The Marines hit the beach – with robots?
The latest “Marine Corps” issue of Proceedings has another provocative article from Lt Col Noel Williams, USMC. The Next Wave: Assault Operations for a New Era (subscribers only) advises the Marine Corps and Navy to develop unmanned breacher vehicles (UBVs) to perform the first, most dangerous wave of an opposed amphibious assault. Earlier this year, Williams and Captain Henry Hendrix, USN controversially proposed phasing out big Nimitz and Ford-class CVNs in favor of a much greater number of America/Wasp-class LHA/LHDs. In his new essay, Williams is proposing a robotic replacement for the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV), a project that collapsed in engineering overreach.
The EFV died because the Marine Corps expected it to do too many things. The anti-ship missile threat has pushed the launch point for an amphibious assault out to at least 25 miles from the land. The Marine Corps wanted the EFV to traverse this distance in one hour. On land, the EFV was to be a late-model infantry fighting vehicle, complete with chem-bio protection, able to take on other armored vehicles, network with others, and hopefully survive IEDs. It was an impossible engineering task, at least at an affordable price.
Williams proposes to let robots breach the beach obstacles. An excerpt:
In the 2020s and beyond there will simply be no reason to place 20 Marines in a steel box and drive them through mined waters to land on an area-denied beach. An unmanned breacher vehicle (UBV), or family of unmanned systems, could clear and mark the assault lanes ahead of any manned surface movement. These UBVs could be launched from surface, subsurface, or airborne delivery means—overtly or covertly. UBVs could be given large magnetic and acoustic signatures to trigger influence mines and could be equipped with cameras, remote gun systems, plows, cutters, and/or line charges to clear beach obstacles. Additionally, it would be possible to transition the UBV to convoy reconnaissance and clearing missions once manned vehicles are ashore.
Introducing an unmanned system breaks the tyranny of the hybrid vehicle that we have found to be so costly and that inevitably results in compromises in both operating domains—afloat and ashore.
Under this concept, once the robots have cleared the beach, non-armored but high-capacity landing craft such as LCACs LCUs, and other connectors could bring ashore all of the ground-only vehicles and equipment, such as tanks, the next-generation Marine Personnel Carrier (which could very well be like the Army’s Stryker), trucks, logistics, etc.
In summary, Williams describes the following general phases for an amphibious assault:
- ISR
- Shaping fires/advance force operations
- Vertical (helicopter) assault of distributed teams
- Unmanned surface assault
- Surface assault
- General off-load as required.
Without humans aboard, unmanned breaching vehicles could take many hours or even days to swim ashore. They could launch from much farther distances in a much wider area of ocean. And DARPA and others have already demonstrated the ability of unmanned vehicles to self-navigate and to move, communicate, and shoot.
Williams concludes his essay with a discussion of the problem of achieving fire/network superiority in the wider amphibious objective area in the modern era. It was this general problem that killed the EFV and would still need to be solved in order to make any opposed amphibious assault, including one by robots, a feasible endeavor.
Williams discusses the need for the Marines and Navy to locate and target the enemy’s sensor and guided munitions network before and after the surface assault. Breaking down the enemy’s battle network is partly, or even mostly, a battle to achieve superiority over the electro-magnetic spectrum. That task would take place during the first three phases listed above. It would be a task for air and naval precision fires and those air-delivered infantry teams performing distributed operations. And it is a phase that could last weeks or even months.
In the age of long-range guided munitions and their sensors, an opposed amphibious assault will look far different than Iwo Jima. Under this concept, precision air and naval fires, supported by distributed teams of Marines ashore, would wage a long attritional campaign against the enemy’s sensors and missiles. That would clear the way for the surface assault, which, with enough preparation, would ideally be largely permissive.
The Marine Corps is searching for a cheaper replacement for the EFV and a way to keep the opposed amphibious assault viable in the age of guided missiles. Williams’ beach assault robots are a helpful idea. But the bigger problem is achieving dominance over the enemy’s sensors and the electro-magnetic spectrum. Regardless of the landing craft, the Navy and the Marine Corps need a solution and a doctrine for that problem.
