Amphibious warfare is dead, or is it?

By Gary Anderson
Real Clear Wire

Amphibious operations were declared dead 100 years ago after the failed triple entente landings at Gallipoli early in the first World War. The amphibious assaults at places like Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and Normandy during World War II disproved that theory but were soon left in the shadow of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The advent of nuclear weapons and "push button" warfare gave rise to conventional wisdom that defensive technology rendered amphibious assaults obsolete. Harry Truman went so far as to declare that the U.S. Marine Corps and its amphibious operations specialty had become obsolete. The Marine Corps, however, forced Truman to revise prevailing conventional wisdom after the Marine Corps’ historic landing at Inchon turned the tide of the Korean war.

The Battle of Inchon reinvigorated military amphibious warfare doctrine until just a few years ago.  This time it wasn’t the President of the United States, but rather the Commandant of the Marine Corps that sought to end the Marine Corps reign as the masters of amphibious warfare and ability to conduct large scale combat operations. By 2019, Marine commandant General David Berger concluded that, once again, defensive technology had made traditional amphibious operations obsolete.

General Berger instead conceived of a new mission for the Corps, that by employing defensive technology in the form of anti-ship missiles along China’s first island chain with small, dispersed Marine teams known as stand-in-forces (SIFs).

The SIF, according to Gen. Berger’s plan, would create a region of A2/AD (anti-access/area denial) to deny the Chinese navy (People’s Liberation Army Navy) access to their core national interest in the South China Sea and extending to Taiwan via Okinawa and the Ryukyu Island chain.

Gen. Berger’s vision was dependent upon his concept of Expeditionary Advanced Based Operations (EABO) which required the divestment of the Marine Corps’ tanks, heavy engineers, bridging equipment, and much of the wheeled artillery, previously staples in the Marine Corps doctrinal expeditionary operations.

The Marine Corps had to also divest in amphibious ships that comprise Marine Expeditionary Units (MEUs) and the Navy’s Amphibious Ready Group’s (ARGs) in favor of small logistics craft to supply Marines isolated on small islands and islets along the first island chain.

By 2024, Berger had done what Truman and generations of soldiers and battleship sailors had failed to do. The Navy-Marine Corps amphibious team were decimated to the small SIFs necessary to implement EABO.

Perhaps most perplexing to Marines, Marine historians, and those steeped in the traditional Marine Corps planning process was that innovations to the Marine Corps had been in the works as early as the 1980s, when senior Marine Corps leaders, notably commandant General Al Gray realized that the increasing accuracy of long-range missiles was making traditional linear amphibious assaults problematic.

Only about twenty percent of the world's shoreline has beaches such as Normandy, Okinawa, or even Inchon. Marine Corps leadership realized that within twenty years, adversaries like Russia, China, and Iran would have sensors and missiles able to mass against the large numbers of ships needed for traditional amphibious assaults. General Gray and like-minded thinkers wanted non-linear assaults launched from over-the-horizon (OTH), prompting Gray to direct the Marine Corps' combat development enterprise to analyze and assess the problem.

The Marine Corps combat development was making progress until the events of September 11th, 2001and the global war on terrorism (GWOT) stalled the Marine Corps plans to modernize the force.

However, preceding September 11th, 2001, the next two decades, OTH morphed into the concept of maneuver warfare called Operational Maneuver from the Sea (OMFTS) during the 1980s and 90s. It envisioned widely distributed amphibious ships launching many miles from the intended targets with advanced landing craft and vertical lift aircraft to attack in unexpected places like remote fishing villages, boat ramps, and small helicopter landing zones. To accomplish this, surface units would land in column rather than in line to create deep penetration before the adversary could mass fires and mount an effective defense. This would allow the assault force to open more traditional beaches and ports from the rear for large scale reinforcements and requisite logistics.

Well articulated wargames suggested the types of vehicles and aircraft that were needed to achieve this vision.   Prototypes that were developed and tested for this new maneuver concept included the Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft and the CH-53E heavy helicopter which were capable of mid-air refueling and could be launched hundreds of miles from intended targets. Also, advanced landing craft such as the Navy's Landing Craft Air Cushioned (LCAC) were tested for OMFTS feasibility and all passed apart from the advanced amphibious assault vehicle (AAAV). However, having commanded a Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force in several Western Pacific OMFTS experiments, I became convinced that the LCAC could get the job done by landing less sophisticated combat vehicles than the AAAV concept.

By the turn of the century, we were certain that OMFTS was the path forward, while still wrestling with technological challenges to overcome. Over-the-horizon communications was once such problem, and we hoped that very small reconnaissance robots would help us identify promising landing sites on the beach and routes to objectives inland. The technologies to do this were nascent, but progress was being made.

The progress halted in the aftermath of 9/11and in the two decades of GWOT, much of the Marine Corps’ leadership and planners working on OMFTS retired, creating a gap in the Marine Corps’ plans for a future force built around OMFTS.

It is puzzling as to General Berger concluded that OMFTS would not work. It was always envisioned as a 2020 concept and no global threat had arisen to challenge the concept of OMFTS.

Gen. Berger, as a young major, was the operations officer of the Experimental Marine Corps Marine Corps Air-Ground Task Force that was attempting to implement a new concept called the Command Post of the Future (CPOF). As the Chief of Staff of its parent unit, the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, CPOF, in my view was useless and failed in virtually every wargame and force-on-force field exercise in which it was tested. Berger, however, became a true believer in CPOF technology despite the lack of adequate field testing and evaluation.

This might explain why Gen. Berger viewed the Ukraine war as validation for his notion of technology and defense ruled the battlefield even though armor and maneuver warfare has proven the most decisive in terms of territorial gains in the war.

Except for anti-ship missiles, many of the technologies involved in Berger's EABO/SIF concept could be useful in OMFTS. Like SIF, the assault units making the initial penetration landings would be fairly small and use sensor-to-shooter technologies to enhance firepower. Unlike the SIF, these penetration units would be highly mobile and agile. They would be designed with the element of surprise and disrupt the enemy both physically and psychologically in an offensive posture rather than the passive and reactive concept envisioned in EABO/SIF.

Amphibious operations and OMFTS in the modern context must be revisited after the decades of work that went into Gen. Gray’s vision, rather than the few years that Gen. Berger took to fundamentally alter the Marine Corps most lethal capabilities.

Hypersonic weapons, all-seeing drones, and anti-tank systems have created new challenges on the modern battlefield but have not been decisive. As a maritime power, the United States needs to project power from the sea in a decisive manner rather than remain in a boxer's crouch and hope the enemy gets tired.

Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps Colonel. He served as a Special Advisor to the Deputy Secretary of Defense and is the author of Beyond Mahan: Proposal for U.S Naval Strategy in the 21st Century.