Novel Concepts for Amphibious Force Resupply

The United States Navy has made a substantial investment in forces optimized for amphibious assault. According to the latest Congressional Research Service Report, Navy Force Structure and Shipbuilding Plans: Background and Issues for Congress,US Navy-Marine Corps amphibious assault forces have remained relatively robust as the size of the US Navy has shrunk from 594 ships in 1987 to 272 ships today. And as the aforementioned Congressional Research Service report explains, US Navy
expeditionary strike groups, built around a large deck amphibious ship, make up a substantial percentage of the US Navy’s current fleet – and the blueprint for the future fleet the Navy is building maintains and even increases that percentage of amphibious ships.

In the almost two decades since the 9/11 attacks, the US Marine Corps has been heavily engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan and has not routinely embarked in the US Navy’s amphibious ships. Today, the Marines are back to sea and are working with their navy partners to ensure that the country’s amphibious assault forces (more appropriately, expeditionary assault forces) remain important to the US Navy and Marine Corps operational calculus.

The reason for the prominence of these expeditionary assault forces is clear. These naval expeditionary formations—built around a large-deck amphibious assault ship, an amphibious transport dock, and a dock landing ship—have been the ones used extensively for a wide array of missions short of war: from anti-piracy patrols, to personnel evacuation, to humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, to other missions. And where tensions lead to hostilities, these forces are often the only ones able to give the US military a forcible entry option.

In his keynote remarks at National Defense Industrial Association Expeditionary Warfare Conference, in Annapolis Maryland in October 2018, Lieutenant General David Berger, Commander of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command (and nominee to be the next Commandant of the US Marine Corps), put it this way: “We need to be prepared for large-scale amphibious operations. We might do it differently in the future, but we can’t ignore it.

This emphasis on expeditionary operations is not limited to the US military. A recent article in US Naval Institute News, “New High-End Amphibious Warfare Tactics Tested at BALTOPS 2019,” noted that new tactics evolved through the NATO Amphibious Leaders Expeditionary Symposium (NALES) series were the primary focus of this multinational exercise, which included participation by eighteen nations, dozens of ships and over 8,600 personnel. As an article in Defense News, “Eighteen-nation BALTOPS exercise wraps up in Germany,” described it: Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as NATO partner nations Finland and Sweden, all participated in BALTOPS 2019, one of the largest exercises in Northern Europe. Of particular interest to readers of RUSI Defence, BALTOPS 2019 was one of the first major training opportunities for the British-led Joint Expeditionary Force, which included 3,000 personnel from several NATO and partner countries.

It is clear that many nations – NATO and partner nations in particular – intend to continue to place an emphasis on expeditionary operations. And within NATO, the United States is the nation with the most amphibious ships, as well as Navy and Marine Corps personnel, dedicated to this mission. Therefore, many nations take a keen interest in what the U.S. military is doing as it evolves its expeditionary forces to meet the threats of the 21st Century.

Because of their long hiatus from the US Navy’s amphibious assault ships, the US Marine Corps has been especially proactive in organising many amphibious exercises, experiments and demonstrations to investigate emerging technologies (often commercial, off-the-shelf technologies) to enable expeditionary strike formations to prevail in the face of a determined adversary possessing robust A2/AD capabilities.

Many of these new technologies have served to support high-end warfighting tasks and deal with many of the adversary A2/AD capabilities that Kaushal and Watling’s January 2019 article ‘Amphibious Assault is Over’ discussed in detail. However, there are other technologies that may be useful in dealing with some of the more mundane – but necessary – aspects of supporting troops on a hostile beachhead.

One recent US Navy–Marine Corps exercise, Joint Exercise Valiant Shield 2018, focused on using offthe-shelf technology to perform the logistics function, something of critical importance to Marine Corps warfighters. Of those technologies, one that showed great promise was using small unmanned surface vehicles to deliver supplies to Marines on the beach.

Overseen by Commander Marine Forces Pacific (MARFORPAC), the exercise looked to support Marines on the beachhead during the juncture of an amphibious assault where troops must move off the beach and inland. As. Kaushal and Watling highlighted in their article, ‘the capacity of Marines to push inland must depend on the security of their logistical support’. While their article focused specifically on the US Marine Corps, the importance of logistical support is critical to any military conducting amphibious operations. 

As just one indication of the importance of logistics to any amphibious operation, during the February 2019 US Naval Institute/Armed Forces Communications and Electronic Association ’West’ Symposium, Brigadier Arthur Pasagian, USMC, Commander, Marine Corps Systems Command, noted, “Logistics is a key enabler for all we do.” Later during the West Symposium, Brigadier General Christian Wortman USMC, Commanding Officer Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, connected this need for logistics support to unmanned vehicles when he noted “We need long-range, autonomous capabilities to deliver our logistics.”