The military services agree on the need for MDO to mesh all the services in a joint campaign that expands what AirLand Battle did for joint Army-Air Force operations. And the services even agree on what the first priority should be:
They agree that they must conduct operations in all domains, land, sea, air, space and cyber. They even are in general agreement on the initial objective for the Joint Force in such a conflict. This is to penetrate and disintegrate an adversary's layered and networked arrays of anti-access and area-denial (A2/AD) systems by conducting rapid and coordinated attacks across all domains.
This applies to China's A2/AD forces that will make it harder for America to support our allies close to China and it applies to Russian efforts that could hinder NATO reinforcement of eastern NATO countries. It would also apply to smaller states like Iran which may want to use such weapons to deny the world use of the Strait of Hormuz.
So sure, getting Army and Marine help (and Coast Guard help to a lesser extent) to allow the Navy and Air Force to wrest sea and air control of the western Pacific is absolutely a good thing to do. Without that access to the Asia littorals, prosecuting a war successfully is difficult (we really don't want our allies on the wrong side of a blockade line, do we?)
But especially in the Indo-Pacific, we have to expand the concept of MDO beyond the campaign to operate close to China.
Once we have won that phase of the war, the Army, Marines, and Air Force have to be more than naval auxiliaries helping that service win control of the coastal waters off of China. How will MDO doctrine move beyond the seas and its air space to actually win a war against China that may need to include operations on the Asian mainland by sizable American ground forces (as I wrote here in Military Review)?
Remember, the objective isn't to defeat the Chinese military off the coast of China so our Navy can sail safely off their coasts. Presumably we want to do something with that hard-won ability to win and end the war before nuclear escalation rears its ugly head. What will that be?
