In the News
Marines Should Deploy with More Ships, Planes: Think Tank
Want to win from the water? Add a fourth ship to deploying amphibious ready groups and double the number of strike fighter aircraft aboard.
Want to win from the water? Add a fourth ship to deploying amphibious ready groups and double the number of strike fighter aircraft aboard.
The Marine Corps prides itself on being able to project power from sea to shore. But its land vehicles are just too heavy for its key airborne ship-to-shore connector, the MV-22 Osprey to carry. In a report released yesterday by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, authors Bryan Clark and Jesse Sloman say increased protection requirements are making new vehicles even heavier than the old ones they’re replacing.
Marines are famously aggressive, but a new battle plan from a leading thinktank makes Iwo Jima look low-risk. The Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments’ proposed concept of operations is imaginative, exciting and more than a little scary.
The fleet could be grown to the size advocated by Trump, or at least close to it, by the 2030s, said Bryan Clark, a former senior aide to Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jon Greenert and an analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
The Navy is nearing the end of a triplet of Future Fleet Architecture studies – conducted by MITRE Corporation, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis (CSBA) and the Navy – to look at how new technologies and concepts may change the size and composition of the Navy in the mid-term. While the Navy has not yet released the details of the three studies, the general consensus is that the future fleet will have to be larger than today’s.
As 2016 draws to a close, Navy Leadership is in possession of a great deal of Blue-ribbon thinking about fleet architecture and force structure, the result of Congressional direction contained in the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and elsewhere. Specifically, the Rand Corporation has submitted a study of the future of Aircraft carriers, and three separate organizations (The Mitre Corporation, the Navy Staff (N81), and the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) have submitted views of appropriate future fleet architectures.