The exercise, which began March 12 off Southern California, is the result of combining the logistics exercise Pacific Horizon and amphibious exercise Dawn Blitz “to try to start getting at this complicated concept,” Vice Adm. John Alexander, the U.S. 3rd Fleet commander in San Diego, said of the Marine Corps’ Littoral Operations in a Contested Environment (LOCE) concept that involves moving small groups of Marines around on shore or between islands. “It’s a different way of doing business.”
I discussed a method of deploying Marines for those dispersed operations in this article (sorry, membership required to read it; but libraries may have paper copies).
Basically I called for experimenting with armed fast transports using decommissioned Perry frigates as the building block along the lines of the converted destroyers used heavily as transports (APD) in the Pacific in World War II.
Based on that experimentation the Navy could then try purpose-built armed transports--or discard the concept, of course.
