The joint fight to defeat the Chinese navy is taking shape. Will it take shape fully in all the domains?
U.S. Marines, soldiers and airmen for nearly two weeks polished a new approach to island warfare in the Western Pacific designed to deny surrounding seas to potential adversaries.
They deployed small groups of highly trained troops, fast-moving artillery and stealthy fighter jets to grab territory from which rockets could launch.
Exercise Castaway, which concludes Saturday on this island just off Okinawa’s northwest coast, demonstrates how a relatively small, widely dispersed force could seize and hold useful territory in the early stages of a conflict.
The tactic is called expeditionary advanced base operations. The potential adversary, left unsaid, is widely understood to be China.
I did discuss this dispersed operating in Proceedings while advocating for an armed transport to move those small units. I don't like the concept of the actual ship that is taking shape.
But something is missing:
While I'm not against the Army taking part in this concept to defeat the Chinese fleet, once America and our allies gain control of the seas, the tyranny of the shores will call and may require the Army to provide its core competency in land combat. Or at least be able to threaten it.
UPDATE: Hmmm:
“The Army will provide [joint] combatant commanders with land forces that are persistent, cost effective, and survivable,” the paper says. “Technologically connected and geographically dispersed Army forces deployed across the land – whether archipelagic [i.e. islands] or continental – present a key operational problem for adversary sensing and targeting. Put simply, land forces are hard to kill.”
Land forces can be isolated and left to wither on the vine, however. So take care not to island hop into positions the Chinese can cut off.
Remember, American forces in Bataan started out inside the Japanese A2/AD envelope.
