Is the Marine Corps Expeditionary Advance Base Operations (EABO) concept essentially replicating the Japanese experience from World War II American island hopping operations? Doesn't moving the Marine units or supplying them close to China assume friendly sea control that EABO is trying to achieve?
Yeah, Chinese long-range precision forces (LRPF) are a problem:
Col. Angell said that some LRPF lessons in Ukraine are that LRPFs offer speed, are more precise, and create a contested logistics battlefield environment. Now long-range precision fires are a threat across the entire battlefield, admitted Col. Angell, and enemy LRPFs can extend to the range of USMC (expeditionary) advanced bases.
The Marine Corps, responding to the need to support the Navy in a sea control campaign against China in the western Pacific, is creating Marine Littoral Regiments to disperse small units across islands to add to the anti-ship missile arsenal aimed at the PLA Navy.
I worry about logistically supporting these Stand-in Forces (SIF) contingents. After all, by definition the United States won't have sea control around them. That's why the Marines are being committed. To gain sea control.
I worry that analogies to American island-hopping operations in the Pacific are mistakenly assuming the Marines are following the American side when it is actually following the Japanese side.
After early war America frontal assaults on Japan's island perimeter, America eventually gained enough naval and air superiority to leap past Japanese defended bases.
America had the power to bypass many bases and pound the bases into passivity to let them wither on the vine as America advanced on Japan itself.
Marine EABOs with SIFs are skipping past the prerequisite of establishing naval and air superiority to deliberately put Marine forces within China's air and naval envelopes.
It isn't as if the Marines haven't thought about this issue (back to the initial article):
Granted, USMC SIFs are supposed to be small, light, fast, and mobile to increase their survivability, thus making them very hard to detect, and not depend on a noticeable logistics tail. That would factor into the enemy’s decision not to waste LRPFs on SIFs if SIFs’ locations are generally unknown, or SIFs are so small that an enemy would not waste an expensive missile to destroy them.
The units may be small enough to extract even in a contested environment. I admit that is a reason it might work.
Although the reasons the EABs can safely operate aren't accurate.
SIFs are mobile?
No. Once planted on an island they require outside assets to move them. Even a Marine with just his personal gear.
Hard to detect?
If they emit they can be detected. And if I may be so bold, I bet looking at a map will narrow down the range of possible locations considerably.
Too small to waste expensive missiles on?
Really? When the PLAN warships that the SIFs target are pretty darned expensive? Doesn't this argument essentially argue that the SIFs won't be effective in sinking Chinese warships? Because that's the only reason I wouldn't target them.
Still, the small size might be the ultimate enabler, meaning even intermittent and harder-to-detect logistics tails are good enough. As long as we don't count on barges with pretensions.
And if we also use aerial assets to get the SIFs out or resupply them. But the Marines are getting rid of air assets!
Operational maneuver within the island chains of the vast Western Pacific is dependent on surface lift and air mobility. The huge divestitures in Marine Corps aviation appear not to have considered lift requirements to support its stand-in forces, or the support required for more conventional operations against a peer or near-peer competitor.
And adding air defense assets to SIFs, which is the focus of that first article, isn't the answer. They just increase the logistics problem of supplying and extracting them by making them bigger and heavier--and less mobile.
I have worries.
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
