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“It’s hard to make predictions, especially of the future.”
Yogi Berra*
Predicting the future is much easier for us than it was for Yogi, a World War II combat ‘Gator; our signposts are clear. The difficulty lies more in accepting—and acting upon—what we know of the future than in defining it.
The characteristics of future amphibious warfare—nearly impossible to make out a year or two ago—are now much clearer. There still is murkiness around the edges, to be sure, but the outline has emerged and is rapidly taking on definition. Two developments, each moving from speculation toward certainty, have helped: the character of littoral warfare and significant changes in force composition.
Actions have consequences. Changes in the operational art and in amphibious-force composition will affect the future. These can be foreseen with some accuracy. To put it another way, we cannot make major force-structure
•Yogi Berra, our most famous amphibious warfare sailor, volunteered for duty with the Amphibious Forces early in World War II at the Naval Amphibious Base, Little Creek, Virginia. He served in an LCS, and participated in every amphibious operation in the European Theater.
changes, couple them with dramatic changes in warfighting, and expect that the character of amphibious warfare will stay the same. It is just not realistic.
Desert Storm saw the reemergence of maneuver warfare as a decisive method of campaigning on the ground and, as it is now generally accepted that future large-scale contingency operations will be conducted by joint forces, it follows that sustained ground campaigns in these con- 1 tingencies will be largely U.S. Army operations.
Given these developments, what conclusions should we draw regarding amphibious warfare? Simply that it will be vital and that it will be conducted as maneuver war- t fare; they are a near-perfect fit. To the extent that a theater includes littorals in which an enemy is operating or through which he can be flanked, amphibious forces will be the centerpiece of the campaign’s maritime component. And speaking of littorals, we should stretch our definition of them—the entire Korean peninsula, for example, is a littoral area.
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Proceedings / May 1994
Maneuver warfare puts a premium on agility, rapid reaction, speed of movement, and the ability to exploit advantage quickly. An amphibious force offshore fills this bill perfectly. Not only can its mere presence tie down a disproportionate number of enemy defenders, its speed ! and responsiveness give it the capability to inflict critical, perhaps decisive, damage almost at will. The implications ! of this seem clear: if the sustained ground operations in |
a major contingency are likely to be Army, and since amphibious forces will likely operate from offshore in a strike/reconstitute/strike-again maneuver mode, it behooves us to make force structure tradeoffs that emphasize air- cushion landing craft (LCACs) and rotary-wing lift and that discount large sustainment stocks.
Two recent force-structure decisions—to retire the tank landing ships (LSTs) and amphibious cargo ships (LKAs), and to structure the amphibious force to meet peacetime presence requirements—will have significant impact on the shape of the future.
First and most important, the LSTs and the LKAs carried the equipment that makes sustained operations ashore possible—causeways, warping tugs, and small boats. Without this equipment we cannot conduct logistics-over-the- shore (LOTS) operations, and without LOTS we cannot sustain a large force ashore for any significant period. We are then left with only two options: forgo sustained operations ashore or use commercial ships to bring the equipment we need.
The typical reaction to any proposal to associate commercial ships with an amphibious assault has been to label it preposterous and move on. Actually, it is not a bad idea. Commercial ships are not that vulnerable [recall the tanker war, and what an Exocet did to the USS Stark (FFG-31), a mine to the USS Samuel B. Roberts (FFG-58), and the many commercial ships that survived serious hits, including mines]. In addition, once one accepts the notion of commercial ships in the assault, new vistas open, the most significant of which is the option to shift the sustainment burden from amphibious to commercial ships. This would free increasingly scarce space in the ‘Gators to carry the more volatile cargo and additional combat capability—mine countermeasures systems
Navy simply will not have the forces, however, to answer the unified commanders-in-chief forward-presence requirements with separate and independent carrier battle groups and amphibious ready groups full-time.
Indications are that we will employ a Naval Expeditionary Task Force or an Adaptive Joint Force Package to fill forward-presence requirements. The semantics are not important, but the concept is. Only rarely will amphibious ships conduct forward-presence operations as independent amphibious ready groups. Twelve of everything, therefore, becomes less important as a programming goal. Given this, perhaps the force should be re-balanced between peacetime presence and combat requirements. Such an effort would, I am sure, conclude that the Whid- bey Island (LSD-4 l)-class ship with her four air-cushion landing craft is the crown jewel of the amphibious force because of her disproportionate contribution to our maneuver capability.
In addition to these primary effects, the changes In force structure and our embrace of maneuver warfare will produce secondary effects and with these will come other significant changes.
► Command and Control. Our amphibious warfare doctrine is incompatible with maneuver warfare. Rigid command relationships, planning to the point of choreography, and utter dependence on an all-pervading communications architecture have no place in operations that emphasize rapid change, agility, real-time reaction, and unexpected shifts in the focus of effort.
While coordination between elements is vital, attempts at synchronizing their efforts are generally inconsistent with the fluidity required in maneuver. In a maneuver engagement, initiative is everything. Accordingly, communications in maneuver warfare are largely implicit—re-
and unmanned aerial vehicles, for example.
Settling for the peacetime-presence requirement to deploy 12 amphibious ready groups means that we need 12 amphibious assault ships (LHAs-LHDs), 12 dock landing ships (LSDs), and 12 of the planned next-generation amphibious (LPD-17s) ships. [See “Picking the Latest ‘Gator,” Proceedings August 1992, pages 91-93.] The
suiting from shared understanding of commander’s intent and his objectives. Explicit communications, while necessary in some phases of the operation, are of much less importance once the balloon has gone up.
► Staffs. Closely related to shifts in doctrine and com- mand-and-control emphasis is staff capability. A task force engaged in littoral maneuver warfare can be likened to a good football team: when the quarterback sees a weakness he changes the play at the line of scrimmage—not after a lengthy time-out to discuss the options. Only the best teams can pull this off consistently. It takes long familiarity with each other and with the game.
Maneuver warfare practitioners must develop the same degree of familiarity, and the only way to attain it is by establishing standing, integrated staffs that include all the warfare disciplines: strike, amphibious, submarine, mine countermeasures, defensive. The Marine Corps addressed similar problems by establishing standing Marine Expeditionary Unit and Brigade staffs that included all elements of a Marine air-ground task force. It is an example the Navy would do well to follow.
> Over-the-Horizon. It is an option that had clear Cold War and forcible-entry utility, but launching assaults from 35-50 miles offshore in the world of the future will be required much less often because few potential adversaries can mount the kind of threat the demands it. Smart weapons are not threats in and of themselves; Operation Desert Storm showed that. Smart weapons are threats only when employed by well-trained, sophisticated operators. Applying that standard, a reasonable one, should moderate our perception of threat levels along the world’s littorals. Because future task forces will include commercial ships that must operate close inshore, our over-the-horizon capability can be more modest (LCACs certainly, but probably not advanced assault amphibian vehicles).
It is now apparent that the amphibious operations conducted during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm were harbingers, not anomalies. All the following were employed:
> Commercial ships in the assault echelon (and planned early-use of their causeways and boats)
► Integrated staffs
>■ Implicit instead of explicit communications with supporting task forces
► Non-doctrinal command relationships
► Rapid shifts in mission/focus with no time for formal planning
We normally learn more from failure than from success but that should not be the case here. With apologies to Yogi, this time the handwriting on the wall is so large that predictions are easy—especially with regard to the future. Required now are some radical changes in our thinking and in our operations to accommodate them.
Starting now, we need to:
► Stop training to do what we’re good at—set-piece choreographed operations—and concentrate on developing staffs and people who can function in the quicksilver of the maneuver environment.
► Learn to operate with commercial ships: the Maritime Prepositioning Squadrons, lighter-aboard-ship (LASH), and SEABEE ships of the Maritime Administration’s Ready Reserve Fleet, and the U.S. Army’s Afloat Prepositioning Ships.
► Fix our logistics-over-the-shore (LOTS) programs, which now are deficient in training, interoperability, and doctrine.
► Consider shifting part of the Marine Expeditionary Unit/Brigade sustainment burden to commercial ships since they will be there anyway with their LOTS equipment if we contemplate sustained operations ashore. This does not suggest that doctrinal levels of sustainment be modified—- only the vehicles by which they are delivered.
► Create an integrated staff (or staffs) capable of conducting maneuver warfare in the littorals. The initial deployment of one of the evolving adaptive force packages or Naval Expeditionary Task Groups would seem an ideal opportunity.
We need to react to the future, and we need to do it now. To insist that the traditional forcible-entry assault with its force structure, doctrine, and procedures is adequate for the future is to admit that amphibious warfare will remain nothing more than “beaching the whale.” The signposts to the future point to a near-revolutionary capability. At this moment, however, it is all potential. It is time to take the stops that will permit us to realize that potential.
Admiral LaPlante is the Director for Logistics, J-4, on the Joint Staff- He commanded Task Force 156/Amphibious Group Two in the Persian Gulf during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.
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Proceedings / May 19*14