024.