Army says its helping not encroaching on missions with its long range missiles..and its IS coming for the Missile Marine Corps!.

via Breaking Defense.

The Army is not trying to challenge the division of labor laid down at the famous 1948 meeting in Key West, Fla. between the chiefs of the Army, Navy and the newly-independent Air Force. There’s plenty of precedent within that framework for the Army to have surface-launched missiles that can fire one thousand miles or more, Rafferty said.

“I don’t think we need to go back to Key West, although I wouldn’t mind a trip there to discuss it,” Rafferty told me.

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Army Advantages

At the most basic level, Army artillery units do things differently from naval vessels or air squadrons, so they add another problem for an enemy to solve. In some cases, land-based missiles have advantages over air- or sea-launched ones.

Concealability is one such. While aircraft and even surface warships can be designed with stealth features to hide from radar, they’re never invisible, and there’s nothing at sea or in the air to hide behind. Airbases, meanwhile, are notoriously large and static targets. But for artillery units, camouflage can be as cheap and simple as slapping on a coat of green paint, erecting some netting with tree branches on top, or driving into a tunnel. Indeed, as North Korea has shown, a wheeled missile launcher under a mountain is even harder to find than a submarine under the ocean. (Of course the enemy has to roll that artillery into the open to use it.)

The US and its allies, for all their surveillance technology, struggled to find Saddam’s SCUD missile launchers in 1991 and 2003, Rafferty notes. And that was in the open desert, not the more varied terrain of Eastern Europe or Pacific islands. Even the largest artillery systems the Army is developing, the semitrailer-mounted Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon and the Strategic Long-Range Cannon supergun, will still be small enough to conceal, he said.

Story here. 

A certain reader has made the last bold comments in the article several times in our debate about the Missile Marine Corps.

My refrain has always been if we become the Missile Marine Corps that Berger wants then what makes us necessary to the nation.

What makes us unique.

Well according to this article not a damn thing.  I can't believe people tend to forget one thing.  The Army WILL NOT be left out of any fight in any region on this planet. 

The Marine Corps was once the same.  

Not the New Missile Marine Corps!  We are pigeon holing ourselves into one fight against one enemy in one region.  That's a mistake.  No one has ever correctly predicted the next fight.  The Commandant is thinking the Pacific.  I'm thinking Northern Africa.