A V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor lands Marines in Afghanistan.
Wreaking Havoc — Within Limits
With current technology, “a few good men” can get ashore from more than 65 miles out. That’s enough Marines to rescue some US citizens, reinforce an embassy, or hit a key target and get out, but not enough to seize and hold ground. It would be less an amphibious assault and “more of a raid,” King told me.
Putting this first small force ashore doesn’t necessarily require blowing holes in the enemy’s layered defenses, just disrupting it at key times and places through stealth airstrikes or cyber attack. “[E.g.] for this eight-hour window, I can fly this route — I don’t need to keep it open all day, I need to create a window of opportunity to put that company ashore,” King said. “Once they’re ashore, they’ll wreak havoc.”
The force would probably a single company of a hundred-plus Marines slipping ashore from a boat or flying in on a V-22 aircraft. But while the Marines are developing “internally transportable vehicles” that can fit inside a V-22, most of the Marines in such a company-sized force would still have to walk, which limits both their maneuvers and their ability to carry heavy weapons.
“65 to 100 miles out….there’s no way we do an entire amphibious landing from that type of distance,” Brig. Gen. Mullen told the Sea-Air-Space conference when I raised the question. “It’s not possible, it’s not feasible, we can’t go do a build-up at an operationally relevant pace.”
Shutting aircraft or landing craft back and forth over a 65-plus-mile distance takes too long to get Marines ashore in numbers with vehicles, heavy weapons, and supplies. “Once you get closer, everything’s easier,” said Mullen.
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So the mission for the initial force is to start prying open the door — the traditional phrase “kick down the door” is too strong a term here — so the fleet can get closer and more Marines with more heavy equipment can land. A Marine company could seize a small island outpost where the enemy had emplaced radars and missiles, hunt down launchers that had eluded airstrikes or secure a modest landing site on the mainland: “not a 1,000-yard beach but a place where we can maneuver an LCAC [hovercraft] or a landing craft ashore,” said King.
This second wave could bring in more Marine riflemen, light armored transports like the proposed “Phase I” Amphibious Combat Vehicle (aka ACV 1.1) to let them maneuver faster, or an air-defense battery to protect the mini-beachhead. As the force built up, the scattered individual companies could link up into a battalion — which will require robust but portable new communications networks that can coordinate far-flung units with each and with the fleet 65 miles out in the face of enemy jamming and hacking.
Only once the first small force of Marines — along with airstrikes by F-35s and other planes, jammers like the EA-18G Growler, and cyber-attacks — have wreaked sufficient “havoc” on the enemy’s defenses can the fleet come in close enough to launch the main assault. Even so, said King, the ships will probably stay 30 to 50 nautical miles offshore rather than approach to the traditional five to 12 miles, which is within the range of too many shore-based weapons.