A Useful Amphibious Exercise

The Marines/Navy conduct virtually worthless amphibious exercises.  Neat rows of AAVs swim to shore from a ship perched just offshore (what happened to the 25-50 mile standoff that doctrine calls for?).  With parade like precision they leave the water and proceed, unimpeded (other than by cameramen for photo ops), to an assembly point for more photos and then, perhaps, simulate a humanitarian mission or, possibly, a raid on a small village to rescue hostages.  Does that sound like a realistic exercise?  It sounds about as worthless as it gets.

Does This Look Like A Realistic, Useful Exercise?

Here’s what a useful amphibious exercise should be …

The exercise should start only if significant, adverse weather is present.  That’s probably how it will be in a real war so let’s start dealing with waves, rain, and wind.

An actual and significant opposing force (OpFor) should contest every second of the exercise including the approach into the area.  Let’s involve the Air Force and give them free reign to try to stop the amphibious force using any tactics they can think of.  Interservice rivalry and pride should provide all the realism and creativity we need.  Let’s include manned aircraft simulating cruise missiles (since we don’t have enough drones to do anything worthwhile).  Let’s give them free reign to begin attacking as far out to sea as they can detect the amphibious force (there’s your 25-50 mile stand off !).  Let’s have them conduct attacks on any forces that land and see how we perform anti-air defense (hint: we don’t have anti-air capability!).

Let’s include an opposing submarine force and see if they can penetrate and sink the amphibious ships.

Then, let’s set up a division size OpFor (yeah, good practice for the defenders, too, in commanding and controlling a large unit – something we don’t practice at all, anymore) to defend the beach and, again, give them free reign to devise their own tactics.  Let’s give them engineering units to construct obstacles, trenches to be crossed, and fortifications (good practice for combat applications of engineering instead of building schools in third world countries) and see how the amphibious force deals with them (I bet they won’t have a clue).

Let’s emplace extensive simulated minefields and make the assaulting force deal with them (what a cluster* that will be!).

Let’s give the defending force a full complement of electronic warfare capabilities.  Let them jam, decoy, disable GPS, cyber attack, and any other tactic they can think of and make the assaulting force operate in a degraded electronic environment.  Let’s see what (and who!) can work under those conditions and what can’t.

Let’s have referees permanently remove ‘dead’ ships, aircraft, and personnel from the exercise – no ‘reanimations’.  We can, and should, repeat the exercise, in its entirety, as often as necessary to ensure that all units can participate start to finish.  Those that keep getting killed and can’t participate are either trying to execute flawed tactics or they have incompetent commanders.  Either way, it’s something we should identify as opposed to our current practice of reanimating dead units over and over again with no penalty.  If they’re consistently dying, that’s telling us something!

With the above defensive efforts, we should have a lot of induced confusion (What do you mean, my MLP sea base is sunk?!  I’ve only got one!  What am I supposed to do now??) but let’s not stop there.  Let’s add additional layers of confusion and chaos.

Let’s apply lots of smoke.  There will be lots of smoke from explosions and burning equipment in a real war so let’s get used to our vision and our sensors being degraded.

Let’s use lots of flash-bang explosives.  A real war is going to be incredibly noisy so let’s start learning how to communicate when you have to scream into the radio.

Let’s have referees arbitrarily misdirect landing vehicles to the wrong areas – you know, just like will happen in a real assault – and see how units recover and reorient.

Let’s have ‘dead’ vehicles and equipment get left where they are, constituting additional obstacles for subsequent units.

Let’s have referees arbitrarily insert incorrect orders into communications - you know, just like will happen in a real assault – and see whether the receiving units can figure out for themselves what to do.

Let’s remove half of all the supplies delivered to the beach to simulate actual combat usage which is always 2x-5x the predicted rate and see how we deal with ammo and supply shortages.

All right, that’s enough to get us started.  Seriously, what do you think would happen if we did this?  I know exactly what would happen.  We’d immediately find out that most of our doctrine is unexecutable.  Most of our tactics will be seen as flawed.  None of our plans will work.  We’ll have great difficulty loading, launching, and coordinating AAVs due to the weather.  Most of our equipment will be found susceptible to electronic warfare effects.  Our communications will be compromised.  All of our commanders will be confused and begin issuing contradictory orders.  We’ll find that we lack all kinds of useful equipment.  None of our equipment will work as advertised – some will be useless and some will be less effective but still somewhat useful.  

This Is What We Should Be Simulating

In short, the exercise would be a total debacle … exactly what we want!  That’s how you find out what really works and what doesn’t.  That’s how you learn.

Let’s do it, let’s fail, and let’s get better.