The Army and the Need for an Amphibious Capability: Role in the Pivot to the Pacific, Defeating Aggression, DOTMLPF Doctrine, Organization, Training, Materiel, Leadership and Education, Personnel

This excellent report has been professionally converted for accurate flowing-text e-book format reproduction. Though national strategic guidance does not specify the need for the United States Army to maintain an amphibious capability, joint doctrine does task the Army with providing landing forces as part of larger, joint amphibious operations. This doctrine, when coupled with the Joint Staff s Joint Operational Access Concept, that outlines the means by which U.S. forces project power to defeat aggression in the face of increasingly complex anti-access and area-denial weapons and technologies, the so-called "pivot" to the Pacific, and shortfalls in existing joint amphibious capacity, suggests that the Army is in need of an amphibious capability. This study assesses this need in light of anticipated amphibious requirements, the Army's historical role in amphibious operations, and an analysis of Army doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership/education, personnel, and facilities (DOTMLPF) to identify capability gaps that the Army would need to address in order to fulfill its role in Joint amphibious operations.

Throughout the history of the United States, the Army has repeated a cycle of attaining proficiency in a particular type of warfare and then ignoring those capabilities in favor of general forms of warfare, only to have to relearn these special skills during a future conflict—sometimes at a cost of thousands of American casualties. The US Army learned and conducted trench warfare during the American Civil War, but then neglected it from 1865-1917, paying the cost in human life on the battlefields of World War I while trying to reacquire a skill it once possessed. Counterinsurgency operations honed in Vietnam but ignored in the 1980s and 1990s, later rose to prominence in the villages of Afghanistan and the streets of Iraq. Before World War II the Army developed a robust amphibious capability consisting of a two-star Amphibious Training Center, large quantities of equipment capable of supporting amphibious operations, and units with amphibious operational experience. The Army's invaluable amphibious capability has atrophied since World War II to the point that almost zero capability exists today within the Army. This monograph proposes that an amphibious capability gap currently exists within the Army as part of a larger Joint Force and when the Joint Force calls upon the Army to conduct amphibious operations, it will be unable to do so.

Any need for the Army to possess an amphibious capability would, of course, only exist if such a requirement was anticipated within the future operational environment. The Capstone Concept for Joint Operations: Joint Force 2020 states that the future environment will include characteristics such as the "proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the rise of competitor states . . . regional instability . . . and competition for resources."1 In scenarios where these threats have presented themselves in the recent past, the US has had time to "build up combat power in the area, perform detailed rehearsals and integration activities, and then conduct operations when and where desired." Anti-access and area denial (A2/AD), the primary emerging threat within the future environment, hinders the US military's ability from operating the way it has in the past. Anti-access and area denial capabilities "challenge and threaten the ability of the U.S. and allied forces to both get to the fight and to fight effectively once there."