A True Force in Readiness

In the current atmosphere of military hand-wringing over parochial mission issues, the U.S. Marine Corps must review its traditional role. The push toward joint interoperability is based on good intentions but suffers from poor application; it is a worthy but difficult goal. The Corps needs to think of new ways to spend dwindling defense dollars and introduce new concepts for its proper employment.

We need to rethink the current philosophy of the Marine expeditionary unit (special operations capable) [MEU(SOC)] as our force of choice for amphibious operations. The unit is described as the “immediately responsive, on-scene, sea-based Marine component of the fleet commander’s amphibious and power projection forces.” With our solid foundations in littoral warfare and low-intensity conflict, the Marine Corps should know better than to rest such a heavy burden on the skinny shoulders of the units we deploy at present. With the advent of the “... From the Sea” philosophy, the U.S. Navy has (finally) come on board with regard to the concept of littoral warfare, and their new emphasis on amphibious ships for the 21st century shows that money is following promises. We need to capitalize on this momentum by deploying Marine expeditionary brigades (MEBs).

In the 1993 Department of the Navy Posture Statement, Admiral Frank Kelso and General Carl Mundy wrote:

As envisioned in The National Military Strategy, the Naval service will be largely responsible for forward presence and initial crisis response. This shaping of our future active and reserve Navy/Marine Corps team will ensure flexible, capable, and self-sustaining combatant forces; a tailorable, credible global deployment capability; continuous, effective strategic deterrence; and, most important, sea-based, task-organized naval expeditionary force packages for rapid response and seamless integration into joint and combined military operations. . . .Naval forces maneuver from the sea, using their dominance of littoral areas to mass forces rapidly and generate high-intensity, precise offensive power at the time and location of their choosing. Power projection requires mobility, flexibility, and technology to mass strength against weakness.

Doctrine states that an attacker must enjoy at least a three-to-one advantage over a defending force for an assault to be successful. Does a Marine expeditionary unit— a force of little more than 2,000 men—have the combat power necessary to “mass strength against weakness” against a well-trained, well-equipped, determined enemy?

The Marine expeditionary brigade was the building block for the deployment of Marines in Operation Desert Storm. With several complete MEBs overseas, the power projected ashore was effective: a regimental landing team, composite Marine air group, brigade service support group, artillery battalion, and associated support units provided the type of combat strength needed for a sustained ground war. The massing of nearly 40 ships under two amphibious groups took a great amount of logistical planning but was seen correctly as the immediate solution to a real threat to Saudi Arabia.

Deployment of a brigade as the basic Marine landing force would require dramatic changes in current force structures and geographic dispersion.

Leave Okinawa

Our current military drawdown necessitates closure of overseas bases. We have both worn out our welcome on Okinawa and backed ourselves into a comer. The island is too small for useful aviation training, and live ordnance delivery is confined to two tiny and restrictive offshore islands. Our jet aircraft deploy only detachments from Iwakuni, Japan, and are forced to fly from Kadena Air Force Base, while helicopters must overfly heavily populated areas to reach the cramped confines of Marine Corps Air Station Futenma. Infantry units must restrict live fire exercises tightly, for fear of angering Okinawa residents, and artillery officers live in mortal fear of a misfired round landing off the range. Extensive coordination with Japanese officials is required during large exercises. Our CH-53E aircraft cannot lift external cargo over highways; combined-arms training is difficult, if not impossible. And to the legs of a weary Marine, the hills of the Okinawa’s Northern Training Area differ little from those back at Camp Pendleton, California.

The current political climate between Okinawa’s government and the U.S. Marine leadership is uneasy at best. Governor Masahide Ota of Okinawa made an official request recently for the U.S. Marine Corps to be expelled from the island. Okinawa’s geostrategic position is a prime one, but when has its location been to our advantage lately? Deployment of the 31st MEU from White Beach requires a three-day sail of a four-ship amphibious ready group from Sasebo, with added difficulties in moving thousands of men to a pier ill-equipped to handle the influx. The training opportunities on Okinawa are minimal, and the strategic importance of our presence there has diminished with the end of the Cold War.

The Marine Corps’ attachment to the island is primarily sentimental, rooted in the hard-fought victory there in 1945. Defense of Korea and Japan is a mission for which the U.S. Army is better suited. The Marine Corps should remain devoted to an expeditionary role. By remaining stagnant in Okinawa, we are diverting from our own policy and creating the redundancy General Colin Powell warned against in a message to Congress. We have neither the money nor the personnel to waste one-third of our force structure there; we should use those forces to flesh out stateside Marine expeditionary brigades. Let the Army take the watch—or take all U.S. forces out of Japan.

Work with the Navy

A recent Navy Times article entitled “Is the LX the Rx for the Fleet?” insisted that “strengthening the nation’s amphibious lift capability is one of the few areas of the Pentagon’s force structure that has been consistently supported by Congress over the last several years.” After decades of working in the shadows of the bigger, pricier, more glamorous multipurpose aircraft carrier navy, the ’Gators are beginning to receive the recognition, influence, and money they deserve. This is an opportunity that must be seized if the brown-water navy is to become a sustainable combat force. Each brigade deployment could use the following amphibious ships: two assault carriers (LHA/LPH/LHD), three to four LPDs, two LSTs, two or three LSDs, one or two LKAs, one or two Aegis cruisers, one or two Aegis destroyers, one or two SSNs, and requisite maritime prepositioning ships on tether (one squadron of four ships). Such a structure does not include t the new amphibious ship, currently designated the LX, which is slated to begin construction in 1996 and enter fleet service in 1998. The LX would augment our current fleet of amphibious assault ships, providing landing space for two CH-53Es or four CH-46s and serving as a platform to rearm and refuel V/STOL AV-8B jets and AH-1W SuperCobras.

The value of surface combatants must not be overlooked. This future amphibious ready group is as potent and valuable as the carrier battle group and requires similar flexibility in the form of Aegis-equipped destroyer and cruiser escorts. The phased-array wizardry of these ships provides a quantum leap over our current amphibious ready group ships in early warning, antiair warfare, electronic warfare, and antisubmarine warfare. The naval gunfire support on which platoon commanders in Vietnam often relied has been lost with the departure of the battleships. Tying the cruiser and destroyer to the fire-support coordinator at the infantry battalion level would give the battalion commander another supporting arm for the ground scheme of maneuver, enabling him to fight a true combined-arms battle.

Train as a Marine Expeditionary Brigade

Consistency—gained from training and deploying as a single unit—would be the greatest benefit in deploying as a brigade. The training for unit deployments and the special-operations-capable evaluation process is difficult and dangerous without up-to-date standard operating procedures, published early in the cycle and understood by both ground and aviation units. The heavy emphasis on night-vision-device training, rapid planning, and over-the-horizon assault requires all players to work together to prevent potentially catastrophic misunderstandings. In the present system, units come together four to six months prior to deployment overseas, which gives these units time to work out the kinks before they leave. With standing brigade-size units training together year round, standard operating procedures would be common knowledge and provide a baseline on which training would build.

Consistency in rotation cycles would be another advantage of training and deploying as a brigade. Removing Marines from Okinawa would end the present unit-rotation cycle overseas and bring stateside units to full strength, thus eliminating the “hollow force” fears of our leaders. If the rotation cycle could be finessed, enabling the amphibious ships and Marines to train and deploy together, the full capabilities of the Navy/Marine Corps team Would be realized for the first time since the landing at Inchon in 1950.

Perhaps the most elusive and difficult advantage to achieve in the present brigade deployment structure is the cohesion and esprit among those units training to deploy and perhaps fight side-by-side. Under current structure, units are fleshed out with personnel in the months just prior to an overseas deployment, bringing an infusion of new blood as well as the requirement for small-unit leaders to bring inexperienced replacements up to par. While training as a MEB, the officer and staff noncommissioned officer cadre would retain institutional memory and provide the backbone of experience needed for a combat unit.

Personnel turnover in the Marine Corps is notoriously high, and such a system would provide the best continuity of leadership.

The thread running through all Marine Corps expeditionary operations is: the absolute necessity of bringing the appropriate force to bear on an enemy at the time and place of our choosing. Military leaders throughout history have succeeded only when backed by the forces able to give battle at the moment most advantageous to their success. The brigade provides this combat strength; the unit does not.

The aviation combat element exemplifies the differences between a unit and a brigade. During the initial stages of an amphibious operation, the bulk of the firepower comes from the aviation combat element. In MEB-sized operations, this firepower is increased tenfold. The number of AH-1Ws is increased dramatically from four to 18 (all night attack capable). Similarly, AV-8B day/night attack close air support is boosted from six aircraft (or, in some cases, zero) to a squadron of 20. Medium lift is doubled; heavy lift tripled; and the flexibility of the MV-22 Osprey can be exploited. The aircraft in a brigade would provide the mobility and firepower that the expeditionary unit currently—but misleadingly—advertises.

The consensus among today’s Marine Corps leaders is to push for special operations capabilities, both to preempt the Army’s desire to move into this arena and to bring a strong Marine Corps into the 21st century. The “special operations capable” designation is not a mantle of invincibility; it simply denotes the ability to perform in many different areas of combat operations. Since the brigade is capable of handling all such missions, however, the SOC label becomes redundant.

The Marine expeditionary brigade can accomplish—and expand on—the MEU(SOC) missions. Amphibious raids, for example, combine a quick strike with a rapid pullout. A brigade provides the staying power to support continued operations ashore. Let the 16-man SEAL platoons perform raids, and let the Marines concentrate on the assault. The expeditionary unit can perform only “limited objective attacks,” but a brigade is capable of the type of full-scale amphibious assault the Marine Corps is expected to execute.

As an example of the humanitarian assistance mission, one need only look to May 1991 and Operation Sea Angel, in which Bangladesh was devastated by a hurricane and the 5th MEB was ashore within weeks to support a joint rescue mission. The combat support element was self-sustaining, and aviation assets were invaluable in lifting food and supplies throughout the countryside.

The following fictional scenario better illustrates the expeditionary unit’s weakness: The 15th MEU is positioned just off the coast of Somalia and is prepared to launch an amphibious assault from the USS Tripoli (LPH-10) against an enemy of unknown size and disposition. There are no naval gunfire assets and no attached Harriers (neither is an uncommon occurrence). During the initial assault, the lead unit comes under attack by an overwhelming force equipped with one ZSU 23-4 antiaircraft platform. The four AH-1Ws are sent in to support the counterattack; two are shot down and one limps back to the ship. The battalion landing team has lost all of its rotary wing close air support assets, with no promise of organic aerial fire support anytime soon. This situation could have arisen in December 1992, but can be avoided if the force deployed is the size of a brigade, afloat with 18 Cobras and 20 Harriers.

If the Navy/Marine Corps team is to follow the tenets of our leaders as set forth in “. . . From the Sea,” the Marine Corps must be prepared to make bold changes if our current force structure. As currently deployed, the Marine expeditionary unit is little more than a token force, incapable of either projecting real power ashore or sustaining ground operations once a beachhead has been seized (witness Mogadishu in December 1992). By leaving our forces in Japan and retaining status quo posture at home, we risk extinction through rapidly diminishing public support. We must face the realities of both congressional hostility and a U.S. Army that is growing increasingly interested in amphibious operations.

General Mundy and Admiral Kelso insisted that, “[naval forces are] relevant in force composition and employment, and fully capable of meeting national needs.” To live up to this claim, we must deploy Marines as Marine expeditionary brigades—for the strength necessary to conduct forcible entry operations across hostile shores.