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| The Marine Corps is launching precision guided weapons hit the spike firing exercises at sea conducted in the last 21 days (Google Translate) |
Side-note: The SecDef suggested that the US Army utilize its Patriot missiles to allow it to participate in operations in the Pacific. Additionally the idea of them using anti-ship missiles so that they could integrate with Navy aircraft/ships and US Air Force assets was also mentioned. I wonder why some Marine Corps general wasn't pounding the table saying bullshit! One of the core competencies of the Marine Corps is suppose to be not only assaulting and then establishing forward operating bases (amphibious assaults) but port seizures AND repelling enemy assaults...even those that come from the sea (enemy amphibious assaults). The focus has been too much on tech and not enough on doing the "Marine thing". Re-doing Bold Alligator into a port seizure exercise and then turn it around and have the forces repulse an enemy attack would prove more instructive then the dog and pony show its become.
Riddle me this...and take your time. When was the last time the United States Marine Corps practiced port seizures.
Side-note 1: The above illustrates what I've been saying about the idea of using LCACs and JHSVs to carry AAVs and MPCs to an "in stream launch" approx 3 miles from the beach. You're still going to have to do the hard work of destroying enemy fortifications, missile systems etc. Same applies with heliborne assaults using MV-22s and CH-53Ks. Leadership wants a free lunch. There are none. You want the beach? You got to put in the work! Of course this leads to an even more troubling question. If you have to fight to the beach then do you need (trying to take out my bias here) amphibious vehicles? Does a marinized Stryker make sense in this constrained budget era?
I think having Army Patriot/THAAD batteries is perfectly sensible. And while having anti-ship batteries or ground launched cruise missiles would be valuable (and bunch of anti-air and anti-surface missile batteries overlapping the First Island Chain would scare the piss out of the PLAN), in the lean budget years we are seeing, it isn't workable.
ReplyDeleteWhere are they going to get the manpower? They are already cutting into muscle (bypassing the fat of HQ and Army/Corps/Division echelons) how do they get them manned? And who pays for these anti-surface batteries? ain't gonna happen.
And why didn't the Marine Corps General pounding the table? Because the USMC have even less manpower and less funding available. While they can perform defensive missions, is that really where you want the sharp tip of the spear? I think the USMC has a better role as being the means by which the US seizes and maintain the initiative rather than waiting for PLAN amphibs to appear on the horizon.
Quite frankly, having Army play a role in Pacific with Patriot/THAAD and cruise missile like they used to do with GLCM Tomahawks is something I thought had a great deal of merit, but in the Dark Age of the Great Sequestor, it isn't going to happen. The force size and budget is too small.
You mean build a wall, without adequate air-cover PLAN/PLAA would simply punch a few holes in it, bypass the remainder, and render that whole wall useless. This sort of Maginot line thinking is dangerous because it offers a false sense of security at the expense of real military capacity.
DeleteIt would make more sense to improve USN strike capacity, more SSGNs, better (supersonic) cruise missiles, modern ASMs, better Marine Corps carriers, improved heavy lift capacity, better naval helicopters (think AVX JMR), expanded mine warfare capacity, a proper multi-role LCS class ship.
What has anti-ship missiles, anti-air and ballistic missile defense all rolled into one? An Aegis ship.
DeleteThis is why talking about taking islands like Woody Island (look it up on google earth) is pretty pointless, yes it is unsinkable but it is also immobile. That was useful in WWII when a bomber had to make it past the island based fighters. It is useless in the modern era when it can be ballistic missiled into nothingness or just plain nuked.
Much larger islands are much more defensible but also allow more of a surprise assault in that the total beach area to be defended is much larger, and probably larger than the enemy is capable of truly defending. A LP/OP on the beach of a squad with 2 Spike launchers and a radio to serve as a warning device is more doable. Sink a couple of AAVs and then run back to the larger force.
I have driven myself nuts a couple times white boarding these ideas.
What i came up with is:
-small islands are nice in small wars but useless once you opponent decides to smash them with missiles
-larger island or land areas cannot defend the entire beach head Normandy style, expect small LP/OP defenses or disbursed mobile defenses such as a combined arms platoon of tanks and IFV
-mobile combined arms forces would respond to the landing and force a rapid mechanized battle
-if the enemy does not have armor or large amounts of armor they would use hybrid style warfare to immediately start an attrition campaign focused on slowly killing the attacking force. This would be never ending harassment by mortars, mines, and various rockets used in hit and run attacks. This is incapable of repelling the assault but it would start filling the medevac birds.
I don't think an Army missile wall is what I am talking about, for the same reason a wall along the inter-German border would have been insufficient.
DeleteBut an Army team tied in with Navy AEGIS ships and Air Force would be more formidable than just Aegis/Standard
I agree but it still depends on the size of the island being defended. Guam or Okinawa vs Woody Island for example. Either Patriot or THAAD can only sit in one spot and emit for so long and then it would eventually be killed in a missile strike, they need the land to displace multiple times.
DeleteI think you are right in that the Army systems cannot be sunk while the Navy systems are very mobile.
yes, you can't have a truck with missiles driving around in circles on a small island. The only way you could on a smaller island is with very hardened silos.
DeleteBut a Patriot/THAAD battalion suppnorted with Harpoon/Tomahawks on each of the Islands Amami, Okinawa, Miyakojima, Ishikagi, down along Luzon and perhaps Palawan islands providing umbrellas for friendly forces would be a multiplier. Each of those Island is big enough for missile batteries to be mobile and bug out if needed.
They would need the support smaller units for security.
If you fire a weapon from a submarine or a stealth aircraft with a sufficiently long weapons bay; ignoring the former's 1,500ft rocket ride to flight speed, the soonest you can expect a radar to see the missiles coming in over the horizon is about 12nm.
DeleteAdd stealth and you're down to six. If it's PAC-3 ERINT, with it's own seeker, maybe you can go Mountain Top or JLENS with a separate, longwave or ship moutned cueing radar to push that back out aways but ERINT is all boost, like a Sprint, so it's range is normally pretty short anyway, say 15-25km.
And then there's the land attack DF-21C and the Wu-14 MARV-
http://news.sctv.com/jsxw/201101/W020110103542983908640.jpg
If you are firing on a fixed target, there is NO TARGETING required, prelaunch, because the entire threat matrix is premapped, before the war.
You simply put a RADAC system like that on the Pershing II or even an Optical seeker like the Iskander is rumored to use and you snake and porpoise down to a height/Mach point as the DF-21C bus section does something like this-
Youtube, Carrier Killer In Action
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWwEpGY16Lk
But instead of going unitary with The Big Flash, you bus out submunitions like this-
Mangler Muldoon's Blog
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1hcrM8xXgKM/UfrpAP0T2PI/AAAAAAAABnQ/5aDgEHajoy8/s1600/Cluster+munitions+Kadena+2.jpg
And wham bam, whaddya know Joe, it's a rotokill.
In this, I have a large degree of doubt whether setting up frontal defenses is going to matter much unless those defenses are THAAD or Land-Standard based, with SM3IIa/b. You are simply not going to get enough height as downrange capability on conventional (marginally affordable PAC-2GEM/PAC-3) air defenses to push back midcoursing weapons.
What could you end up losing if you DON'T stop the munitions bus, pre-shotgun?
Ohhhhh, I dunno. Something like this-
Mangler Muldoon's Blog
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1OAxSbvI5Ws/UhOIuYA41EI/AAAAAAAABwA/3OaSGvmAzhM/s1600/bradley.jpg
The best way to deny the DF-21C/D any military utility is to do what Mr. Miyagi once questioned about sudden attacks by trees: "You no be dare."
Either by shifting to cheap (converted container) Arsenal ships with 'Missiles In A Box' loadouts and minimum crewing.as launchers of C-IRBM of our own. Or to SSN/SSBN with dedicated aeroballistic weapons like the HSSW (smaller = more).
The one flat out-ranges most DF-21D profiles (not the 2,700km one but certainly the 1,500 and 1,200km should be possible and would, challenge a ROTHR to target them). The other defining it's survivability by the amount of empty water you have to 3D sanitize to find the boat when it's off the bubblet.
I frankly see no reason for a large replacement Ohio without a substantial class fraction being dedicated to conventional attack (reroleable at need to strategic nuclear) at any one time. Minutemen replacement weapons can (treaty threshold limits) and should return to multi-MIRV so it's not like we're losing capacity.
To my knowledge, no variant of the BASM is ASW capable. Nor is the CX-1 or CM400AKG.
More proof in my eyes that all the AAV's and MPC's need active protection.
ReplyDeleteYes a marinized Stryker makes a hell of a lot of sense. They are combat proven vehicles that the USMC would not have to pour excessive amounts of money in R&D with. Also Solomon as you said in a previous post marine tanks are in danger. Why not replace them with some of the mobile gun system of the Stryker as a temporary replacement for the M1A1s. It would be much more affordable than upgrading to M1A2s, and you could marinize it to be amphibious. Sort of like what the Chinese are doing.
ReplyDeleteWhat do you think?
All european 8x8 you can think off are at least as developed as the striker only most were already generation or two ahead when they were designed. Money you spend in R&D is result of corroupt practices (brass setting up some stupid requirements that are often of no real value ,that same brass later on serves on boards and in advisory roles to LM&co) admit it or not US procurment is as corroupt as they get banana state style. R&D wastage is necessary for LM & Co as thy do not have a product to offer on their own so idea is take a fully developed euro 8x8 that you can buy off the shelf and then create added cost to earn $$$ and its even easy to justify as US military often seeks breaktrough/ leap ahead designs that end up with huge R&D budgets and are often canceled and rarely deliver .
DeleteIn terms of ground vehicles just about every state in europe has its own modern design while you R&D in a bastardisation of a decades old swiss design licenced to canada. LOL
So what about the Czech Pandur IFV? It is already semi-amphibious and a well refined design. We can just buy them and there is no need for R&D.
DeleteAustrian Pandur(Steyer now part od General Dynamics) might not be the best 8x8 out there Patria AMV bested Pandur on just about every selection in Europe except Czech. But if you have money to spend of the best of the best Boxer ,Piranha V ,VBCI would be top of the list but as these are all heavily armored(Stirker base armor protects against 7.62 round all these are protected 14.5mm alround so levels more comparable to Bradley) might not be too floatable without some more volume added(AMW for marines now has bigger wheels and hull so it can float) So sensible low cost option would be ither AMV or Super AV
DeleteIt really does make sense, if not for the amphibious assault, then for river crossings and whatnot once you move inland. Overall I think that their needs to be a focus on moving away from the so called 'light brigade' concept and uparmouring these marine units. The problem is weight constraints, how much weight you can put on the ship decks, how much weight you can carry using the LCACs or whatever their replacements are.
DeleteThe truth is that 4x4s like humvees are just completely inadequate and have low-survivability, something like the ZBD-0Xs or a light 20Tonne class IFV would be suitable and allow more of the expeditionairy forces to be reasonably well protected. Also with something like the ZBD-XX or the EFV you can use the main cannon to launch missiles in support-of an opposed landing, prevent a counter-landing, or take out MBTs.
I have heard the "strykers for marines" argument plenty of times, not just here. Ill be the first to say that it is wrong.
DeleteThe Marines need an amphibious vehicle. The Stryker in its current configuration isn't. It isn't even adequate for air transport in its current form (with anything less than C17 of course).
It cannot transport a true infantry squad, and its MGS version is fundamentally flawed from the beginning.
There are better vehicles out there for the task at hand. There are also better MGS platforms for the task at hand. Like what Mr T said: Patria/Havoc or SuperAV.
The Stryker is too big and wheeled.
DeleteMy favorite beach craft would be a “Wiesel 2” with small a Schottel pump jet. On the other side the pump jet is unnecessary because a CH-53 can carry two Wiesel inside! There are several Wiesel variants in service: 20 mm cannon, light air defence, ambulance, 120 mm automatic mortar system. A Wiesel 1 variant with a 30 mm cannon (RMK30) was tested in 1996. 12 Wiesel would easily fit on an LCAC instead of 12 HMMWVs. 12 Wiesel with 20 mm cannon or 120 mm mortar offer a far better fire power than just 4 LAV-25.
Unrelated news: Hagel is stepping down.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.politico.com/story/2014/11/chuck-hagel-to-resign-113131.html?hp=t1_r
Potential successors could include Michele Flournoy, a former undersecretary of defense who now runs the Center for a New American Security; Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work; or another administration alumni such as Ash Carter, who stepped down as Hagel’s first deputy secretary.
I think there needs to be better set out priorities of what the US is actually there for and what it's trying to achieve.
ReplyDeleteThe picture sums up how people should be thinking about this situation. If Taiwan,Japan et al want to keep hold of their Islands, then it's bloody well up to them to provide shore and defence in depth. They need to garrison the islands and build competent A2/AD defence networks.
I think people often overestimate the Chinese position and underestimate the forces opposed to them. Look at what they have to do. The US Marines have said how hard it would be to conduct opposed landings. The Chinese need to do this against sophisticated opposition (see picture above) while having the world's only superpower lurking in support waiting to mess up their plans.
This leads to what support the US should provide (support being the operative word). It shouldn't be up to the US to provide lots of men to defend or, even worse, retake these disputed island. However, Chinese forces making an amphibious assault are going to have a really bad day if a US navy carrier task force and subs are in the neighborhood.
That's my strategy for countering the Chinese. And once the strategy is in place, it becomes easier to identify and prioritize the technologies to focus upon and the tactics to employ. The CSBA papers focus too much on technology without looking at where and how it's going to be employed. Without strategy and prioritizing equipment and technology, you end up to having to fund everything with the services fighting each other for said funding. Likely to be very expensive.
I realize this is a Marine centric blog, so apologies for favoring the navy's capabilities in this part of the world.
There is a 'Friends Of The Army' lecture on YT that covers the concept of 'what do you do when the threat doesn't do what you wanted it to'? It goes further to say that all the 'new ideas' about maneuver warfare theory are just regurgitations of what people learned or heard in basic from -their- seniors as 'really great ideas!' that never came about. And the reason they never came about was that they were so singular (Airborne Invasions of the USSR! The plan works! Invest in it!) that they didn't account for cross disciplinary counters (An airborne drop with a full corps sized unit would occupy an area of roughly 20 square miles, what else [1950s] do you think might 'cover about the same distance'?).
DeleteI think that applies here, with a vengeance.
I also think people forget Boyd and his prescient: "Don't get obsessed with the white water, the fight is BEYOND the beach."
With these as guidelines, there really isn't much difference between _driving_ 20nm or even 50nm from a beach two headlands down the coast and dumping a full blow SPOD capture off the breakwater, because, by the time you sterilize the harbor defenses enough to push a force in, you will have matched your timeline for the vehicle deployment and the vehicles, while possibly suffering the iniquity of a blockforce or mines will, by their very association with a coast road or the like, also be in a position where airpower and air assault units can provide significant overwatch and even preemptive engagement -without- jeopardizing the capture force, directly.
The Israelis _failed_ to do this, in 2006, and got a bunch of Merkavas holed by Kornet for their troubles.
The point being that, once the capture force arrives on the backside of the harbor, the environment transition problem is zero and, unless it's Tobruk or Sevastopol, you have a civilianized access condition with multiple axes of advance and essentially no secured lines of defense because each adjacent structure, once blown or occupied becomes _sheltered_ from the adjacent one's field of view and lateral engagement.
The question then becomes what do you do to force the fight beyond that initial line of contact and into a maneuver condition. It would be simple, with EB warheads, to simply devolumize the structures but this doesn't give you the fluid maneuver conditions that forces the threat into the open because they may be one line of houses back. Or one floor up. Or stacked behind the building in cover, waiting to come out and shoot you as you go by.
No. What you need is the equivalent of fast moving armored recce without the weight.
You need robots.
DeleteThis way, even if it is deemed necessary to assault into that first line of structures (and it could as easily be warehouses full of flammables as apartments or marine businesses) to shelter your leapoffs and have a base, you can push robots two the street behind and compromise the line of retreat in a flush-to-fire condition.
You equip those robots with a simple 'crown' of AMAP-ADS type active protection and applique NERAs plus smoke and you give them a _drop in_ (permission configurable) armament well with an M240 and XM27 for instance (as opposed to a VLS cluster of Spikes or a 20mm+4 Javelin) and when the threat moves out under pressure, they get hit.
Or if they don't get hit, they get bypassed and must give chase.
Either one works because your small robotic vehicles (Wiesel class) trade the armor in armored recce for speed and firepower and active protection.
And once you size your SPOD force mission as a kind of surfaces and gaps infiltration force that undernines the contiguity of unit shoulders, you _don't need_ a large amphib commitment. You need a 40 knot, planing, LCVP with a ramp. Or you need a CH-53K with a couple of these UGCV tankettes inside, where they don't detract from the flyout range or speed of delivery, like a slingloaded LAV does.
The faster and more distant you can make your insertions, the more you can disperse them beyond the range of even NLOS coverage to bag the lot. And where Wiesel has a lot of options (20mm gun, Mistral/Stinger, FAAD radar, TOW, Ambulance, Dragonfire Mortar etc.) that drop in well lets a lean Marine Corps buy 200 chassis and 500 turret loads.
The mistake we make is one of doing things The Hard Way as the only or even /best/ means by which to execute the mission. If you talk about THW, you have to talk about overlapping force protection. If you talk about cheating your way in, avoiding fights you don't have to and getting to land -before- you fight, the ability of modern munitions to break down the door put the enemy to rout can compensate for a lot of OOB that is frankly, redundant.
The Spike Missile is for taking out North Korean coastal guns embedded within cliffs of North Korean mainlands. They are not intended as anti-ship or repelling of amphibious assaults.
ReplyDeleteNorth Korean marines infiltrating aboard 50 or so hovercrafts will have to be dealt by Apaches. Again, this is a situation unique to Korea and may not apply elsewhere, where an amphibious assault means a full-blown strike force.
If you look at the vehicle it has a some sort of radar in the rear,that is used to detect seaborne threats not costal emplacments
DeleteConcerning using apaches to repel the ladning forces ,Everything Apache can do a Spike launcher unit can do while being even less vounerable and for much less $$
Even Hellfire is being used in costal defence role https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4jcLZxwuFg
Mr. T
DeleteThe version that the ROK marines operate is laser guided. That thing is probably some kind of communication antenna.
There is a communications antenna on the front, the white cylinder on the side does indeed look like it might be a radar unit.
DeleteRadar serves to locate objects in all weather conditions whatever the guidance system.Otherwise you are more or less limited to mk.1 eyeball , radar is so much more effective in scaning the horizon
ReplyDeleteThe Stryker is too big and wheeled.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite beach craft would be a “Wiesel 2” with small a Schottel pump jet. On the other side the pump jet is unnecessary because a CH-53 can carry two Wiesel inside! There are several Wiesel variants in service: 20 mm cannon, light air defence, ambulance, 120 mm automatic mortar system. A Wiesel 1 variant with a 30 mm cannon (RMK30) was tested in 1996. 12 Wiesel would easily fit on an LCAC instead of 12 HMMWVs. 12 Wiesel with 20 mm cannon or 120 mm mortar offer a far better fire power than just 4 LAV-25.
Mhalblaub,
ReplyDeleteWell said. From my perspective:
If you MUST float upon the water before you drive up the sand, you need to minimize the time from 12-15nm (horizon line) on in during which you make a fat target and you need to drop the total commitedt vehicle mass/unit count, so that you can afford to have 3-4, smallish, planing capable, landing craft to divide enemy fire and arrive at the beach with a medium load of 2-3 vehicles @ 30-40 knots minimum transit interval.
If you launch from the LPD/LHD with 4 such craft and lose 1 during a 20 minute runin to the beach, you still come ashore with six vehicles which is a workable fighting unit.
You charge ahead with 12 on an LCAC you have committed two sins:
1. A HUGE value investment on one beach which, if properly defended will leave you multi-beach assault strategy as a smoking hole.
2. You have guaranteed that when some idiot with a C704 on a garbage truck (hey, it's happened before, see: HMS Glamorgan) turns your SES into a Submarine, you have taken an ENTIRE COMPANY STRENGTH out of the battle. Even before they got shot in the surf zone.
If you have multiple, platoon strength, formations you can split them at 10nm separation intervals so that at least one landing is likely to be uncontested and then -drive- @ 50-70mph, to a common, pre-objective, rally.
This small-packet insurance policy extends further up the load class scale as well in that , if you have five 50 knot JHSV and want to keep them under the AAW umbrella until the last possible moment and then disperse laterally up and down the coast, you can do it. If they are sized to deploy no more than a company strength assault.
You can't with a battalion gator freighter MAGTF as 20 knot LHD/LPD. They are too costly, slow and HDLD value intensive (hospital, vehicle repair garage, boat well, hangar and runway) to be risked.
Think small, survive by rapid dispersion, pre-launch from the well deck, cross the radar horizon just long enough to deploy forty knot fast-transit -to- the beach, keep your total loads on each assault boat small and mass on the opposite side of the beach with air mech delivered overwatch/suppression to help guide-on the forces exiting your high speed, swamp boat, LCVP.
Then DRIVE to the sound of gunfire.
There is no reasonable excuse whatsoever for Marine assault units not to be fully mounted. None.
DO NOT try to recreate Operation Iceberg just for the hell of a bogged down objective assault. If you are mech'd you can shift, fluidly, around and past hardpoints of surface/gap theory and remain useful (crew served heavy weapons) tying down an enemy response force as long as you have gas and ammo.
Dear M&S,
DeleteMy reply was posted at the wrong position. It was thought as an answer to a question further up concerning the use of a “mobile gun system of the Stryker as a temporary replacement for the M1A1s”.
One LCAC can carry just one M1 (60 t) or 4 Stryker MGS (17 t, already operational?) but more than 12 Wiesel at a maximum weight of 4.8 t (maybe 5 t with a small pump jet). So for one Stryker at least 3 Wiesel could be put ashore. The Wiesel is even faster than the Abrams at a milage of just 8.5 mpg (Abrams ~ 0.5 mpg).
MHalblaub,
ReplyDeleteA modern Wiesel with a NERA package, APS, universal turret well and track/suspension system to handle the added weight would be edging towards 6-7 tons.
That said, I would be more concerned with the ability to drive them onto helicopters (the clearances are very tight on the CH-53G, as is) than weight limits inherent to putting them on LCAC or LCVP (mini).
With regard to the latter, the problem with the LCAC is quite simply that the size well deck you need to stow it in is that of the LHD class.
I want something more like this-
http://mxak.org/home/businesses/business_images/aukebay.gif
http://www.workboatshow.com/11/custom/ProductLarge8753.jpg
http://www.strategicmarine.com/media/13865/kuwiatlandingcraft03.jpg
http://www.camillc.com/Site/images/landing_craft/lc_load_water_2.jpg
Because I can put half a dozen of them into a JHSV well, half slung from the roof.
People have this INSANE notion of hordes of men and vehicles coming out of the surf something out of Tarawa.
Just. No.
My view is that if you make some defend everywhere, they defend nowhere well and in an era of high end coastal surveillance on the cheap, you have assume you are being watched all the time and use activity and numbers to fool the threat as to your intent rather than try to force a salient from the sea like Normandy. Think of Mogadishu and CNN _standing_ in the whitewater to 'welcome the Marines' onto the beach. Argh. Opsec will be about deception and misdirection as 'watch what I do with this hand' while the rest of your Raider force comes ashore elsewhere and start the real war.
If I have an ability to put multiple, small, fully-mounted, forces onto several assault points with an FFG standing offshore for NGS and/or airmech dropped into overwatch on the hill /behind/ the beach to handle local artillery, I can gain massing by DRIVING to the rally point.
Short of the Objective SPOD seizure.
In this, you have so many more options for harbor seizure when you assault from inland rather than through the breakwater. Look at Haiphong, look an Antwerp and Rotterdam and tell me again that you want to try and bring an MEU into /that/.
No Way.
It's going to take 24-72 hours just to clear single channels to the docks for your main RORO force.
You will _not_ be doing it under fire from coastal ASCM and guided mortars firing through roofs of buildings in the town!
We absolutely must get away from this notion that mass means everything or that massing has to happen in the water where, if nothing else, a tactical nuke could make a REAL MESS OF EVERYTHING.