By Kris Osborn, President, Warrior
The historic and successful maritime warfare tactics employed in World War II Iwo-Jima amphibious attack campaign largely involved linear, condensed ship-to-shore mechanized armored attack. There were helicopters, bombardments from Navy surface-ship 5-inch guns and heavy ship-to-shore transport vessels supported by little airpower.
While the classic successes and historic sacrifices made by US Marines in Iwo Jima are forever immortalized in the collective psyche and soul of America, amphibious warfare tactics, strategies and technologies have now entered an entirely new universe in the world of sea-air-land warfare and maritime attack.
There are likely more strategic, tactical and technological reasons for this than can be articulated, as the modern threat environment presents a host of complex, multi-domain yet interwoven variables. Air, undersea and surface drones can now operate autonomously in groups across hundreds of miles to conduct reconnaissance, find weak points in an enemy coastline for attack, relay targeting specifics to air and surface attack weapons and detect minefields without placing soldiers at risk. Multi-domain transport layer connectivity using RF signals and various datalinks now network forces in unprecedented ways, enabling surface warships, aircraft and drones to share target specifics in near real-time across multiple domains. Large surface ships, such as big-deck amphibs are not only capable of releasing amphibious assault vehicles, Landing Craft Air Cushions and transporting weapons and Marines but also increasingly being used as “mother ships” performing command and control for growing numbers of unmanned system able to operate in closer proximity to enemy forces and weapons without placing sailors and Marines at risk.
Multi-National RIMPAC Showcases New Amphibious Warfare Tactics
A US Navy photo and essay showcases this kind of highly-networked, multi-national modern amphibious warfare from the now underway large-scale Rim of the Pacific maritime warfare exercise. “Twenty-nine nations, 40 surface ships, three submarines, 14 national land forces, more than 150 aircraft and 25,000 personnel are participating in RIMPAC in and around the Hawaiian Islands,” a Navy essay explained.
A Navy image from RIMPAC, the world’s largest international maritime exercise, shows multi-node, cross-domain amphibious warfare formations wherein a MH-60S Sea Hawk helicopter and Landing Craft Air Cushion operate from and in coordination with the USS Somerset, a San Antonio-class Amphibious Transport Dock.
Distributed Maritime Operations
In a broader conceptual sense, the advent of highly networking and increasingly autonomous maritime unmanned systems enables dispersed or disaggregated amphibious warfare attack formations without compromising lethality. Advanced networking and disaggregated unmanned systems connected to larger host ships armed with long-range precision weapons enables more survivable and precise ship-to-shore attack. More condensed targets are not only easier for enemies to see and target but also less able to attack across a wider sphere of enemy coastline.
Alongside unmanned systems, longer-range precision-weaponry and high-speed multi-domain networking, the arrival of sea-launched 5th-generation stealth aircraft has also been paradigm-changing for amphibious warfare tactics and formations. For instance, the arrival of the amphib-launched F-35B vertical take-off stealth fighter jet over the course of the last decade has introduced previously unprecedented amphibious warfare tactics which did not exist in the WWII era.
Kris Osborn is the President of Warrior Maven – Center for Military Modernization. Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a Highly Qualified Expert with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army—Acquisition, Logistics & Technology. Osborn has also worked as an anchor and on-air military specialist at national TV networks. He has appeared as a guest military expert on Fox News, MSNBC, The Military Channel, and The History Channel. He also has a Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University
