Marine Corps Combat Development Command Embraces Sea Basing

Marine Corps Sharpens Tactics To End-Run the Enemy

By DAVID VERGUN
Production Editor

The classic battle image of Marines is a squad of infantry splashing through the surf to take the beach at Iwo Jima or Tarawa. Historically, the most vulnerable time of the assault was during the landing itself, when Marines were exposed to a hail of fire from heavily defended enemy positions.

Avoiding costly across-the-beach assaults is the reason that the Marine Corps Combat Development Command (MCCDC) in Quantico, Va., is working on a new vision called Sea Basing--which, for Marines, translates into bypassing enemy fortifications from the sea and moving swiftly inland. To accomplish this, an armada of ships--aircraft carrier battle groups, expeditionary strike groups, high-speed vessels, logistics ships, submarines, and even unmanned surface and subsurface vessels--would be networked together to provide firepower, intelligence, and surveillance, as well as both seaborne and airborne platforms from which a brigade-sized unit could be launched.
Making this vision a reality, Marines say, will turn the tables and put the enemy in a vulnerable position. "Operation Enduring Freedom was just a glimpse of things to come," said Lt. Gen. Edward Hanlon Jr., commanding general of MCCDC. "It was a rudimentary operation compared to what we visualize 10 years in the future." During Operation Enduring Freedom, forward-deployed Marines from Task Force 58 landed nearly 450 miles inland from the Arabian Sea to establish an advance operating base. By moving so far inland, the Marines had taken on a traditional Army mission.

Hanlon spoke enthusiastically about Sea Basing--a fundamental component of Marine Corps Strategy 21 and its partner, the Navy's Sea Power 21 vision paper. Sea Basing, he said, will give the Marines the flexibility to provide greater reach in carrying out future OMFTS (operational maneuver from the sea) missions. "We will operate with impunity from the sea without pausing at the beach to build an iron mountain [piles of supplies]. Ships will be selectively offloaded at sea and an expeditionary brigade-sized force of Marines will then marry up with their equipment and move rapidly from ship to shore and then far inland aboard a combination of current and future land, sea, and air vehicles including Advanced Amphibious Assault Vehicles, high-speed vessels, CH-53 helicopters, and tiltrotor aircraft."

Sea Basing is not the only "transformational" vision being evaluated in the upper echelons of the Navy/Marine Corps hierarchy. A competing, or perhaps complementary, idea is to use static platforms known as Mobile Offshore Bases (MOBs), which would be used to build up massive tonnages of equipment, consumables, and other supplies--stored on colossal, and well protected, floating platforms anchored to the seabed off hostile shores--in international waters, preferably. Under the MOB concept, Marines would marry up with their vehicles and equipment on the offshore platforms and then move ashore.

However, the terms "fixed" and "static" run counter to the Marine Corps' own concept of expeditionary maneuver warfare. "We want the inherent flexibility of mobile Sea Basing," said Brig. Gen. Kenneth J. Glueck Jr., director of the Marine Corps' Expeditionary Force Development Center (EFDC). "Dynamic Sea Basing affords us the opportunity to reconstitute, move around, and execute another mission from a different location if need be. The last thing we want to do is to be stuck in one place."

Which is not to say that Marines are unwilling to consider new ideas--even if they compete with previous concepts and practices. "Developing a concept is a dynamic building process," said Col. Arthur J. Corbett, director of Futures, an MCCDC department that develops and analyzes concepts such as Sea Basing. "We listen, recognize, and absorb good ideas from others. We try to be good sponges. Then, we develop a vision through a synergistic thought process."

Hanlon pointed out that, while the Navy/Marine Corps team is ideally suited for rapid, forcible entry from the sea, Marines will continue to work closely with the nation's other armed services and the unified commands--including Special Forces Command and the Coast Guard--"to ensure that the joint-force commander has the right mix of tools that he needs at his disposal."

Col. Frank J. DiFalco, director of MCCDC's Joint Concept Development and Experimentation Division, is tasked with ensuring that the Marine Corps' Sea Basing vision is in the joint planning loop. Marine Corps participation in studies, war games, and experiments showcases Sea Basing solutions and capabilities for the joint-force commander, DiFalco noted.

The Marine Corps is currently participating in a Joint Forcible Entry Study at the Secretary of Defense-level, and in joint-planning studies being carried out at several lower echelons of command.

Last summer, the Marine Corps participated in Millennium Challenge 2002, an experiment hosted by U.S. Joint Forces Command that tested the intelligence-sharing and command-and-control capabilities that would be crucial to Sea Basing in a joint context.

"We have the best and the most flexible capabilities available for the future joint-force commander," DiFalco said. "The Marine Corps can make a great concept like Sea Basing work because Marines of all ranks and specialties have always been an inherently innovative part of the process. Coming up with solutions to problems is the forte of Marines; from amphibious doctrine and close air support in the 1920s and 1930s to Expeditionary Maneuver Warfare and Sea Basing today." *

Holistic Approach To Sea Basing

Hanlon said that the Marine Corps is taking what he describes as "a holistic approach" to Sea Basing. "The devil is in the details," he said--to make Sea Basing a reality, he continued, operational requirements must include not only the transformational vehicles needed to move men and equipment ashore, but also a redesign of both training and weaponry.

"In the case of Sea Basing, concept drives requirements. That was not always so," said Col. Len Blasiol, MCCDC's director of materiel requirements. In the past, he pointed out, requirements were sometimes generated by a specific crisis or were built around a particular weapons system. He cited the legacy M2 .50-caliber machine gun, built more than 50 years ago--but without a driving conceptual requirement. It will eventually be replaced by a concept-driven weapon designed to fit in with the Sea Basing vision of a light but powerful punch.

On Blasiol's desk is a military classic, The Soldier's Load and the Mobility of a Nation, written in 1950 by S.L.A. Marshall, one of the most-respected military writers and analysts of his era. Marshall cites innumerable historical examples of soldiers who were overburdened with too much gear to maintain mobility and/or fight effectively. In generating materiel concept driven requirements, Blasiol is ever-mindful of not overburdening the trigger-pullers. He has another, personal, reason for ensuring that Marines go into combat with just the right mix of equipment. His son, a rifleman, was in Kuwait at the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Each new weapon and equipment item evaluated at MCCDC--there are now more than 1,000--is measured against the conceptual Sea Basing yardstick. "I'm glad to see that this was assigned the number-one priority," said Brig. Gen. Kenneth J. Glueck Jr., director of Expeditionary Force Development Center, leafing through a stack of papers called List of Urgent Needs. At the top of the list, marked "Approved, Priority 1," was "Blue Force Tracking," a computer program designed to display to joint forces a common operating picture of the disposition of friendly forces--and thereby greatly reduce the possibility of fratricide in a complex, fast-moving environment such as that envisioned in Sea Basing.

Among the other items on the "approved" list were: special binoculars that give the viewer distance-to-target and laser designation; night vision goggles; mine plows; tactical data network components, forward air control sweeps, and other communications upgrades; an obstacle marking system; bridging equipment; a thermal imaging system; and the Dragon Eye unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).

Marines at the Corps' Warfighting Lab have the task of testing all of the latest weapons, equipment items, and "gadgets" of various types that would be standard issue for a future Sea Basing force. "We take new technologies out to the operating forces and let them try them out," said Lt. Col. Steven H. Mattos, director of the Technology Division at the Warfighting Lab. "There are winners and losers. If the technology is a winner, it goes on to Systems Command for production. If it is a loser, we usually learn something anyway."

Mattos gave an example of an item that was rejected--a Global Positioning System-controlled parachute delivery system. "We threw it out the back of an airplane but it didn't work right because the radio altimeter did not factor in the wind or the relation to the ground," he said. "We then gave it to the Army and they are further developing it."
One of the gadgets successfully tested was the five-pound Dragon Eye UAV--designed to give the small-unit leader an "eye in the sky." The original Dragon Eye test model is still at the Lab--and still flies, despite the fact that several chunks of the airframe were taken out by an eagle when the UAV swooped in too close to its territory.

The Lab is currently experimenting with an unmanned ground vehicle called Dragon Runner--a small reconnaissance vehicle weighing several pounds that can be tossed inside a building or even through an upstairs window and operated remotely by an infantryman using a Game Boy-like device. The vehicle is rugged enough to be driven out of a two-story building, Mattos said. Dragon Runner could be used to great advantage in an urban environment. Several law-enforcement agencies are interested in it, as well as the Marine Corps.

Among the other gadgets under study at the Lab are an Expeditionary Tactical Communications System; a tactical utility tractor and all-terrain vehicle; and a Local Area Security System--which uses sensors hidden inside rubber bricks, rocks, rusty fuel cans, and other bric-a-brac. New weapon systems and communications gear are among the other technologies under review.

The Lab also works closely with the Office of Naval Research, a Navy/Marine Corps science and technology center that evaluates emerging technologies throughout the world to determine which ones might be particularly suitable for current and future Navy/USMC combat requirements.