New mission for Corps relies on amphibs

New mission for Corps relies on amphibs

New deployment strategy stresses Navy-Marine link

By Andrew Scutro - Staff writer

Posted : Friday Feb 8, 2008 18:24:45 EST

The Marines want to get back to their expeditionary roots — and they’ll be taking amphib sailors with them.

According to a recently approved operational concept, the Marine Corps plans to keep nine infantry battalions forward-deployed at all times, with the remaining 18 battalions in training.

For the Marines, it means new advisory missions on top of existing requirements. And for sailors, it will mean a steady reliance on the amphibious fleet.

In recent years, with Marines committed to long-term presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Navy’s gator force has at times deployed without Marines on unique missions, such as chasing pirates off Africa or serving as a floating health clinic in Asia.

But that may soon be adjusted under the new operational concept known informally as “The Long War brief,” which was signed sometime in late January or early February by Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Conway.

In comments to reporters Feb. 1 in Washington, D.C., Conway said long-term commitments ashore have dulled the Corps’ sharp seagoing tradition.

“We now have a generation of men and women who do not have a complete understanding of what ‘expeditionary’ is,” Conway said. “That people now believe that three square meals a day courtesy of KBR and a cot is expeditionary, that is just not true in most of the environments where we would expect to find ourselves in the early going of a contingency.”

It’s back to the blue/green team.

Based on a force of 27 active-duty infantry battalions, the new “operational employment concept” puts nine infantry battalions forward at all times: three with Marine expeditionary units, three forward-deployed on Guam and Okinawa, Japan, and three with newly conceived, region-specific foreign military training missions, known as a “security cooperation Marine air-ground task forces.”

The SC MAGTF would provide security assistance and conduct civil-military operations with the intent of helping cooperative but less-developed nations.

“Among these changed practices is the implementation of a regional focus for units that source this new capability [sC MAGTF],” according to a Conway-signed forward to the document. “Through this initiative, changes to manpower policies will enable the development of linguistically adept, culturally aware units for training foreign military forces.”

As a more detailed vision of the “soft power” elements in the new Maritime Strategy, released in October, the SC MAGTF is similar in spirit to Navy’s global fleet station — a ship or group of ships deployed to a specific region with embarked local-language speakers and training cadres.

The most recent GFS set sail in mid-October, when the Little Creek, Va.-based dock landing ship Fort McHenry steamed for the west coast of Africa to serve as a floating partnership station, building relations with the militaries and civilians in the nations of the strategically important Gulf of Guinea. It was joined recently by the high-speed vessel Swift.

According to the 52-page “Long War” document, “mission success” for continually forward-deployed Marines will rely on available transport via naval forces.

Those new sorts of missions are similar to a new Marine/Navy configuration proposed by Frank Hoffman, a former Marine officer and currently a national security analyst. In an article for the May 2007 issue of Marine Corps Gazette, titled “Rethinking Naval Forward Presence,” Hoffman called for a new mix of forces in the post-Sept. 11 world order.

“Everything should be back on the table,” he said.

In the Gazette article, Hoffman proposes modifying the expeditionary strike group and embarking a scaled-down MEU aboard the amphibs for forward presence, training and crisis response — possibly without artillery or tracked vehicles, to free up cargo space in the ships — while keeping surface combatants and/or submarines in the U.S., but “available ... if needed.”

He terms the new force a “Maritime Security Group.”

“I just don’t see the need to employ these ships on a day-to-day basis in the way the Navy is doing,” he said in an interview. “The Navy is not suffering with the same operational tempo so they are spitting out the same deployment rotations.”

While the new Marine concept may provide greater definition in similar future scenarios, the recent past has shown creative uses for “green-free” amphibs.

In May, the amphibious assault ship Peleliu steamed from San Diego on Pacific Partnership, a floating four-month humanitarian assistance/civil affairs mission throughout Southeast Asia.

Before being decommissioned in 2007, the amphibious assault ship Saipan deployed with only an embarked Navy helicopter detachment in August 2006 as an “expeditionary action group.”

Bob Work, a former Marine officer and now senior defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the new operational concept will mean plenty of work for the amphibious fleet.

“The Marines are thinking really hard about getting back into the naval expeditionary mind-set. Right now they just don’t have a lot of slack to do it,” he said. “The amphibs are not going away.”

For Norman Polmar, longtime naval analyst and author, the very versatile amphibious ships should be deployed, but with a good purpose. He takes issue with the Peleliu deployment last year on a medical mission, saying that’s the job of the hospital ships such as Comfort and Mercy, not a “first-line warship.”

Further, swift and deadly surface combatants such as cruisers, destroyers and frigates are ideal for catch-all maritime security operations, he said. “But a 40,000-ton LHD with a crew of 1,000 sailors doesn’t do maritime surveillance and patrol.”

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