The rise of networked enemy surveillance systems and long-range precision strike capabilities make Marine expeditionary unit (MEU)-centered amphibious ready groups (ARGs) too large to avoid attention, and they are too few in number to carry out widely dispersed missions. U.S. amphibious warfare needs a real innovation in how Marines are put ashore, using new technology and perhaps some old ideas to help Marines carry out new ways of achieving objectives.
According to “Expeditionary Force 21” (EF21), “the increased range, precision, and proliferation of antiaccess/area denial (A2/AD) systems highlight the need to conduct dispersed operations with smaller, task-organized forces. While EF21 seeks to carry out traditional Marine missions in the new threat environment of this century, there is a danger of not adapting fast enough. The operating concept risks failure if the Marine Corps does not push adaptation ruthlessly tested into the force.1
This does not mean simply doing the same things with better technology. Trying to do the same big operations once begun from offshore to something done from over the horizon with more extensive, expensive, and technologically advanced tools is not the answer.
Simply asserting that today’s Marines will defeat A2/AD challenges twists an otherwise admirable “can do” attitude into what looks more like the “Charge of the Light Brigade.” It might be magnificent, but it is not a war-winning strategy.
Modern U.S. amphibious doctrine is built on the experience of World War II, and today’s Marines can look to it for insights into disaggregated operations. Japanese victories in the opening months of the war relied on small units to take small islands and swarms of small units to converge on larger targets. The Japanese Navy used older warships to carry its naval infantry and provide fire support to the troops as they landed.2 Prewar Japanese amphibious doctrine held that using units “widely dispersed yet concentrated at the point of attack” was the best way to hit an objective.3
Even though the U.S. Marine Corps spent the inter-war years developing amphibious doctrine and specialized equipment, at the beginning of the war the U.S. discovered the need for capabilities that the Japanese had used so effectively. The Navy, in response, developed the assault transport ship (APD) from obsolete destroyers to carry company-sized Marine elements to begin the rollback of Japanese gains.
Today’s Marine Corps needs to move away from battalion-sized MEUs to company- and platoon-sized operations (building on them for larger operations); and the Navy needs an updated APD dedicated to moving Marines and providing fire support to carry out a greater number of smaller, faster amphibious missions. Disaggregated “swarms” are the means to adapt to the A2/AD challenges that threaten large-scale amphibious operations.
Expeditionary Assault Ship as the Enabler
Operations in high-threat areas might only be possible with smaller amphibious units that can land, conduct a ground element mission, then withdraw before the enemy can effectively react. This is how to cope with more potent threats, rather than trying to build mobile death stars that can slug their way ashore, swatting away ever-expanding threats.
Exercise Blue Chromite, conducted in the western Pacific in autumn 2016, demonstrated this nimble, always-moving concept. The exercise centered around a series of raid scenarios that required Marines to move rapidly from ship to shore, and from objective to objective on land, without setting up a heavy footprint that would bog down their movements.4
This approach may make the Marines “more focused on the company, platoon, and squad levels, with the service trying to empower lower echelons that will operate with more independence in dispersed operations.”5
Carrying out disaggregated Marine operations emphasizing empowered smaller units will require a new type of ship. The Navy should resurrect the APD—the nimble “Green Dragon”—used in World War II. Between late 1938 and early 1939, the U.S. Navy modified its oldest flush-deck destroyer, the USS Manley (DD-940), replacing her forward two boilers and two stacks with a berthing compartment for 120 Marines. Her four triple torpedo tube mounts were replaced by davits to handle the new Higgins boat, and one waist gun was removed while another was moved to the ship’s centerline.
The APDs, based on destroyer and destroyer escort hulls, could carry up to 200 men. In 1969, the Navy still had 11 in the fleet, which by then were called fast amphibious transports (LPRs).
The British, too, adapted a destroyer—HMS Campbeltown (ex-USS Buchanan (DD-131))—to carry 80 commandos for the raid on German-occupied Saint Nazaire in late March 1942. The ground complement was limited because the ship was to be used as a very large improvised explosive device to wreck the dry dock at the port.
Today, the Navy could use decommissioned larger Coast Guard cutters or Navy frigates for these expeditionary assault ship (EAS) conversions. The speed and shallow draft of the littoral combat ships (LCSs) could make them ideal platforms for this mission as well, allowing them to launch Marines closer to an objective. The LCS could make room for a Marine expeditionary company (MEC) by using habitability modules.6 With the Navy moving beyond the LCS concept to create frigates in their place, LCSs may be available for experimentation.
Modern-day Marine Raiders, the designation of Marine Corps Special Operations Command forces, take their missions as well as their name from their World War II forbears. Today’s Raiders would be ideal to spearhead the testing and adoption of dispersed or disaggregated operations that land, attack, and relocate before the enemy can react.
Swarming Marine Expeditionary Companies
The key characteristics of an expeditionary force as defined in EF21 include “deploying and employing tailored, economic forces of almost any size and configuration,” and “living and operating in austere conditions where large support bases are unacceptable or infeasible.”7
More, smaller units afloat (or ashore, in places such as Spain and Australia) will allow the Marines to “engage forward” during peacetime in more locations and respond to crises more rapidly. During war, smaller units would enable numerous operations to secure island or coastal landing sites. Marine companies dispersed to separate locations should have the ability to operate in a more self-contained capacity, and have the “necessary personnel and equipment to immediately integrate enablers and assets.”8 These attributes would be key for MECs.
Splitting Marine units in the Pacific across a wider basing pattern would put a strain on Navy amphibious assets to move them. Some troops could be “stranded on an island” without sufficient EAS hulls to match Marine basing. Existing large amphibious warships still would be valuable, however, if the Marines emphasize disaggregated operations. A single big-deck amphibious carrier could support multiple company-sized elements landing on separate objectives within a few hundred miles of each other. Other Navy amphibious ships could be used as mother ships for dispersed operations of the MECs, as EF21 suggests.
In conflict, seizing small but important islands in the Persian Gulf, the South China Sea (some literally being built by China), and the East China Sea could be a mission for small assault elements.
In the Persian Gulf, in addition to securing key islands, MECs could follow in the footsteps of U.S. forces during the Iran-Iraq War who manned barges, small boats, and helicopters in the northern Persian Gulf to oppose Iranian efforts to interfere with the flow of shipping.
In the South China Sea, China already has deployed mobile artillery to at least one of its artificial islands, and added point air defenses to all of its Spratley Island outposts. To remove those assets from the Chinese side of the board—and more important, to make them friendly assets—the Navy and Marine Corps team must be able to seize those islands.
Marines are also needed in Europe. While a confrontation with Russia would rely on heavy Army and NATO forces, there are many opportunities for MEC operations, from Norway’s littoral regions, to the Baltic Sea’s critical islands, to the shores of the Black Sea, to Mediterranean islands and coastal regions. These missions would include setting up outposts for antiaircraft and antiship assets and for fire support to friendly ground forces, denying the enemy such assets, and clearing approach routes to project power ashore for larger-scale operations.
Per EF21, scaling up Marine forces may require linking up forward elements with reinforcing units rapidly deployed. If Marines are flown in from distant bases, they could link up with afloat prepositioned equipment at or near the objective. Traditional amphibious warfare ships could assist in the transition from disaggregated power projection ashore to concentration in battalion- and brigade-sized operations inland after the MECs have weakened or neutralized coastal defenses that would have prevented a conventional ship-to-shore movement by a larger maneuver unit and its accompanying Navy ships.
MECs also could carry out A2/AD missions. Prior to 1921, the Marines prepared “for the defense of advance bases and not for offensive landing operations.”9 Citing World War II experience, EF21 holds that the Marines must be capable of establishing and defending advanced bases while working with other services to “project power and control the sea.” This will allow the United States to “turn the A2/AD table” on an enemy by deploying weapons and sensors in a “network of numerous austere bases—by occupation or seizure—as a means of dispersing aircraft, missiles, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets” that deny an enemy the ability to operate in those waters and in that air space. Such advance expeditionary bases equipped with long-range strike, antiship, and antiair systems would function as “sea denial outposts.”
Such outposts—quickly established and abandoned as needed—could be used for forward arming and refueling points to support dispersed air operations ashore, making a transition between sea-based and land-based Marine air power truly seamless.
The Navy Expeditionary Combat Command (NECC) also should be part of the dragon swarm concept. The NECC could create island defense forces of mixed infantry, air defense, and antiship (tube, rocket, and missile) units. Their coastal riverine force patrol boats also would contribute. Used in place of MECs, NECC coastal defense units would hold small islands and force an enemy to operate in an A2/AD environment.
Deploy, Survive, Fight, and Win
The Navy is trying to cope with new A2/AD threats by attempting to land Marines on large ships from over the horizon. This is not innovation.
It has been a long time since the large-scale amphibious operations at Inchon. The United States refrained from a landing in 1991 during the Persian Gulf War after two ships were damaged by Iraqi naval mines off the coast of Kuwait. Perhaps large-scale opposed landings are no longer possible. But as long as enemies hold islands, the United States will need to assault hostile shores, or defend them against enemies. The threats to large-scale amphibious operations mean that the Marine Corps must focus on smaller amphibious operations that can be completed before enemy forces can react in strength.
Transitioning to Marine expeditionary companies and Navy expeditionary assault ships as the basic maneuver unit for amphibious operations, but whose ground elements can be augmented, including with non-amphibious lift assets, may be the innovation that ensures Marines can deploy, survive, fight, and win. Converting new APDs to ruthlessly test this operational concept must be the first step.
1. Major Scott Kinner, USMC (Ret.) “Making Expeditionary Force 21 Work,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 141, no. 11 (November 2015), 19.
2 Alan R, Millett, “Assault from the Sea: The Development of Amphibious Warfare Between the Wars, the American, British, and Japanese Experiences,” in Military Innovation in the Interwar Period, ed. Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 70.
3. Ibid., 69. It should be noted that this approach was appropriate only for small islands or larger but poorly defended islands. The U.S. defense of Wake Island, for example, demonstrates that the swarm concept is insufficient on its own to overpower defenders capable of hitting naval ships that carry the landing force.
4. Megan Eckstein, “Marines Practice Expeditionary Advance Base Operations in Exercise Blue Chromite In Japan,” USNI News, 4 November 2016, news.usni.org/2016/11/04/marines-practice-expeditionary-advance-base-operations-exercise-blue-chromite-japan.
5. Megan Eckstein, “Marine Corps to Prioritize Smaller Frontline Units in Upcoming Budget Plans,” USNI News, 5 October 2016, news.usni.org/2016/10/05/marine-corps-to-prioritize-smaller-units-close-to-the-fight-in-budget-plans.
6. “Expeditionary Force 21,” 20.
7. “Expeditionary Force 21,” 6.
8. Kinner, “A Custom-Built Corps,” U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings 140, no. 11 (November 2014), 22.
9. Gunther E. Rothenberg, “From Gallipoli to Guadalcanal,” in Assault from the Sea: Essays on the History of Amphibious Warfare, ed. Lt.Col. Merrill L. Bartlett, USMC (Ret.) (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1983), 178.
Mr. Dunn served in the Michigan Army National Guard until 1993. He previously taught American history and was a research analyst for the Michigan State Legislature. He has written articles for Army Magazine, Military Review, Infantry Magazine, and the Joint Force Quarterly.