US Marines Revamp Strategy to Counter China

After nearly 20 years of accumulating dust on the streets of Fallujah and Camp Bastion, the

U.S. Marines are once more preparing to urge their boots wet.

Following the publication of the Trump administration’s 2018 National Defense strategy, the U.S.

military has been revamping its strategies to counter Russia and China, in an era of what analysts

call renewed “great power competition.”

within the Pacific, China’s layers of long-range precision missiles designed to carry the U.S. Navy and its jets at arm’s length have left strategists with a headache.

The concerns aren’t simply about all-out warfare, but that this so-called “anti-access bubble”

hampers the support of regional allies—and potentially threatens to push the us out

of now-vulnerable permanent positions like deep-water ports.

The Marines have now come up with an idea to show the tables on the Chinese military.

United States Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger published (pdf) a serious shift in strategy in July, which might see the Marines return to their roots as an expeditionary force that supports the Navy, with an almost exclusive specialise in countering China within the Pacific.

“The current force isn't organized, trained, or equipped to support the Naval force—operating

in contested maritime spaces, facilitating sea control, or executing distributed maritime

operations,” Berger wrote. “There is not any piece of kit or major defense acquisition

program that defines us.”

Berger’s plan has yet to run the gauntlet of Congress, and wishes the green light from the Navy in

the shape of a sweeping Navy force-structure assessment (FSA), expected sometime within the next

month.

“The biggest thing that came out of the new strategy is that the shift of the United States Marine Corps faraway from that specialize in amphibious assaults, where they're going to storm a beach like in war II, toward much smaller operations,” said Bryan Clark, senior fellow at the middle for Strategic and

Budgetary Assessments.

Clark, a former special assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations, told The Epoch Times that

those new operations would be “more like small raids, fixing advanced bases in remote

locations.”

Using higher numbers of smaller ships, the Marines would found out artillery, batteries, and

surveillance on numerous remote atolls and island chains, slipping inside the anti-aircraft bubble

on smaller ships, without the provocation or risk related to a carrier or large amphibious

ship.

“That shift [in strategy] features a lot of implications for the sorts of equipment and systems the

Marines need, which has created tons of disruption within the industry that supports the Marine

Corps and also with the Navy that builds the ships and mans the ships the Marines use,” Clark

said.

world power competition has pushed the 186,000-strong United States Marine Corps to narrow its strategy focus almost exclusively on China, Clark says, while NATO and therefore the U.S. army tackle the opposite strategic challenges posed by Russia in Europe.

In some ways , that marks a return to the normal role of the Marines as an amphibious

Navy-supporting expeditionary force—albeit minus the large-scale beach assaults launched from

massive amphibious ships.

Distributed Lethality

The Marine Corps’ strategy aligns with new Navy tactics called distributed operations, designed

to counter the very fact that the queens within the game of maritime chess—the large U.S. ships and

carriers—are held cornered by relatively expendable firepower.

Distributed operations mean moving faraway from reliance on a couple of large ships, instead,

distributing the firepower and forces (lethality), also as surveillance, across more

platforms, including unmanned ships, with no single point of failure.

“Visions of a massed naval armada nine nautical miles off-shore within the South China Sea preparing to launch the landing force in swarms of ACVs, LCUs, and LCACs [amphibious landing vehicles] are impractical and unreasonable,” Berger wrote in his strategy document. “We must accept the realities created by the proliferation of precision long-range fires, mines, and other

smart-weapons, and seek innovative ways to beat those threat capabilities.”

Among the opposite solutions, Berger also proposed experimenting with “lethal long-range

unmanned systems capable of traveling 200 nautical miles.”

But the mainstay of Marine-distributed operations would be Expeditionary Advanced Base

Operations (EABO)—the creation of positions on numerous atolls and islands, potentially owned

by allies, which Clark mentioned .

Similar strategies are proposed for British marines as an answer to the long-range missile

puzzles.

thimblerig

Sidharth Kaushal, a search fellow on sea power at defense think factory Royal United Services

Institute, last week co-authored a paper on the topic .

“It’s very difficult to seek out and suppress missile batteries on an island,” Kaushal told The Epoch

Times.

“EABO envisions creating a litany of advanced anti-ship positions, anti-air defense positions, and

potentially forward air refueling positions. this is able to now give the adversary a headache

because they now need to waste expensive precision-guided munitions on multiple atolls, many

of which are empty; most of which can be hardened to a particular degree,” he said.

“This would give the U.S. Navy—which would be operating behind these kinds of atoll

positions—more freedom for maneuvers also as a particular degree of protection .”

That protection of the Naval force marks another key change in United States Marine Corps strategy, he said—a specialise in assisting the fleet.

The United States Marine Corps could also bring anti-ship missiles to those positions—something it hasn’t wiped out the past.

For the Chinese, it’s worthwhile to throw precision-guided missiles worth millions at a $14 billion

ship which will be sunk with one hit, taking down billions of dollars worth of aircraft at just one occasion .

But albeit it are often identified, an island or atoll can’t be sunk, stacking the prices in favor of the

Marines. Furthermore, the Marines would be constantly moving positions from one island to

another.

“It’s sort of a thimblerig , in a way,” Kaushal said. “One shell is full, many are empty. If you’re

constantly moving, you force the opponent to expend munitions.”

But the island position strategy isn’t primarily about all-out warfare.

Instead, it turns the tables on adversaries that have relied on their anti-ship and anti-aircraft

missile prowess to hassle their way toward their geopolitical goals without sparking all-out

conflict.

This approach of putting U.S. weapons on allied soil—it’s using the Chinese playbook against

them,” Clark notes. “Because you finish up with an identical set of considerations.”

So having smaller ships (preferably with stealth capability) is significant not only militarily—it’s also

about having the ability to slide into position either unnoticed or with a politically palatable cover story.

Political Cover Stories

Military analysts ask this idea as “operating below the edge of conflict.”

The U.S. National Defense Strategy specifically involved military day-to-day operations to be

ready to “defend U.S. interests from challenges below the extent of armed conflict.”

Kaushal says that operating below the extent of armed conflict can fall under one among two categories. One is actions that are coercive, but involve no actual conflict. He gives the instance of Chinese

fishing boats threatening competitors because the Chinese navy waits on the horizon.

the opposite category is an armed conflict that doesn’t tip into or trigger open war.

to interact “below the conflict,” a ship or force must already be within the neighborhood, and it

needs a canopy story, like being on exercises, or stealth capability.

“It’s really the local forces that are available on-site, instead of the mixture capabilities of

both nations which matter,” says Kaushal. “It’s what proportion you'll enlist a comparatively short

time span.”

meaning there’s getting to be a growing, but low-key, low-visibility military presence within the

Pacific to stay all those elements ready, he says.

“There goes to be a growing emphasis on a forward-deployed layer of contact forces which will

operate with a coffee signature and with a degree of stealth within the anti-aircraft bubble.”

“You see this considerably in what America calls dynamic deployment.”

“If you'll generate a comparatively scalable force, and place it on a couple of islands after some

provocation, which may be how of sending a diplomatic and coercive counter-message without

escalating to A level that, for instance , politicians won't be comfortable with.”

“In a limited skirmish between the PLA [Chinese] navy and let’s say allied forces, deploying

something sort of a carrier task group could be too political.”

To a degree, this is often a return to the low-conflict, high-stakes skirmishes and maneuvers of the Cold War, Kaushal says.

“This sort of conflict is probably going to become ever more frequent because states can’t afford to clash

openly during a world of mutually assured destruction and economic interdependence.”

While the duvet stories of maneuvers, humanitarian missions, then forth, allow forces to be in

the proper place at the proper time and are transparent to both adversaries, as long as each side

have an excessive amount of to lose from all-out conflict, neither will unmask that mutual fiction, Kaushal says.

“It’s an issue of whether leaders in both countries are willing to tie themselves to a collision

course by openly acknowledging what’s happening,”

Clark too says that the EABO concept is about operating below the edge .

Smaller Boats

But the United States Marine Corps plan features a number of hurdles to pass, Clark says.

“If you actually accept the argument that this may be the shape of Marine operations, a minimum of for the

foreseeable future, then tons of the force structure shifts that the Navy’s been buying to support

the Marines aren't as useful.”

rather than the present 33 large amphibious ships, for instance , they could need 50 or 60 “much

smaller ships,” Clark says.

“That’s a reasonably significant disruption to the Navy’s shipbuilding and to the industry .”

“The other thing is that the United States Marine Corps internally goes to possess to buy of these new

precision weapons, EW systems, command and control systems that they need to

put ashore on these advanced bases.”

But Clark says that there’s tons of interest on both the a part of the Navy and United States Marine Corps in bringing Berger’s decide to life which he expects the upcoming FSA to evolve the Navy fleet in

that direction.

“The question will then be whether the Navy and United States Marine Corps can make a case to Congress, and to the administration, even.”

“Then, they're going to need to convince the industry that there's an idea which will keep the industry

solvent during this shift.”

The changes will come slowly, he says, because shipbuilding may be a very capital intensive activity.

“With the military , you'll make far more rapid changes. We saw with the military during the Iraq

war, they were ready to create a counter-insurgency-focused army within about three or four

years.”