Jura The idiot
General
continuation of the post right above:
“Traditionally, the Navy is responsible for sea control. Once we control that, we deliver the Marines ashore,” said Cmdr. Matt Hoekstra, an operations officer with ESG-3.
“We are one of the first forces in the theater,” Hoekstra noted, and “there’s a lot more that has to come in” to support initial operations and create the environment for follow-on forces and support.
But amphibious forces, such as amphibious ready groups, have shipboard self-defense systems but limited strike capability, and they typically don’t deploy with ships such as destroyers that can strike targets at sea or further inland. “We don’t have all the fires a carrier strike group would have,” Hoekstra said. So HIMARS would “augment” naval fires and, ultimately, enable and support sea control.
On Monday, a Marine raid force boarded MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotors and CH-53E Super Stallion helicopters and flew off Essex for the mission to capture an enemy-held airfield, which for the scenario was the airfield at the north end of San Clemente Island.
After capturing the airfield, they set to secure the nearby beach so follow-on amphibious forces could arrive.
“The next stage [is], let’s send the HIMARS ashore and then it can start ranging targets at sea,” said O’Connor, the amphibious task force commander for the Dawn Blitz exercise. “Suddenly, you have a mobile capability that was at sea and is now ashore, and now you’ve got an opportunity to maneuver the ships away with this providing overwatch. It’s pretty amazing.”
That plan involved sending the HIMARS crew, along with ammunition, ashore via air-cushioned landing craft (LCAC) with the forces. Once on land, the force would be poised to respond to offensive operations or against threats, whether these are at sea, say, an enemy vessel, or further inland.
The objective “could be at sea or it could be on land,” said Brig. Gen. Rick Uribe, I MEF’s deputy commander and commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Brigade at Camp Pendleton. “So this gives us great flexibility to be able to go after whatever it is at the moment, whether it’s a surface target or land targets.”
“It’s all hands to the fight,” Uribe said. “On ship, we have Marines sitting below deck. They have weapons. We’ve got to think about creative ways to utilize that capability… to make sure that whatever the force is, wherever it’s going, that it’s protected and we can get to our objective area.”
So Marines who are available and aren’t tasked with other missions, such as while ships are in transit, can “help the amphibious force protect itself,” he said. “These are all concepts we are looking at.”
“That’s not too different than in World War II,” added O’Connor, noting South Pacific battles during World War II where Marines with land-based coastal defense units had anti-air and some anti-ship capabilities.
During the Battle of Wake Island in December 1941, for example, Marines firing their 5-inch guns sunk the Japanese destroyer Hayate. The heroics of that battle today are memorialized in Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 211, the F-35B Lightning II squadron nicknamed the “Wake Island Avengers” and, ironically, operating with Essex for Dawn Blitz. The squadron is slated to deploy with the Essex and the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit later next year.
The F-35 “is a game-changer,” O’Connor said, echoing an oft-repeated description of the added capabilities the jet gives the services that don’t exist in older aircraft.
The AV-8B Harrier, he noted, was “developed for specific types of missions. It wasn’t really developed for air defense missions,” unlike the fifth-generation, multi-mission role of the F-35.”
The F-35B will give options when, say, a carrier air wing isn’t available, he said. “It has the ability to go head to head with any aircraft in the world today,” he added. With its stealthy features, it can take out coastal defenses and missile sites “which pose a problem if you’re trying to do a standard, conventional type of operation.”
As for HIMARS, both commanders relayed support to their three-star bosses. But do they want it? “Oh yeah. Look at what we just did,” O’Connor said.
“One shot, to be fair, is one shot,” Uribe added. “The shot did exactly what we wanted it to do, based on the model. So it is a basis from which to go forward.”
“And then,” said O’Connor, “there is the question of trade-offs because ships are limited in volume, weight and personnel. So in order to bring X, we’d have to give up Y. So it’s something to consider.”