Yeah, I'm afraid there is little planning or rationale behind this project. It's primary raison d'etre is as a political response to the Chinese effort to colonize the moon.

In my opinion, what the USA should be doing to promote a manned program is developing technology to assemble large spacecraft in appropriate earth orbit for deep space exploration. We should continue our robot probe missions to the asteroid belt, comets and outer solar system and when particularly promising targets are revealed, large ships, (or fleets of them) should initiate expeditions to investigate them. Maintaining permanent stations is expensive, limited to one target, and will drain resources from other projects. A more reasonable goal would be a space station in an orbit where multiple deep space missions could be staged and launched easily to a variety of destinations. The potential for permanent bases at the Lagrangian points or even the asteroid belt would be more reasonable "jumping off points", staging areas and assembly points. Permanent bases on the moon make little sense, it requires energy to get there, slow down, land, then take off again. If we decide to undertake a detailed exploration of Mars, perhaps a temporary orbiting base there makes sense, but not on the moon.

Permanent forward bases in the Jovian or Saturnian systems make sense (there are many worlds there to explore). But that is a goal for the far future. Unless there is indeed a useful supply of easily accessible water on the moon, there is little reason to go there. As far as a purely scientific rationale is concerned, the asteroid belt shows more promise than the moon.

I fear the US lunar effort will result in a situation similar to France's Carte du Ciel project a century ago. Its a dead end, a cul-de-sac, and it will drain the life of the American (and European) space programs.