The Commandant of the Marine Corps, General David H. Berger, recently unveiled a new defining role for the service: reconnaissance and counterreconnaissance.1 His stand-in forces concept shifts the Force Design 2030 modernization initiative’s focus from generating organic fires toward enabling joint fires—a significant change for a service that historically has emphasized its operational autonomy. This new role satisfies the U.S. military’s need for a scouting and screening force capable of sensing combat information and enabling kill webs in littoral seas, while frustrating the enemy’s ability to do the same. Scouting and screening competitions determine who can “attack effectively first”—the foundation for successful naval tactics.2
Small boats under 100 feet in length and 100 tons’ displacement could be the centerpiece platform for the service’s reconnaissance and counterreconnaissance role. Such boats could carry diverse sensors and weapons for scouting and screening. Marine Corps experimentation has validated their utility in contested littoral seas, such as those in the western Pacific.3 The Marine Corps’ use of small boats as the main sensing and maneuver platform for its new role may harmonize with the evolving character of war and place the service at the leading edge of an emerging maritime warfighting epoch.
Small-Boat Maneuver
Historically, the superiority of capabilities that deny battlefield maneuver has always been temporary. The current maritime warfighting epoch is defined by the dominance of maneuver-stifling, long-range antiship missiles. The next epoch may be defined by ubiquitous small boats that restore maneuver by evading detection and destruction by these missiles.
The initial transition to the next epoch may have already begun. China’s 50-foot JARI unmanned surface vessel reportedly has a range of 500 nautical miles, has a top speed of 42 knots, can deploy from larger ships, and can operate in autonomous swarms.4 It is equipped with advanced sensors, a 30-mm cannon, missiles, and torpedoes. In 2018, a Chinese company displayed 56 unmanned surface vessels conducting synchronized maneuvers and converging into the distinct outline of an aircraft carrier.5 Taiwan may be developing manned 45-ton microclass missile assault boats that carry antiship missiles and operate in swarms.6
If the United States mirrors China by flooding the western Pacific with long-range antiship missiles, China may rely less on large combatants and instead proliferate small vessels that sensors struggle to track and long-range missiles cannot effectively engage. The United States risks ceding the evolutionary initiative to China if it remains overly focused on exquisite missiles designed to strike large ships.
The Character-of-War Pendulum
The constantly evolving character of war historically oscillates like a pendulum between maneuver and antimaneuver platforms and capabilities. The immutable nature of war acts as the gravitational force that pulls the pendulum toward equilibrium, preventing either extreme from dominating indefinitely. Nature abhors a vacuum, and history demonstrates that the nature of war abhors a maneuver vacuum.
There have been numerous transitions in the maneuver versus antimaneuver balance over preceding centuries.7 Most recently, armor and mechanized infantry—famously employed using German blitzkrieg tactics in World War II—restored ground maneuver after World War I, but antitank guided munitions developed during the Cold War were able to deny this maneuver by the First Gulf War. Stealth aircraft developed in the 1980s enabled maneuver in airspace previously denied by surface-to-air missiles. Long-range antiship missiles—first proven effective in the Falkland Islands War of 1982—now deny surface maneuver to large ships in littoral seas, but low-signature small boats could soon restore maneuver.
There is ample historical precedent for using small boats to scout, screen, and raid in contested littorals. Select historical glimpses foreshadow the decisive role they could play as the centerpiece of a modern littoral maneuver force, with larger ships in a supporting role at times, flipping the traditional paradigm.
Historical Rationale
Since the dawn of the Age of Sail, small boats have avoided detection, dodged adversary long-range fires, and asymmetrically crippled larger ships. Alonso de Chaves, a 16th-century Spanish tactician, argued that small boats should constitute one-fourth of the entire fleet. Rather than directly engaging enemy combatants with attrition-style broadside exchanges, the Spanish used small boats as low-signature scouting, screening, and raid forces that evaded cannon fire and used asymmetric tactics such as surreptitiously immobilizing, scuttling, igniting, or boarding and seizing larger ships.8 Modern small boats, working in harmony with surface and subsurface combatants, could likewise avoid being targeted by larger ships and blind, disable, or destroy ships in littoral seas.
U.S. naval operations in the early 19th century reinforced the asymmetric value of small boats for scouting and screening in contested littorals. In 1804, during the First Barbary War, the U.S. Navy–Marine Corps team operated in the littorals near Tripoli Harbor, which was defended by 115 pieces of heavy artillery. Since large combatants could not maneuver in shallow waters and were easier targets for shore-based artillery, the U.S. expedition relied heavily on small gunboats. Large combatants in standoff positions resupplied and provided fire support to the gunboats.9 Modern small boats supported by larger ships in standoff positions could similarly operate in littorals defended by long-range missiles.
During the War of 1812 and in the West Indies in the 1820s, the United States employed innovative weapons from small boats and used larger ships as motherships and expeditionary sea bases. In 1813, on the recommendation of Robert Fulton—inventor of sea mines (called “torpedoes”)—a U.S. commander proposed using a brig as a mothership for 10 to 12 “torpedo” boats that would be employed against British ships. Fulton also proposed using 15 small schooners equipped with “torpedoes” to swarm a British ship-of-the-line. In the 1820s, the United States created a purpose-built small-boat force that proved far more effective than larger ships at hunting pirates in the West Indies. When the Spanish denied its request to base ashore, the U.S. naval force repurposed a ship as an expeditionary sea base to support small-boat operations.10
These historical examples show how a modern small-boat force could employ innovative weapons to blind high-end combatants, sea base on motherships to offset basing limitations ashore, and serve as the ideal foil to modern adversary small boats.
World War II patrol torpedo (PT) boats began to realize the full reconnaissance and counterreconnaissance potential of a modern small-boat force. Technological developments led to radically improved “potency-to-targetability” ratios—referring to the effectiveness of sensing and strike payloads compared with the ability of adversaries to find and strike small boats. The Navy equipped PT boats with radars early in the war, dramatically increasing their reconnaissance capability. For counterreconnaissance, they carried smokescreen generators and used machine guns at night to shoot out spotlights on the decks of Japanese combatants.11
PT boats actualized Fulton’s early 1800s vision of using small-boat teams armed with subsurface munitions to cripple larger combatants. However, the short range of U.S. torpedoes forced PT boats to sneak close to large combatants at night, which made them vulnerable to enemy fire. A long-range, precision antiship capability on small boats was technologically infeasible at the time, but by the late 1950s the Soviets had integrated missiles onto copied U.S. PT boats.12 PT boats also demonstrated their utility for undersea warfare by using depth charges to destroy two submarines and harass many others. General Douglas MacArthur was so impressed with PT boats that he requested the creation of a new branch of service consisting of specialized personnel and 200 PT boats to hunt Japanese ships up to 300 miles offshore from the Philippines.13
World War II aircraft carriers provide a template for modern small-boat carriers—the ultimate realization of Fulton’s mothership concept. Since small boats do not require runways, their host platforms could be small, diverse, and numerous, ranging from modified military sealift command vessels and repurposed amphibious ships, to offshore support vessels or barges. Rather than depending on a single vulnerable carrier, numerous support vessels could create a network of host platforms, with the most vulnerable remaining outside missile zones. During World War II, PT boats relied on a diverse sustainment network consisting of seaplane PT tenders in forward areas in which enemy air attack was likely, middle-weight tenders episodically entering forward areas, and large tenders remaining in rear areas.14
Unmanned aircraft such as the 3,000 nautical mile–range, runway-independent XQ-58A Valkyrie—which cost $2-3 million apiece—could operate from these platforms or expeditionary advanced bases in a symbiotic relationship with small boats.15 Small boats could help aircraft achieve local air superiority—which is critical for controlling littoral seas—by blinding surface-to-air-missile–equipped surface combatants.16 These aircraft could then help provide air cover to small boats in return.
Small boats could operate away from host platforms for long durations if fuel is available. There are myriad low-cost, survivable sustainment and temporary forward-basing possibilities, including air-dropped fuel buoys, commercial or military expeditionary harbors or vessels, autonomous or towed bulk fuel containers, semisubmersibles, and seaplanes. Small boats and their support networks would be more survivable, cost-effective, and persistent within contested littorals than aircraft carriers.
Technology Catches Up
Historically, small boats could not match the sensing abilities, destructiveness, or survivability of larger ships. This rendered President Thomas Jefferson’s much-maligned gunboat navy largely ineffective in the War of 1812 and led the Confederacy to halt construction of a steam gunboat fleet designed to swarm large Union ships.17 However, miniaturization, precision sensors, and autonomy now enable revolutionary small boat potency-to-targetability ratios.
Individual small boats could themselves become mini-carriers for unmanned swarms of long-range surface, subsurface, or airborne sensors or munitions that target vulnerable points on adversary combatants. Small boats can now carry long-range missiles, correcting the range deficiency of the otherwise exemplary PT boats. Stealthy, dispersed small-boat teams could generate coordinated missile volleys that overwhelm ship defenses, providing the virtue of mass without the vulnerability of a large platform.
Small-boat combined-arms teams also could employ nonkinetic weapons, rockets, machine guns, torpedoes, mines, antiair systems, or Marine Corps boarding teams for surprise close-in attacks, which will be the norm in cluttered littoral seas and against which modern combatants are ill-prepared to defend.18 When asked what he would add to his namesake ship class, Admiral Arleigh Burke, who experienced close-in littoral warfare firsthand, probably only half-jokingly said, “a brace of cutlasses in the wardroom.”19 The second-best weapon is often the most effective in maritime conflict.20
Status-Quo Inertia
Small-boat teams could constitute a stand-in scouting and screening force as revolutionary as World War II blitzkrieg forces and stealth aircraft were for restoring maneuver to their respective domains. Large Navy ships and Marine Corps ground-based missiles will provide fires from the peripheries of littoral seas, while a complementary Marine Corps small-boat maneuver force within those seas completes the overall “fire and maneuver” naval system. Small-boats enable the service to bring its maneuver-based warfighting philosophy to the maritime domain.
The Commandant’s initiative will face resistance. Early in the Civil War, the Union continued prioritizing traditional wooden ships over ironclads because naval officers found it dishonorable to hide behind iron, the highly revered British Navy was slow to adopt ironclads, and senior leaders could not conceptualize a new naval paradigm.21 Prior to World War II, despite extensive wargaming at the U.S. Naval War College, the Navy was slow to evolve from battleships to aircraft carriers as the centerpiece of fleet operations.22 There were only five U.S. carriers in the Pacific compared with Japan’s ten at the beginning of the war.23 These wargames were also heavily biased toward surface combatants and failed to foresee the critical offensive role submarines would play.24
Dramatic warfighting paradigm shifts and force structure overhauls are painful, but less so than military defeat. The Commandant is leading the Marine Corps through a figurative death and rebirth, recreating the service based on a new reconnaissance and counterreconnaissance role that will be critical to helping the joint force deter or win the next war. Small boats are key to realizing this vision.
1. Gen David H. Berger, USMC, “Preparing for the Future: Marine Corps Support to Joint Operations in Contested Littorals,” Military Review, April 2021.
2. CAPT Wayne P. Hughes Jr. and RADM Robert P. Girrier, USN (Ret.), Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations, 3rd ed. (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2018), 33.
3. Gen David H. Berger, USMC, “Force Design 2030: Annual Update,” April 2021.
4. Liu Zhen, “China’s New Killer Robot Ship Goes Through Its First Sea Trial,” South China Morning Post, 17 January 2020.
5. Kelsey D. Atherton, “See China’s Massive Robot Boat Swarm in Action,” C4ISRNet, 1 June 2018.
6. Shuchang Liu, Micro-Class Missile Assault Boat Swarm Tactics Effectiveness in the Taiwan Strait (Monterey, CA: Naval Postgraduate School, 2019).
7. Jack S. Levy, “The Offensive/Defensive Balance of Military Technology: A Theoretical and Historical Analysis,” International Studies Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1984): 230–34.
8. Julian S. Corbett, Fighting Instructions, 1530–1816 (London: The Navy Records Society, 1905), 10–13.
9. CDR Benjamin Armstrong, USN, Small Boats and Daring Men: Maritime Raiding, Irregular Warfare, and the Early American Navy (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), 57–68.
10. Armstrong, Small Boats and Daring Men, 106–13, 138–48.
11. Robert J. Bulkley, At Close Quarters: PT Boats in the United States Navy (San Bernardino, CA: Milesian Publishing, 2017), 40–45.
12. Andrew Hind, “The Cruise Missile Comes of Age,” Naval History 22, no. 5 (2008).
13. Bulkley, At Close Quarters, 38–39.
14. Bulkley, 67–69.
15. Frank Wolfe, “Fourth Flight Test of XQ-58A Valkyrie Expected Soon, AFRL Says,” Aviation Today, 10 January 2020.
16. Milan Vego, “On Littoral Warfare,” Naval War College Review 68, no. 2 (2015): 49.
17. Spencer C. Tucker, The Jeffersonian Gunboat Navy (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 22; James M. McPherson, War on the Waters: The Union & Confederate Navies, 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 105.
18. Hughes and Girrier, Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations, 161–62, 286–93.
19. CAPT Wayne P. Hughes Jr., USN, “Missile Chess: A Parable,” Proceedings 107, no. 7 (1981).
20. Hughes and Girrier, Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations, 181–182.
21. David Porter, The Naval History of the Civil War (New York: The Sherman Publishing Company, 1886), 354–66.
22. John M. Lillard, Playing War: Wargaming and U.S. Navy Preparations for WWII (Washington, DC: George Mason University, 2013), 179–80; Hughes and Girrier, Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations, 302–3; Thomas C. Hone, “Replacing Battleships with Aircraft Carriers in the Pacific in World War II,” Naval War College Review 66, no. 1 (2013): 56–64.
23. Clark Reynolds, The Fast Carriers: The Forging of an Air Navy (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2013), 8–22.
24. Lillard, Playing War, 180–82.