The U.S. Marine Corps and Navy long have been the world’s leaders in amphibious operations. Sweeping victories across the islands of the Pacific in World War II established an amphibious prowess unknown in the annals of warfare, while recent operations from Iraq to Libya demonstrate the continuing need for capabilities in the littorals. The amphibious ready group (ARG) and Marine expeditionary unit (MEU) were created to update Navy-Marine Corps joint operations for the war in Vietnam and late-20th century conflicts in the Middle East.
Today’s ARG-MEU has become antiquated and inefficient—overpowered for a land-based skirmish and underpowered in shaping and striking power. The 2014 Marine Corps publication “Expeditionary Force 21” outlines the need for the Marine Corps to be a littoral reaction force, but the ARG-MEU remains too focused on visions of Saipans and Iwo Jimas, not Mogadishus or Sirtes.1 ARG-MEUs are oriented heavily toward beach landings and ground operations when special operations forces (SOF) insertions and aviation-led strikes dominate their contemporary tasking. These “soft footprint” forces are in demand because of the complexities of territorial sovereignty, social media’s rapid information sharing in the battlespace, and the United States’ post-Iraq fear of future quagmires. The Marine Corps’ and the Navy’s renewed emphasis on Marines-at-sea reflects the Marines’ quest for a defined role between the land and sea services in an era of austere budgets and offers significant opportunities for restructuring and revitalization. The Navy-Marine Corps team must evolve and accept that the ARG-MEU should cede its preeminence to a new arrangement more aligned with the modern battlespace: the tactical expeditionary group (TEG).
Tactical Expeditionary Group
The current ARG-MEU distributes the MEU roughly equally across all three ARG ships. The TEG will retain the same MEU composition and the ARG’s three ships: the amphibious assault ship (either an LHD, with a well deck, or an LHA, currently without), the dock landing ship (LSD), and the amphibious transport dock (LPD). The TEG will specialize the dispersion of Marines across the ships by concentrating the air combat element (ACE) on board the LHA/LHD and shifting well-deck operations to the LSD and LPD. The TEG also will expand the naval assets assigned to an ARG-MEU by permanently attaching a cruiser or destroyer and a littoral combat ship (LCS).
With the rise of viral media, resurgent nationalisms, and a U.S. public averse to battlefield deaths, the Navy-Marine Corps team rarely will be able to deploy ground forces in pursuit of regional crisis resolution. Instead, SOF insertions and aviation strikes, including by unmanned aerial systems, will continue to be the primary options for policy makers and combatant commanders. The TEG will transition from an ARG-MEU largely oriented toward establishing the ground combat element (GCE) on the beachhead to a force focused on maximizing the aviation element’s capabilities, readiness, and time on-station in order to prosecute opponents, while reserving substantial landing capabilities on the LSD and LPD. The TEG concentrates Marines on specific platforms in the most effective combination of ships and personnel to execute the primary missions of 21st Century warfare. For special forces and the aviation element these missions include raids, insertions, and aerial assaults, and for the ground element these include security cooperation, humanitarian assistance/disaster relief, low-intensity beach landings, and theater-level conflict.
MEUs are usually disaggregated; the Navy and Marine Corps need to specialize how best to dis- and reaggregate—and how to augment the LHA/LHD’s naval surface support. Currently, amphibious assault ships’ well decks sit underutilized as the ships spend months at sea launching aerial strikes and reconnaissance far from beachheads. For example, well decks and surface connectors played no significant role in the aviation-dominated destruction of the ISIS stronghold in Sirte, Libya, during Operation Odyssey Lighting in 2016. The elimination of the ISIS force was accomplished primarily by aircraft launched by the USS Wasp (LHD-1), with the USS San Antonio (LPD-17) stepping in as a limited aviation asset only once ISIS had been degraded almost completely. The TEG ensures the MEU’s non-aviation Marines can perform other duties instead of languishing inside an LHA/LHD during air operations. The LPD and LSD with the ground and logistics elements will remain within a 96-hour sail of the LHA/LHD to reaggregate if an amphibious raid or assault is required. This operating structure more closely aligns with contemporary warfighting and will permit execution of more missions in resource-starved theaters of operation.
Including a cruiser or destroyer and an LCS in the TEG will provide the defensive and strike mission packages essential for missions against enemy positions in the littorals. Combining these surface assets with the F-35B’s over-the-horizon abilities will give the TEG an exceptional surface-air arm that will allow Marines to penetrate enemy-held areas more quickly and decisively.2
Aviation Will Dominate
When examining the arc of contemporary warfare, it is apparent that hostile beachheads are low on the list of probable battlefields—landing near Murmansk or Sanya is not a realistic proposition. Terrorists and rogue states do not fight conventionally. As long as the ARG-MEU remains rigidly conventional and doctrinally rooted in the island-hopping campaigns of World War II, it will be an obsolete and expensive use of Marines and sailors that would be employed much more usefully in specialized and asymmetric combinations.
Any large World War II-style amphibious operation would require the entire amphibious fleet. A quick survey of potential adversaries confirms that no single ARG-MEU would be able to deal with our most significant would-be opponents: China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. For a MEU-sized force, a TEG’s aviation and SOF assets would maximize tactical options against terrorists in failed states such as Somalia, Libya, or Yemen. The ground and logistics forces on the TEG’s LSD and LPD will be able to accomplish rapid landings, humanitarian assistance/disaster relief missions, or other taskings separately. The Navy-Marine Corps team has employed already an ad hoc ACE-centric model for LHAs/LHDs, when the USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD-6) and Bataan (LHD-5) operated as “Harrier Carriers” in 2003 during the opening stages of Operation Iraqi Freedom. This example further extends the logic of shifting to the TEG’s more-specialized model and the ease of scaling it to conduct a Marine expeditionary brigade (MEB)-sized assault.
No Well Decks For The Americas
Much ire greeted the decision to commission the LHA Flight 0 ships, the USS America (LHA-6) and Tripoli (LHA-7), without well decks. While the reaction was understandable given the history of Navy/Marine Corps wet-well operations, the warfare of the past is the greatest enemy of future warfighters. Historic attachments can cloud the mind and prevent it from seeing the truth—in this case, that no ARG-MEU has used its well decks against an opposed beachhead in the past decade. At the same time, LHDs have proven time and again that their aviation combat assets are the most in-demand component of the ARG-MEU, rarely pulling in to port as they continuously pummel ISIS and other threats to U.S. national security from above.
The previous aviation-centric amphibious assault ships, known under the old classification as landing platform helicopter ships (LPHs), failed because they were insufficiently large and lacked full, diverse air wings to overcome antiaircraft systems such as those faced off the coast of Lebanon in the late 1970s. The America and Tripoli will have MV-22s, F-35Bs, UH-1Ys, CH-53Ks, AH-1Zs, and drones, easily outperforming the LPHs in the quantity, quality, and variety of their aviation assets. The failures of the LPHs should not be held against Flight 0 LHAs.
As the centerpiece of the TEG, America-class LHAs should remain focused on aviation. The Flight 0 ships offer increased space for refit and repair at sea, 40 percent more capacity for supply, and nearly double the aviation fuel of LHDs, making the America the ideal platform for the F-35B.3 The benefits of this design to the ACE drastically outweigh the limited utility of a pygmy well deck. Flight 0 LHAs also will allow more versatility as drones and other unmanned systems come online during the projected half century service lives of these ships.
The USS Bougainville (LHA-8) will deviate from the Flight 0 ships of the America class and have a small well deck. The ship’s island structure will be modified to free more room on the flight deck for MV-22 maintenance, which will compensate to some degree. But space given over to Humvees and M1A1 Abrams tanks, and their associated surface connectors, will mean a profound net loss of aviation maintenance and storage capacity on a platform that should be employed primarily for its MV-22s and F-35Bs. As the USS Kearsarge’s (LHD-3) and Wasp’s (LHD-1) aviation-centric operations in Libya in 2011 and 2016, respectively, have shown, contemporary MEU tasking leans heavily on aviation assets. It is much easier for terrorists and developing countries to mine littorals and put machine guns on speedboats than it is to acquire and use sophisticated surface-to-air missile batteries. Marines are often safer by air than by sea, which was the impetus in the 1990s for the well deck-less LHA Flight 0 design.4 MV-22s cannot carry everything that surface connectors can, but the TEG arrangement shifts heavier vehicles and equipment to the LPDs and LSDs with their spacious well decks and appropriate landing craft.
This refined arrangement will be significantly more useful for contemporary and future combatant commanders as Marine Corps assets will be attached to the naval platforms where they will be most effective. Moreover, it promotes the “Expeditionary Force 21” goal of increasing naval integration, as two LHA Flight 0s could carry an entire Nimitz-class aircraft carrier air wing’s worth of fighters and can link up with surface assets nearby for flexibility in combat.5 In September 2016, the Navy demonstrated the ability to extend the range of the TEG’s air defense and strike systems when a ground station successfully used sensor information from an F-35B to fire an SM-6 missile remotely, destroying a fighter-like test aircraft at the Navy’s White Sands test range.6
Sacrificing these aviation-focused capabilities for a miniature well deck in the Bougainville enables the mission creep and compromise that the Marine Corps and Navy have been attempting to fight for years. Instead of making the LHAs Swiss-army knives, the Navy must let them focus on their core mission as expeditionary, Marine-oriented aviation platforms and leave secondary missions to the LPDs and LSDs. The MV-22s on an LHA can still execute many of the GCE’s and LCE’s missions, and those that cannot be done aerially will be assumed by the LPD’s and LSD’s surface connectors.
In a crisis, an ARG-MEU has to reaggregate to assemble all of the necessary pieces for a beach landing. Specializing each platform in the TEG concept does not change this. Specializing each platform without reducing the overall MEU’s capabilities in no way diminishes the GCE’s offensive power but does allow for the only amphibious ship with a full flight deck to exploit its aviation advantage and maximize the ACE’s utility.
More than an Upgunned ESG
The “upgunned expeditionary strike group (ESG)” concept bears a superficial resemblance to the TEG because of the inclusion of cruisers or destroyers with ARGs. While the result is a welcome development for enhancing amphibious forces’ strike and defensive capabilities, the upgunned ESG does not reorganize fundamentally the use of the Marine assets. The TEG, with both an LCS and a cruiser or destroyer, reimagines the employment of the air and ground forces of a MEU in a more specialized way. It maximizes the amphibious assault ship’s strengths as an aviation platform and differentiates the LPD’s and LSD’s ground roles in exercises, training, and offensive employment.
The upgunned ESG focuses on dealing with high-end threats such as China rather than leveraging naval forces against complex, low-end conflicts. On the other hand, the TEG creates a highly functional, networked force with specialized amphibious ships capable of meeting multiple combatant commander demands simultaneously, leveraging the Navy-Marine Corp team’s strengths to create an unparalleled expeditionary force.
Rethink the ARG-MEU
The ARG-MEU has served its original purpose well, but today’s Navy-Marine Corps team requires a more versatile, specialized, and light-footprint expeditionary force. The Navy and Marine Corps continue to design and build forces for the clean conflicts leaders want, the conflicts of the past. By resuming production of Flight 0 LHAs, with their more substantial, focused aviation capabilities, the Navy-Marine Corps team can best develop the TEG—the modern fusion of the Marine Corps’ unparalleled expeditionary capabilities and the Navy’s mobile strike platform mission. The TEG will optimize the MEU’s forces, challenge assumptions, and retain the expeditionary flexibility that is the hallmark of the U.S. Marine Corps.
1. U.S. Marine Corps, “Expeditionary Force 21,” 4 March 2014, www.mccdc.marines.mil/Portals/172/Docs/MCCDC/EF21/EF21_USMC_Capstone_Concept.pdf.
2. Sam LaGrone, “PACFLT’s Swift: Amphib USS Wasp Will Deploy With Surface Action Group in 2017,” USNI News 23 November 2016, news.usni.org/2016/11/23/pacflts-swift-amphib-wasp-will-deploy-surface-action-group-2017. Accessed 18 Sept. 2017.
3. Sam LaGrone, “Successful F-35, SM-6 Live Fire Test Points to Expansion in Networked Naval Warfare.” USNI News, 13 September 2016, news.usni.org/2016/09/13/video-successful-f-35-sm-6-live-fire-test-points-expansion-networked-naval-warfare.
4. Grace V. Jean, “Marines Question the Utility of Their New Amphibious Warship.” National Defense Magazine, September 2008, www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2008/9/1/2008september-marines-question-the-utility-of-their-new-amphibious-warship.
5. Sam LaGrone, “Marine Harriers Strike ISIS Targets in Libya from USS Wasp.” USNI News, 3 August 2016, news.usni.org/2016/08/03/marine-harriers-strike-libyan-targets-uss-wasp; Joint Force Maritime Component Commanders Odyssey Dawn Public Affairs; U.S. Navy, “Navy, Marine Corps Aircraft Strike Libya,” 20 March 2011, www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=59195.
6. LaGrone, “Successful F-35, SM-6 Live Fire Test Points to Expansion in Networked Naval Warfare.”Editor’s Note: This essay won second prize in the 2017 Marine Corps Essay contest, sponsored with Marine Corps Generals Peter Pace, John Allen, and Wallace Gregson.
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