Consider this a follow up to LtCol Hall's article. Below is a tidbit from it that has me punching walls....
From the late 1980s through the expeditionary fighting vehicle’s cancellation in 2011, the Marine Corps sought to replace the AAV family of vehicles with a high water speed, self-deploying tracked amphibian capable of launching from 25 nautical miles (nm) over the horizon. This launch distance was established to protect amphibious ships from burgeoning enemy coastal defenses. This changed, however, in January 2011 during congressional testimony before the House Armed Services Committee when the Chief of Naval Operations declared that improvements in integrated naval fire support and ship defenses would facilitate the launch of self-deploying tracked amphibian vehicles from a distance as close as 12 nm.3 This “new” launch distance was reiterated in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Defense Appropriations in 2012.4What exactly are we being sold by HQMC? The CNO has laid the 25nm launch distance lie to waste.
Were we being steered to an aviation centric Marine Corps because of the bias of the Commandant instead of operational necessity?
If the US can't operate at just OTH then everybody else needs to move to submarines only because nobody is safe.
ReplyDeleteThe problem as I keep saying is two fold. The first problem is LCS is crap; the US needs a cheap steel frigate with a couple of 5in and good size flight deck. Two the EFV was too complicated; the US should look back in history to look how clever do it all German technology did against just good enough simple Soviet technology. I refuse to believe that as a nation of great engineers somebody in the US couldn't have come up with a vehicle better than EFV for a third of the price or less.
PS: Really the space assigned to F35b on the LHx needs to be given over to new AH and quick.