GyBill
05-03-2010, 10:49
Marines chart a course for future landings
Constraints in moving larger gear ashore leaves Corps in a bind
By Amy McCullough - Staff writer
Posted : Monday May 3, 2010 9:33:58 EDT
The commandant has made it clear that Marines need to reclaim their role as “soldiers of the sea,” but he and other Marine officials are worried about more than rusty skills after nearly a decade spent fighting two land wars.
Future naval deployments will require a degree of creativity, they say, as new big-deck amphibious ships come on line without space for hovercrafts needed to bring Marines and their gear ashore, or for stowing the Corps’ bigger, beefier vehicles. Another big concern: There are fewer amphibs to go around.
This pending dilemma could force the Corps to change the way it configures its expeditionary units, sending Marines out on four amphibs instead of the traditional three, or force the Navy to alter the design of its LHA 8, a big-deck amphib that has yet to move beyond the conceptual phase. But Marine officials acknowledge there really are no clear answers just yet.
“Amphibs are a valuable commodity. They are a utility ship in high demand, and that demand outstrips capability,” said Col. Scott Walker, the Corps’ expeditionary policy branch head in the Plans, Policies and Operations division at the Pentagon. “It’s going to be a problem. We’re going to have to know what our priorities are and where we can accept risk. We’re going through those analyses right now to determine how we’re going to go out, what we’ll look like and what the [Marine expeditionary unit] will look like in the future.”
Simply too big
The next-generation of big deck amphibs, the America-class LHA 6 and the unnamed LHA 7, were designed without well decks to create what’s been dubbed a “Marine Corps aircraft carrier” built around the F-35B Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, a jump jet like the Corps’ AV-8B Harrier, and big-rotary wing aircraft such as the MV-22 Osprey and the heavy-lift CH-53K Super Stallion.
But as the America class gets ready to enter the fleet in fiscal 2012 and the Navy prepares to start purchasing the LHA 7s in fiscal 2011, the Corps is scrambling to figure out how it will operate on such ships.
“LHA 6 is perfectly designed for what it’s designed for — but fast-forward to today, and our equipment is much bigger and heavier; it’s bulkier, and it’s more difficult to lift to get the gear off the ships,” said retired Col. James Strock, director of the Marine Corps Combat Development Center’s Seabasing Integration Division at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va.
Tanks, trucks and mine-resistant vehicles can’t be flown ashore, which is the only way the America-class will be able to deliver troops and gear unless the ship pulls up pierside to offload. Even the Corps’ biggest birds won’t be strong enough to carry a Medium Tactical Vehicle Replacement, an all-terrain vehicle that can carry 15 tons on highways and up to 7 tons off-road. The CH-53K, the largest of the Corps’ heavy haulers, is at least another six years in the making. It will be able to carry up to 27,000 pounds, a significant improvement over existing heavy-lift capability but insufficient to haul the MTVR, which will likely weigh about 27,900 pounds with just enough oil and gas to get it started, said Maj. Scott Boisvert, a Marine Air-Ground Task Force data specialist at MCCDC.
“If we shipped it without ammunition and nothing in the bed of the truck, it’s still too heavy,” Boisvert said, “but we just don’t send vehicles ashore in that configuration because then you’d have to spend time putting the vehicle back together [on land] so it could go and conduct a mission. That just doesn’t make sense to do that in a potentially hazardous environment. It’s best to do that in a safe location, which is usually on the ship, and then send it forward.”
The Corps will not completely lose its ability to shuttle vehicles ashore, however. The San Antonio-class small deck “gators” can carry two Landing Craft Air Cushions, better known as LCACs, and the Navy’s amphibious assault ships, the Wasp-class LHD-1s, can carry three LCACs or two Landing Craft Utilities, a smaller landing craft similar to an LCAC. But there is no doubt that overall there will be less room to carry equipment, meaning MEU commanders will have to carefully pick and choose how they are going to send Marines and their gear to shore — even more so than they do today.
“If you can only put so many LCACs ashore, the guys that you decide to send first may have to sit there for two to three hours until the next group comes in,” Strock said. “Anytime you extend a timeline like that, you are looking at more operational risks.”
Not only will the limited number of LCACs extend the operational timeline, but the way vehicles are stored could present a similar time dilemma in the future, officials said.
Today, the basic Humvee is about 6 feet tall, but Boisvert estimates future Humvees will range from 6 feet, 4 inches, to 7 feet, 7 inches, depending on whether the suspension system is activated and the vehicle is raised to its max height. And that doesn’t take into consideration modifications that can be made to the vehicle so it can act as an ambulance or carry bulky communications gear, he said. Those changes can add another 20 to 24 inches to a Humvee. Add an armored gun system and you bring its max height to almost 10 feet.
Another example is the MTVR, which is about 13 feet tall with an armored gun shield attached, Boisvert said.
“That now becomes an issue because some of the vehicles will only fit into certain places on the LPD 17, which is the main vehicle stowage forward and the upper vehicle stowage. If the equipment is stowed behind a lot of equipment then you have to start playing a lot of the shell game to get that equipment to shore via LCAC,” he said. “You can store the equipment anywhere on the LHA 6, but then you have the issue of how you are going to get it off.”
No easy answers
A typical MEU includes about 2,200 troops and brings along four M1A1 tanks, 31 trucks — to include a variety of MTVRs or Logistic Vehicle Replacement Systems — and roughly 117 Humvees. Those vehicles are spread out over three amphibious ships, which make up the amphibious ready group. With a finite amount of space, it’s impossible to bring everything the MEU commander might need.
“We try to best guess and fit the ships individually to do different things so the ideal meets the reality,” said Col. Mark J. Desens, the 26th MEU’s commanding officer. “You have to start making compromises for how to just get all the capabilities aboard the ship. They are hard decisions because once you leave the States, it’s hard to change out gear.”
In the future, commanders such as Desens will have to focus primarily on equipment that is “absolutely crucial and essential,” Walker said.
Another potential option would be to store some additional gear at a number of geographically prepositioned locations so the MEU would not have to carry as much equipment, he said. A similar approach has been used in Iraq and Afghanistan, where MEUs were able to pull equipment out of Kuwait, through the MEU Augmentation Program, to “round out their mobility, weapons capability and communications.”
Still another option: adding a fourth ship to the three-ship ARG. But that could create more challenges for the Corps, which already feels it doesn’t have all the amphibs that it wants.
Marine and Navy officials have been at odds for decades over the amphib requirement. The Marine Corps’ basic goal is to be able to conduct major invasions with two Marine expeditionary brigades, each of which includes more than 14,000 Marines, their armored vehicles, aircraft, weapons and supplies. Of those, a little more than 10,000 Marines make up the assault echelon — trigger pullers and door kickers — that would ride ashore from Navy ships.
To accommodate an assault force of that size, the Corps wants at least 15 amphibious ships, preferably 17, to account for times when some of the Navy’s gators would be in overhaul. So two MEBs would require at least 34 ships, and the Corps wants four more ships to account for the 10 percent to 15 percent of the gator fleet in the shipyard at any one time: hence the official Marine requirement for a fleet of 38 amphibious ships.
The Navy prefers much more powerful and expensive surface combatants, though, and has typically said it needs a much smaller number of amphibs: 29 to 33.
With that in mind, Marine officials have already started reworking plans for a new version of the amphibious assault ship America. The “LHA 8 Concept” would combine new aviation features the Marines want in the America class with a traditional big-deck capacity for landing craft and “green” gear.
The specs for LHA 8 reflect compromises: It could accommodate two LCACs instead of three, its hangar bay would handle only one MV-22 Osprey instead of two, and it would carry fewer Marines overall than either of its parents, America and Makin Island. Those ships are designed to fit nearly 1,700 troops. The Corps’ version of LHA 8 would handle 1,400.
The Corps also wants LHA 8 to have at least as much vehicle stowage as America, but preferably even more. This hypothetical ship also would be widened by about 7 feet, allowing for a new flight deck on the starboard side just forward of the ship’s superstructure, where the bridge is located. The additional space would feature three new parking spaces for Ospreys.
It’s unlikely, though, that any LHA 8 would enter the fleet before 2020. So officials will have to pay particular attention to near-term solutions that address the Corps’ fatter equipment and complicated ship design.
“We’re still trying to figure out how we are going to integrate a big deck ship that doesn’t have a well deck. We have several options at our disposal. It’s just a matter of what will fit best and what’s the most workable solution,” Walker said. “I didn’t say it’s going to be easy.”
Constraints in moving larger gear ashore leaves Corps in a bind
By Amy McCullough - Staff writer
Posted : Monday May 3, 2010 9:33:58 EDT
The commandant has made it clear that Marines need to reclaim their role as “soldiers of the sea,” but he and other Marine officials are worried about more than rusty skills after nearly a decade spent fighting two land wars.
Future naval deployments will require a degree of creativity, they say, as new big-deck amphibious ships come on line without space for hovercrafts needed to bring Marines and their gear ashore, or for stowing the Corps’ bigger, beefier vehicles. Another big concern: There are fewer amphibs to go around.
This pending dilemma could force the Corps to change the way it configures its expeditionary units, sending Marines out on four amphibs instead of the traditional three, or force the Navy to alter the design of its LHA 8, a big-deck amphib that has yet to move beyond the conceptual phase. But Marine officials acknowledge there really are no clear answers just yet.
“Amphibs are a valuable commodity. They are a utility ship in high demand, and that demand outstrips capability,” said Col. Scott Walker, the Corps’ expeditionary policy branch head in the Plans, Policies and Operations division at the Pentagon. “It’s going to be a problem. We’re going to have to know what our priorities are and where we can accept risk. We’re going through those analyses right now to determine how we’re going to go out, what we’ll look like and what the [Marine expeditionary unit] will look like in the future.”
Simply too big
The next-generation of big deck amphibs, the America-class LHA 6 and the unnamed LHA 7, were designed without well decks to create what’s been dubbed a “Marine Corps aircraft carrier” built around the F-35B Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, a jump jet like the Corps’ AV-8B Harrier, and big-rotary wing aircraft such as the MV-22 Osprey and the heavy-lift CH-53K Super Stallion.
But as the America class gets ready to enter the fleet in fiscal 2012 and the Navy prepares to start purchasing the LHA 7s in fiscal 2011, the Corps is scrambling to figure out how it will operate on such ships.
“LHA 6 is perfectly designed for what it’s designed for — but fast-forward to today, and our equipment is much bigger and heavier; it’s bulkier, and it’s more difficult to lift to get the gear off the ships,” said retired Col. James Strock, director of the Marine Corps Combat Development Center’s Seabasing Integration Division at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va.
Tanks, trucks and mine-resistant vehicles can’t be flown ashore, which is the only way the America-class will be able to deliver troops and gear unless the ship pulls up pierside to offload. Even the Corps’ biggest birds won’t be strong enough to carry a Medium Tactical Vehicle Replacement, an all-terrain vehicle that can carry 15 tons on highways and up to 7 tons off-road. The CH-53K, the largest of the Corps’ heavy haulers, is at least another six years in the making. It will be able to carry up to 27,000 pounds, a significant improvement over existing heavy-lift capability but insufficient to haul the MTVR, which will likely weigh about 27,900 pounds with just enough oil and gas to get it started, said Maj. Scott Boisvert, a Marine Air-Ground Task Force data specialist at MCCDC.
“If we shipped it without ammunition and nothing in the bed of the truck, it’s still too heavy,” Boisvert said, “but we just don’t send vehicles ashore in that configuration because then you’d have to spend time putting the vehicle back together [on land] so it could go and conduct a mission. That just doesn’t make sense to do that in a potentially hazardous environment. It’s best to do that in a safe location, which is usually on the ship, and then send it forward.”
The Corps will not completely lose its ability to shuttle vehicles ashore, however. The San Antonio-class small deck “gators” can carry two Landing Craft Air Cushions, better known as LCACs, and the Navy’s amphibious assault ships, the Wasp-class LHD-1s, can carry three LCACs or two Landing Craft Utilities, a smaller landing craft similar to an LCAC. But there is no doubt that overall there will be less room to carry equipment, meaning MEU commanders will have to carefully pick and choose how they are going to send Marines and their gear to shore — even more so than they do today.
“If you can only put so many LCACs ashore, the guys that you decide to send first may have to sit there for two to three hours until the next group comes in,” Strock said. “Anytime you extend a timeline like that, you are looking at more operational risks.”
Not only will the limited number of LCACs extend the operational timeline, but the way vehicles are stored could present a similar time dilemma in the future, officials said.
Today, the basic Humvee is about 6 feet tall, but Boisvert estimates future Humvees will range from 6 feet, 4 inches, to 7 feet, 7 inches, depending on whether the suspension system is activated and the vehicle is raised to its max height. And that doesn’t take into consideration modifications that can be made to the vehicle so it can act as an ambulance or carry bulky communications gear, he said. Those changes can add another 20 to 24 inches to a Humvee. Add an armored gun system and you bring its max height to almost 10 feet.
Another example is the MTVR, which is about 13 feet tall with an armored gun shield attached, Boisvert said.
“That now becomes an issue because some of the vehicles will only fit into certain places on the LPD 17, which is the main vehicle stowage forward and the upper vehicle stowage. If the equipment is stowed behind a lot of equipment then you have to start playing a lot of the shell game to get that equipment to shore via LCAC,” he said. “You can store the equipment anywhere on the LHA 6, but then you have the issue of how you are going to get it off.”
No easy answers
A typical MEU includes about 2,200 troops and brings along four M1A1 tanks, 31 trucks — to include a variety of MTVRs or Logistic Vehicle Replacement Systems — and roughly 117 Humvees. Those vehicles are spread out over three amphibious ships, which make up the amphibious ready group. With a finite amount of space, it’s impossible to bring everything the MEU commander might need.
“We try to best guess and fit the ships individually to do different things so the ideal meets the reality,” said Col. Mark J. Desens, the 26th MEU’s commanding officer. “You have to start making compromises for how to just get all the capabilities aboard the ship. They are hard decisions because once you leave the States, it’s hard to change out gear.”
In the future, commanders such as Desens will have to focus primarily on equipment that is “absolutely crucial and essential,” Walker said.
Another potential option would be to store some additional gear at a number of geographically prepositioned locations so the MEU would not have to carry as much equipment, he said. A similar approach has been used in Iraq and Afghanistan, where MEUs were able to pull equipment out of Kuwait, through the MEU Augmentation Program, to “round out their mobility, weapons capability and communications.”
Still another option: adding a fourth ship to the three-ship ARG. But that could create more challenges for the Corps, which already feels it doesn’t have all the amphibs that it wants.
Marine and Navy officials have been at odds for decades over the amphib requirement. The Marine Corps’ basic goal is to be able to conduct major invasions with two Marine expeditionary brigades, each of which includes more than 14,000 Marines, their armored vehicles, aircraft, weapons and supplies. Of those, a little more than 10,000 Marines make up the assault echelon — trigger pullers and door kickers — that would ride ashore from Navy ships.
To accommodate an assault force of that size, the Corps wants at least 15 amphibious ships, preferably 17, to account for times when some of the Navy’s gators would be in overhaul. So two MEBs would require at least 34 ships, and the Corps wants four more ships to account for the 10 percent to 15 percent of the gator fleet in the shipyard at any one time: hence the official Marine requirement for a fleet of 38 amphibious ships.
The Navy prefers much more powerful and expensive surface combatants, though, and has typically said it needs a much smaller number of amphibs: 29 to 33.
With that in mind, Marine officials have already started reworking plans for a new version of the amphibious assault ship America. The “LHA 8 Concept” would combine new aviation features the Marines want in the America class with a traditional big-deck capacity for landing craft and “green” gear.
The specs for LHA 8 reflect compromises: It could accommodate two LCACs instead of three, its hangar bay would handle only one MV-22 Osprey instead of two, and it would carry fewer Marines overall than either of its parents, America and Makin Island. Those ships are designed to fit nearly 1,700 troops. The Corps’ version of LHA 8 would handle 1,400.
The Corps also wants LHA 8 to have at least as much vehicle stowage as America, but preferably even more. This hypothetical ship also would be widened by about 7 feet, allowing for a new flight deck on the starboard side just forward of the ship’s superstructure, where the bridge is located. The additional space would feature three new parking spaces for Ospreys.
It’s unlikely, though, that any LHA 8 would enter the fleet before 2020. So officials will have to pay particular attention to near-term solutions that address the Corps’ fatter equipment and complicated ship design.
“We’re still trying to figure out how we are going to integrate a big deck ship that doesn’t have a well deck. We have several options at our disposal. It’s just a matter of what will fit best and what’s the most workable solution,” Walker said. “I didn’t say it’s going to be easy.”