The Marine Corps is exploring alternative means of creating forward presence as it deals with a shortfall in amphibious shipping, but service leadership is wary of relying on alternative platforms to move Marines and their goods around the globe.
Speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Thursday about a recent CSIS report, Amphibious Shipping Shortfalls: Risks and Opportunities to Bridge the Gap, Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. John Paxton made clear that “alternative platforms are just that–they are alternative platforms.” He said they bring some opportunity to move people and supplies around when amphibious ships and connectors are not available, but he warned that most are not combat-survivable, many are restricted to operations in low sea states, and they all only meet bits and pieces of the Marines’ very specific lift needs.
The Marine Corps is dealing with the shipping shortfall by creating land-based versions of the Marine Expeditionary Unit–called Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Forces–including a new one that deployed to U.S. Central Command earlier in the week (Defense Daily, Sept. 30). But both Paxton and the CSIS report, written by Maren Leed, say the land-based units are not a substitute for ship-based MEUs.
The Marine Corps and Navy are also revamping maintenance schedules to try to create more operational availability of the ships already in the fleet. The report analyzes this effort, the SP MAGTFs, and other options such as buying more ships or altering what people and gear the Marines deploy with to reduce the shipping requirement. The report concludes that “the most promising near-term option to partially address amphibious shipping shortfalls, therefore, is to find alternative ways to deploy Marines. None of the available platforms, however, provide the same level of capability in each of the three roles amphibious ships play: transport, sea base, and weapons system.”
Leed’s report goes on to judge a range of Navy ships based on five criteria–survivability, breadth of functions, projection capacity, responsiveness and persistence–to determine what risk would be involved in relying on them for Marine Corps operations.
Paxton, however, said that projection capacity was a higher priority for the Marine Corps than it was for CSIS, and that it took on a more specific definition. For Marines, there are “five fingerprints of lift, and these are steady state constant requirements of the Navy-Marine team. And these are people; small craft, so well deck spots; aircraft, flight deck spots; square feet for vehicles in stow; and cubic feet for supply.” A ship that does not have all five fingerprints of lift would not be an acceptable alternative to the Marines, he said, even if they met the other criteria outlined in the CSIS report.
As the Marine Corps plans its next classes of amphibious ships–both the LX(R) to replace the LSD dock landing ships and the LHA-8 with a reintroduced well deck–Paxton stressed that each class would have its own balance of the five fingerprints, but that all five absolutely had to be there. Earlier this year, Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work said that if budgets continue to go down, the Navy and Marine Corps may need to pursue other, less expensive alternatives to paying for the redesign of the amphibious assault ship to include a well deck, which was taken out in LHA-6 and 7 (Defense Daily, Aug. 20). Asked about those comments, Paxton said, “we’re not interested in a single-capability ship–a ship with only a flight deck, or if we had a ship with only a well deck. We’re interested in all five fingerprints of lift. We’re interested in ships that have a flight deck and a well deck.”
Same goes for alternative platforms the Marine Corps may use. Though it may be exciting to think about putting Marines on a supply ship, or a Joint High Speed Vessel, or a Littoral Combat Ship, Paxton said that any alternative platform would have to adequately meet all five lift requirements, plus have the ability for integrated command and control with the Navy and Marine Corps, plus be hardened for a combat zone, and so on.
Asked about the JHSV, for example, Paxton said that “it is, I think, a splendid platform for building partnership capacity, for theater security cooperation, for humanitarian assistance/disaster response. It really doesn’t equate. I don’t see how you could legitimately put it into an operations plan for major theater operations unless you’re doing long-term later follow-on operations that have nothing to do with the assault echelon or the early stages.” He also noted that it has plenty of lift for people and supplies, but lacks the other three lift requirements.
As for a long-term solution, buying more amphibious ships is the only path the Marines want to take. Paxton said he understands that the Navy’s shipbuilding plan has more needs than there is money to pay for right now, but he noted that the Marine Corps had always had a people-focused budget and the Navy had a platform-focused budget and they’d both have to figure out a way forward.
An individual Marine “is our most lethal weapon system, and we’re going to continue to seek out, recruit, train, retain high quality individuals,” he said. “But we’re then going to go back to the Navy, to our shipmates, to ask them to make a comparable investment in a piece of that weapon system that helps the Marine do his mission, which for us is the amphibious shipping.”