Threatened by hundreds of precision-guided munitions now in the hands of Russia and China, the Navy and Marine Corps continue to search for technologies and tactics that will allow them to operate close to the coastline without unsustainable losses.
My view is that to land a sizable force the Navy can either build a figurative battlestar capable of bulldozing through those hundreds of PGMs without crippling losses (in practice this means a fully networked force with shared defensive missiles and guns); or the Navy disaggregates amphibious assets into something like the armed transports carrying company-sized elements that I advocated in this Proceedings article and bring together the assets briefly for the landing from multiple directions in order to avoid giving a military with hundreds of PGMs at hand the time to find, track, and attack the amphibious assets before they scatter again.
And it is possible that large-scale amphibious operations against defended shores is simply no longer possible.
Maybe small-scale landings--perhaps transitory in nature to achieve a specific mission--are the only thing possible from the sea in the face of hundreds of PGMs coupled with a persistent surveillance network.
Maybe the Marines have to separate their expeditionary role from the amphibious role of assaulting defended shores that has defined the Marines since the World War II Pacific campaign.
Maybe the Navy has to think of the issue like the Army does when pondring how to move troops into friendly NATO Poland in a crisis in the face of enemy anti-aircraft and ground attack missile footprints.
Perhaps the Navy should think of its missions as moving a brigade-sized Marine element (and here is an old idea of mine about how to do that, which links to a Joint Force Quarterly article I wrote) into a friendly port under attack by an enemy and able to land without fully functioning port facilities to rapidly begin combat operations to win the first battle of a war.
Maybe the Marines need to focus on being the leading element of ground power projection to support allies in the INDOPACOM region that includes, as I argued for in Military Review, a large Army component that follows the Marines ashore. We've done it before, as I recounted in this Land Warfare Paper.
Whether by changing how the mission is achieved or changing what missions are possible, the Navy and Marine Corps have to adapt to the new threat.
