Three organizations were tasked with conducting a Future Fleet Architecture study to draw up a plan for what kinds of ships in what quantities may best help the Navy carry out missions decades down the road. The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, one of the three participants, last week unveiled one piece of that future fleet in a report called “Amphibious Operations in an Era of Precision Weapons.” Predominately focused on a high-end fight in the Pacific, the CSBA plan in some ways diverges from what Pacific Marines say they need but generally agrees that the next war will be fought against a sophisticated enemy with long-range precision weapons that will necessitate a new operational concept – and that the Navy will need more amphibious ships to support the Marines in this war...
To meet all the combatant commanders’ needs for amphibious forces, though, service leaders have said the fleet would need more than 50 amphibs. While it is not yet known how many amphibs the Navy will aim for going forward – the service should soon release both a Force Structure Assessment that states how many ships of what kind the service needs, along with the Future Fleet Architecture studies that take a more open-ended look at what a future force may be composed of – the CSBA study on amphibious operations calls for 40 ships and is a good indication that the Navy may consider a larger amphibious fleet going forward.
According to CSBA’s report, the Navy and Marine Corps should grow their amphibious forces, morph the big-deck amphibious assault ship into a catapult-launch/arrested recovery light carrier, add a vertical launching system (VLS) to the smaller amphibs and station more forces forward to help the Navy and Marine Corps better prepare for a high-end fight.
Importantly, the CSBA report calls for a greater reliance on aviation to conduct missions at long ranges. Noting that the MV-22 Osprey can only lift the un-armored Internally Transportable Vehicle (ITV) that can tow a Howitzer, the report calls for lighter Marine Corps ground vehicles. It calls for a new concept of surface connectors – suggesting that the ideal of a high-speed Amphibious Combat Vehicle that self-deploys from ship to shore but is optimized for ground combat may no longer be useful, it instead calls for connectors optimized for open ocean transport to drop off ground vehicles on the beach. And it calls for the acquisition of ground-based long-range precision fires, the addition of VLS to LPDs and LSDs, and the development of long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicles for targeting.
Most surprisingly, though, the report states that the Navy’s Flight 0 America-class amphibious assault ship design – which eliminated a welldeck and instead focuses the ship on aviation support – is preferable to the updated Flight I design, which re-introduces a smaller well deck beginning with the third ship in the class, the future Bougainville (LHA-8). CSBA recommends reverting to the Flight 0 design in the short term and eventually transitioning to a conventionally powered catapult-launch light carrier, similar in size to a Midway-class carrier. To offset the loss of the well deck, CSBA would have the Navy deploy four-ship Amphibious Ready Groups instead of three-ship ARGs – adding a second LX(R) dock landing ship (LSD) replacement to provide about four more helicopters and two surface connectors.
Ultimately, CSBA’s plan calls for 11 big decks – both the current amphibious assault ships and the future light carriers – and 29 smaller LPDs and LX(R)s. About three big-decks and eight smaller amphibs would be stationed forward as part of the Forward Deployed Naval Force (FDNF) in the Pacific, Mediterranean and Persian Gulf. They would have shorter training cycles to create more operational time at sea, and to reduce training they’d focus specifically on their geographical location and likely operational requirements instead of the full range of military operations. Among the rest of the amphibs, a separately trained force would serve as a backstop, being ready for missions in these areas of operations that are outside the training of the FDNF forces...
Similarly, CSBA’s deployment and readiness model relies heavily on the MEU construct rather than the MEB and division-level groups that Simcock said last week the Marine Corps and Navy need to focus on, which could lead to some reservations from Marine leadership if the Navy were to implement CSBA’s recommendations. Still, having 40 amphibs instead of today’s 31 could go a long way in fulfilling what Simcock often calls his Christmas wish – more amphib ships for the 3rd Marine Division.