Putting a value on amphibious capability
The recent cancellation of the U.S. Marine Corps’ Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV) sparked a debate over how the Marine Corps could maintain a capability to conduct an amphibious assault against high-end adversaries on contested shorelines. While the debate over this important, hopefully rare and hypothetical scenario continues, it is also worth considering the value of very real strategic shaping operations Marine Corps and Navy amphibious forces conduct nearly every day somewhere in the world.
In Tough Choices: Sustaining Amphibious Capabilities’ Contributions to Strategic Shaping, a new report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Maren Leed and Benjamin Moody analyze the value amphibious operations currently make to America’s “strategic shaping” strategy. As the debate over the EFV showed, amphibious capabilities are expensive and compete with other defense priorities. In their report, Leed and Moody assert that calculations that look for savings in the amphibious budget should take into account the cost it would take other substitute forces to perform the strategic shaping or “Phase Zero” missions currently performed by U.S. amphibious forces and the risk assumed by no longer performing those shaping missions.
Resources for the Leed-Moody report included numerous interviews with a variety of military officers and diplomats, along with examinations of unit records, post-deployments briefs, and command histories. In the preparation of the report, the authors assessed the importance and impact by geographical region of various shaping activities (humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations, partnership activities, and regional assurance and deterrence operations). Similarly compared were the regional importance of the various attributes of amphibious capabilities (breadth, visibility, responsiveness, scalability, persistence, mobility, etc.).
Leed and Moody recommend that decision-makers in the Pentagon adopt an opportunity cost model when contemplating force structure reductions. In addition to standard cost and risk considerations, such a model would also consider the costs shifted to other capabilities by a force structure decision and the risks assumed from foregoing strategic shaping activities.
In addition, listen to this 6:38 audio summary of the report delivered by Maren Leed.
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