MARINE CORPS BASE QUANTICO, Va.–For the past 16 years, Marines have been in almost constant combat somewhere in the world, but none of them had to “fight to get to the fight” as they likely will in the next war, according to Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Robert Neller.
“We just went,” Neller said Sept. 20 during a speech at the Modern Day Marine expo here. “When you think about the history of our nation, we haven’t had to fight to get to the fight since World War II. We got on a plane. We got on a ship. We sailed. We arrived. The port was secure. The airfield was reasonably secure. We got our stuff, organized our force … and crossed into the area where we would conduct the operation.”
Most potential U.S. adversaries have precision guided munitions that can strike amphibious ships far out at sea. Because the Marine Corps does not have vehicles that can wade ashore from those ranges, it and the Navy will have to fight their way in, Neller said.
“If the enemy has the capability to shoot my large ship or my destroyer or my carrier from a couple-hundred nautical miles away … I’ve got to do something about it,” Neller said. That’s why it’s important for all the ships to have some sort of capability to do strike or some way to suppress that capability.”
How that will be done, through a renewed intimate partnership between sea services, is laid out in the Marine Corps new operating concept called “Littoral Operations in a Contested Environment,” or LOCE.
“We haven’t faced an adversary who has long-range precision capability for many years,” Neller said. “When you look at what is out there and the four primary adversaries … all of them possess long-range precision capability. They all possess capabilities to deny access.”
After 16 years of ground combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, most Marines do not have sufficient training to operate aboard ships. Many Marines have never performed tasks as easy as finding the mess hall or a particular birthing compartment, Neller said to laughs.
In context of the last 16 years of war, LOCE presents a set of challenges the Marine Corps is ill-suited to meet, he said. Marines “have done a great job” fighting counterinsurgency conflicts but the service’s sea legs have atrophied as it focused on training specifically to fight a relatively unsophisticated enemy in permissive environments.
“We’ve been fighting and sustaining a land campaign ashore. We’ve had Marines on ships, we’ve deployed and some of those Marines have come off ship, but our focus like that of the Army and Special Operations Command … has been Iraq and Afghanistan.”
When and how to participate in defending a ship against attack is something the service as a whole is having to learn anew. Neller said Marines need to provide their own strike capability from the ship, which could include adding the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) to a ship’s own arsenal. Lockheed Martin [LMT] produces HIMARS.
“When we get to the fight or when we get to where we need to be part of that fight … we have to figure out how we’re going to project our power ashore from the littorals, in that area where air and land and sea meet,” Neller said.
“The amphib ship, for the Marine Corps, is the critical capability in this whole thing. We have to have a ship or a platform that gets us across the ocean to these fights. … We’ve got to increase our fighting capabilities across this type of environment,” he added.
Neller listed a number of capabilities the Marine Corps needs to operate successfully in contested near-shore waters. They include more unmanned systems in the air, on the ground, on the surface of the sea and underwater.
More importantly, the service needs new and different ways to get Marines and large amounts of heavy equipment ashore. The Marine Corps has been after a fast, armored ship-to-shore tracked vehicle that can fight on land for years to no avail. After several high-profile failed efforts, the service has tempered its appetite for an exquisite amphibious combat vehicle (ACV) and split its requirements into different generations of an amphibious armored personnel carrier/fighting vehicle. It is in the midst of testing two wheeled variants of the ACV 1.1 and has plans for increasingly more-capable 1.2 and 2.0 versions.
“Part of the shortfall we have right now is connectors that allow us to move at sea from ships and get high volumes of stuff ashore,” he said.