Compass Points - Amphib Mistake
Too many or too few?
Compass Points - Amphib Mistake
Too many or too few?
January 26, 2024
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Megan Eckstein, a reporter for the Defense News has been covering the Marine Corps for many years. She must be wondering about the Marine Corps -- particularly when it comes to amphibious ships.
Megan Eckstein's most recent article, "Ship shortage forces Marines to consider alternate deployments."
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WASHINGTON — The U.S. Marine Corps is looking more closely at how to leverage alternate ships to keep its forces at sea, amid an amphibious ship shortage a top Marine called the “single biggest existential threat” to the service.
-- Megan Eckstein, Defense News 2024
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In the article, she goes on to quote Lt. Gen. Karsten Heckl,
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In the Middle East, Heckl noted, the Bataan Amphibious Ready Group with the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit remains on station off Israel. But it’s been deployed since July and eventually must come home. When it does, there is no ready ARG on the East Coast to replace it.
-- Megan Eckstein, Defense News 2024
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But Megan Eckstein must think it is strange the Marine Corps is so worried about the lack of amphibious ships today when, as she reported back then, the new Commandant in 2019 announced the Marine Corps would accept fewer amphibious ships!
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. . . Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. David Berger backed away from the two-MEB requirement in his initial Commandant’s Planning Guidance after he took command in July 2019. He noted that “we will no longer use a ‘2.0 MEB requirement’ as the foundation for our arguments regarding amphibious shipbuilding, to determine the requisite capacity of vehicles or other capabilities, or as pertains to the Maritime Prepositioning Force. We will no longer reference the 38-ship requirement memo from 2009, or the 2016 Force Structure Assessment, as the basis for our arguments and force structure justifications. … The global options for amphibs include many more options than simply LHAs, LPDs, and LSDs.” . . .
-- Megan Eckstein, Defense News 2021
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The Navy must have been astounded back in 2019 when the Marine Corps said it would accept fewer than the long-standing requirement of 38 amphibious ships. Just the year before, the Marine Commandant General Neller had testified before Congress that the Marine Corps needed at least 38 amphibious ships and to meet worldwide demand actually needed "upwards of 50."
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38 L-Class Amphibious warships are required to meet a 2.0 MEB Joint Forcible Entry requirement, and upwards of 50 would be needed to meet CCDR demand.
-- General Neller, Posture Statement, 7 March 2018 (p. 5)
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The Marine Corps cannot be the Nation's crisis response force if Marines cannot get to the crisis.
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It is good the Marine Corps is waking up to the critical shortage of amphibious ships.
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It is good the Marine Corps is at last experimenting with ships that are currently available including the expeditionary sea base and the expeditionary fast transport.
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The Marine Corps also needs to put new emphasis on rebuilding the depleted maritime pre-positioning ships. With crucial supplies and equipment on maritime pre-positioning ships around the globe, Marines can be flown in and make immediate use of the pre-positioned supplies and equipment.
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It is long past time for the Marine Corps to reject the amphib mistake of 2019. The Marine Corps has distracted itself for the last several years with an unfortunate experiment with Marine missile units. It is time for the Marine Corps to regain its focus on crisis response. The Marine Corps needs to stop saying it will accept fewer ships and start advocating for more. With the help of the entire Marine community and Congress, soon Megan Eckstein will be able to report the Marine Corps is focusing once again on worldwide crisis response and is upgrading and enhancing the Marine MAGTF.
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Defense News (defensenews.com) 01/25/2024
Ship shortage forces Marines to consider alternate deployments
By Megan Eckstein
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Defense News (defensenews.com) 06/21/2021
Marines explain vision for fewer traditional amphibious warships
By Megan Eckstein
The issue of too few Amphibs is as old as the hills. Our last Division size Amphib exercise was Operation Steel Pike in 1965. IMPO, nothing short of general war, or divine intervention, will reverse the damage we have sustained by this neglect: one from the Navy, and our own recent self inflicted wounds. So, a question may be: what is the Corps to do until our listing ship can be repaired? I offer a few thoughts that we can expand upon, to wit: 1. Continue with vigorous PME - we must remain smart & educated. 2. Continue to train well in the basics. 3. Remember our constituents in the public, especially organizations such as the American Legion & the VFW - those people vote, & are powerful. 4. Continue discussions such as we are having on CP … this mode of communication can have enormous intellectual freshness to it. 5. Listen to each other … the late MajGen Jim Day once told me “all of us are smarter than any of us” … we can beat our current situation. 6. In placing senior general officers, let’s make sure we’re getting the right folks, with the right backgrounds, into the right positions. Don’t give up the ship! Semper Fi!
I want to address the amphibious lift capability—or the gap in that capability. I apologize for the length of this, but my perspective is one that may be different from that of many Marines.
I served a two-year tour as a Combat Cargo Officer (CCO) with the amphibious Navy in 1974-76. The first year I was on the USS Francis Marion, LPA-249, the last of the troop transport ships, an old Liberty ship from WWII. It was put into the Navy’s reserve fleet, and I transferred at the end of year one to the USS Shreveport, LPD-12. I have a different perspective on the amphibious service with those two different platforms. For those unfamiliar with the CCO billet, at that time, each amphibious ship (amphib) had a Marine officer, usually a 1stLt, and a Staff NCO as part of ship’s company. We were assigned to the ship—our duty station for two years. We coordinated the Marine load plan, embarkation, and offload during exercises. We had to know the Marine and Navy sides of the amphibious business. It was a requiring an 0430 Embarkation MOS, my secondary; my primary was 0302, Infantry.
In those two years I saw the old LCVP’s and LCM’s, the vehicles we called Amtracs, and three types of helicopters carrying Marines, vehicles, ammunition and supplies. When you are landing troops, the amphibs are either not underway or at very slow speed because we were launching, loading and/or recovering the water-borne vehicles. Today these may be hovercraft, or LCU’s or today’s assault amphibious vehicles. Think of pictures of South Pacific invasion fleets and you see vast numbers of ships offshore. Every vessel is an easy target full of hundreds of sailors and Marines.
We all know an amphibious operation requires more ships than the Navy and Marines have available today. And the operations—even just the exercises I saw--take incredible coordination by expert, dedicated professional servicemembers totally focused on the mission and in many cases willing to risk it all for success. And it takes luck being on our side. Does that describe today’s Navy? How many commanders have been relieved for “…lack of confidence in the ability to lead”? I worry about the service men and women paying more attention to their phones and devices than to the radar, sonar, radios, and other early warning systems they are assigned to monitor. It was difficult to keep them attentive even in the days before phones and the internet. Now it must be nearly impossible.
Even if Congress decided tomorrow to build ships, it would take years to be operational. And I am not confident in the quality of personnel being recruited, trained and put into positions of responsibility both in the Marine Corps and the Navy. It gives me heartburn to write that—about the Marines.
Our adversaries are watching and reading every day, learning the weaknesses of our capabilities. We can count on them to be prepared to take full advantage of those weaknesses. Not enough ships is a weakness. Poor leadership is a weakness. Add to that the lack of self-discipline in the enlisted ranks caused by attention to social media. I do not intend to say this applies to the entire enlisted men and women, but enough of them to create weak links in kay jobs at critical times. The answers—the solutions are obvious. Are we willing to do what we have to do?