Arming the new Marine Littoral Regiment (MLR) with offensive ground-based antiship missiles (GBASMs) but no defensive surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) is as bold as it is risky. The Marine Corps has not been so ill-equipped to face high-end naval and air forces since the first year of World War II. Retired Navy Captain Wayne P. Hughes Jr.’s missile “Salvo Model” suggests the Marine Corps needs a high-to-medium air-defense (HIMAD) system to conduct littoral operations in a contested environment and expeditionary advanced base operations.
More than 75 years after the end of World War II, ballistic and cruise missiles have supplanted the role of most long- and medium-range bombers. The vulnerability of U.S. forces operating without adequate HIMAD or theater ballistic-missile defense protection was demonstrated on 8 January 2020, when Iran launched conventional ballistic missiles against U.S. forces at Iraq’s Ayn Al Asad Airbase in Operation Martyr Soleimani. Iran’s attack reportedly injured 110 U.S. service members and inflicted minimal damage to the airfield and aircraft. The U.S. Army’s HIMAD MIM-104 Patriot SAM system was deployed to protect against further attacks.
The threat posed by Iranian missiles and the wide range of missiles China operates have compelled the Navy and Army to upgrade Aegis warships and Patriot batteries for theater missile defense. The MLR’s littoral antiair battalion (LAAB), however, does not have Patriot missiles and is limited to short-range air-defense (SHORAD) systems, such as the Light Armored Vehicle—Air Defense (LAVAD). Marine Corps F-35B Lighting II aircraft can also counter low-flying fighters and helicopters, similar to those that threatened the United Kingdom’s amphibious landings in the 1982 Falklands War.1 But the Marine Corps must determine if the MLR’s LAABs require an organic HIMAD capability like Patriot.
How to Fight with Missiles
The Hughes Salvo Model calculates probabilities of success in modern missile combat between ships. It uses the number of antiship missiles (ASMs)—striking power; missiles not intercepted by SAMs—defensive power; and the number of hits required to be put out of action—staying power—to calculate the amount of damage taken by the defending ship.
Hughes’s “Salvo Model” was not originally intended to account for a battle between a ship and land forces, but the concepts of striking, defensive, and staying power still apply when dueling ship and land forces are both capable of launching and intercepting missiles.
The MLR can use this model to calculate its striking power and the salvo size needed to defeat a given ship, assuming planners and operators know how many GBASMs the defender can intercept and how many GBASMs hits would take it out of action. The model also can estimate the defensive power required to keep the MLR in the fight against a ship-launched attack (or missiles the ship directs from another firing unit). The Salvo Model’s weakness in this case exists in trying to estimate sustainable damage to a land force—staying power.
The model identifies two areas of concern. First, the MLR must be able to launch a large enough GBASM salvo size to take a defending ship out of action, even after a number of GBASMs are intercepted. An adversary’s air-defense destroyer with a full SAM magazine, for example, would require a larger salvo size than a supply ship sailing alone. Second, the MLR must be able to intercept enough of the attacker’s missiles to avoid being taken out of action. As presently conceived, the defending MLR cannot intercept land-attack missiles on its own, while the attacking ship could possibly intercept all the MLR’s GBASMs, suffering no damage.
For the first problem, one solution would be to ensure the MLR has enough GBASM launchers to achieve the requisite salvo size to overwhelm a defending ship’s defensive power. For the second, the MLR requires a HIMAD system with enough missiles to intercept multiple salvos of ballistic and cruise missiles. Alternatively, the MLR could focus its missiles on undefended support vessels. (Captain Hughes proposed using lightly protected guided-missile patrol boats in just this way.)2 This would reduce the MLR’s required striking and defensive power, requiring fewer, or even no, HIMAD systems.
A Familiar Situation for the Marines
By substituting missiles for Japan’s Mitsubishi G3M3 medium range bombers and Marine F4F-3 Wildcat fighters (in the same manner as other authors have with the 1942 Battle of the Coral Sea), an analyst can use Hughes’ “Salvo Model” to measure the importance of effective air defense at the 1941 Battle of Wake Island.
On 8 December 1941, the lack of adequate air defenses at Wake Island contributed to the failure of the Wildcat fighters—the Marines’ defensive power—to launch and intercept the G3M3 bombers, Japan’s striking power. This resulted in 8 of 12 Wildcat fighters being destroyed on the ground. The four remaining fighters did not provide the Marines with a sufficient salvo size for strike or defense power. In the follow-on engagements against Japan’s naval and air forces beyond sinking one destroyer and shooting down two bombers.3
The “Salvo Mode” indicates that the MLR, with no HIMAD to counter ballistic- or cruise-missile attacks, might find itself in a situation similar to that faced by the Marines at Wake Island. Furthermore, the Navy’s ballistic-missile defense Aegis cruisers and destroyers cannot protect the MLR if the ships cannot protect themselves in a contested environment. For an armed service that prides itself on maintaining its own fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft, depending on the Army, Air Force, or Navy for HIMAD seems very un-Marine.
1. ADM Sandy Woodward, RN, with Patrick Robinson, One Hundred Days: The Memoirs of the Falklands Battle Group Commander (Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 1997), 253–68; Gen David H. Berger, USMC, Commandant’s Planning Guidance, Headquarters U.S. Marine Corps, 16 July 2019.
2. CAPT Wayne P. Hughes, USN (Ret.), “A Salvo Model of Warships in Missile Combat Used to Evaluate Their Staying Power,” Naval Research Logistics 42, no. 2 (1995): 284.
3. John B. Lundstrom, The First Team: Pacific Naval Air Combat from Pearl Harbor to Midway (Annapolis,
Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2005), 32.