12 Sep 2018, 02:12
Basic instincts: Resetting the core operational mindset of the USMC
11 Sep 2018 Michael Fabey
"Facing mounting coastal threats, the US Marine Corps is developing new methods and mindsets to face its foes and remain relevant, as Michael Fabey reports: After years of fighting on land in Iraq, the US Marine Corps (USMC) has returned to its naval roots only to find its traditional method of conducting amphibious warfare being challenged in a way modern marines have never before faced. Squaring off against the kind of peer competition that the service has not experienced since the Cold War, the USMC is formulating a new way of conducting combat operations in the littorals while still maintaining its traditional operational skillset.
One of the most promising amphibious warfare concepts being explored and developed by the USMC involves expeditionary advance bases (EABs). The concept, new to the US marines, turns traditional marine basing on its head. Instead of relying on the full-frontal assault and seizure that can be mounted by a traditional amphibious readiness group (ARG) with fixed bases, under the EAB concept small, mobile operations bases would be established inside the attack arc of an adversary.
An EAB would enable marines to harass adversaries, keep their ambitions in check, and exert a special kind of sea-land control – or at least prevent a foe from exerting its own. This ‘inside force’ is designed to persist forward within range of adversary long-range fires; accept greater risk than the traditional force might; be more passively defended; take advantage of partner proximity; provide intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) for the ARG ‘outside force’;
be inherently resilient; invert cost imposition; buy time for other operations; and create enemy uncertainty.
Additionally, EABs would get critical marine infrastructure and vulnerable capabilities ‘off the X’, as the USMC would say, which simply means creating a smaller, more mobile force that is much harder for enemy forces to target than a traditional base. Marines could employ trucks, barges, ferries, and other non-traditional vehicles to provide the necessary mobility as well as better mission support continuity. An EAB is designed to provide the essential functions of a traditional base but with a less vulnerable, more resilient support infrastructure.
“It’s a myth that when we deploy with an intact MAGTF [Marine Air-Ground Task Force] we put afloat and put ashore,” USMC Major General David Coffman, US Navy (USN) Director of Expeditionary Warfare, told Jane’s. Marines, he warned, can no longer count on using a full amphibious assault to establish a major secure base of operations in relatively virgin territory. “There is no immature theatre,” Maj Gen Coffman said. “Somebody’s already there.” In the case of an EAB, where the base is deep within what is essentially enemy territory, that somebody is an adversary or a peer competitor, so the goal of a theatre-located EAB is to wrest sea control from that foe....
...The USMC is now honing this operational concept. Marines are practising EAB operations during exercises and while conducting routine patrols, as one USMC officer told Jane’s. Soon, the corps would like to employ EABs throughout areas of contention and competition, so that wherever potential foes might try to exert power there could be an EAB keeping adversarial aggression in check....
Source: http://www.janes.com/images/assets/892/ ... e_USMC.pdf (0.4Mb)
A4G Skyhawk: www.faaaa.asn.au/spazsinbad-a4g/ & www.youtube.com/channel/UCwqC_s6gcCVvG7NOge3qfAQ/videos?view_as=subscriber
Thanks for that refreshing quote with URL 'popcorn'. 
