Amphibious Warfare is not Dead, Its Only Sleeping

Eighty years ago, U.S. Marines stormed ashore at Iwo Jima a battle that became immortalized with a statue in Arlington Cemetery. Seventy-Five years ago, they took Inchon in the last great amphibious operation of modern times. Some would-be strategists think it will be the last one in history. I say Not so fast.

Likewise, despite firing scores of ant-ship missiles at U.S. combatant vessels by the Houthis, not one has been seriously damaged or sunk in the waters bordering Yemen. These are the kind of subsonic missiles Berger and his successor Eric Smith bought to "modernize" the Marine Corps at the expense of ground combat power that marines will need in any long-term war with a modern foe such as China.

Serious military planners in China and the United States -Berger and Smith are not among them- are thinking in terms of hypersonic weapons. The Chinese planners hope to keep the U.S. and its allies at arm’s length as they pursue their goals in the South China sea using their reconnaissance-strike (R-S) complex to threaten the American Navy in any future conflict. Conversely, the Navy and Air Force plan on using hypersonic weapons to degrade that R-S system to a point where it is possible to project U.S. combat power ashore to retake territory or reinforce threatened allies. That will almost certainly require amphibious operations. That power projection will likely come from over the horizon in small, but powerful distributed attack packages. In the last years of the last century, the Marine Corps was working on an operational concept to do just that. It was called Operational Maneuver From the Sea (OMFTS). In his panic over the missile threat Berger abandoned that for a very questionable concept called Force design that is rapidly showing its combat impotency with obsolete equipment while other services pursue real modernization.

The pieces needed to correct the mistakes of the past six years and rebuild an amphibious warfare capability through OMFTS exist, but the current leadership of the Marine Corps has shown itself to be incapable of seeing the world as it is and reversing course before a shooting war shows it the error of its ways. It will take a combination of congressional and civilian leadership, but that cannot be done if we continue to allow people like Berger and Smith continue to emasculate our finest warriors.

Amphibious warfare is not dead; it has been asleep. It is time to wake it up.

Gary Anderson retired as Chief of Staff of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab. He served as a Special Advisor to the Deputy Secretary of Defense.