Out of the Mountains
Page 36
How, then, will military forces need to organize and operate for this environment? In the first instance, they’ll need to get there.
Getting Ashore . . .
Getting into the littoral zone will involve amphibious operations, but these probably won’t look much like Saving Private Ryan, with massed naval gunfire stonking a heavily defended beach, and troops wading ashore from flat-bottomed boats, under intense fire from dug-in positions protected by obstacles underwater and on the shore. This may be a depiction of amphibious assault in conventional war, but there are many types of amphibious operations—including amphibious raids, demonstrations and withdrawals, and amphibious support to other operations.26 And, as we saw in Chapter 4, naval forces can help ground troops maneuver along coastlines (using the sea as a maneuver space, embarking them to avoid encirclement, and reinserting them to outflank an adversary), while ground forces can land to protect the flanks of a naval force operating in a constricted coastal waterway.
The last large-scale opposed amphibious assault in which U.S. forces were engaged was sixty-three years ago, during the Korean War, at the battle of Incheon in September 1950, mentioned briefly in Chapter 1. Incheon involved an opposed landing in urban terrain, followed by extremely slow and heavy house-to-house fighting, as U.S. forces advanced from the port of Incheon into the contiguous city of Seoul, which had a population of roughly one million at that time (its population today is almost ten million). The city had been depopulated and damaged during its capture by North Korean forces that July, but still represented a tough challenge. The operation entailed a difficult approach through constricted coastal channels, with little sea room, an enormous tidal range, and no opportunity for ships to maneuver. Underwater obstacles and defended islands hampered the attack. The landing force had to assault into an urban harbor, landing across seawalls and docks. Once the port was secured there was an urgent need to put it back into service so that other forces could be brought ashore to advance into Seoul. General Douglas MacArthur’s bold move to cut off North Korean forces by landing at Incheon is widely regarded as a strategic masterstroke, but as Russell Stolfi has argued, it was “followed by a ground advance to Seoul so tentative that it largely negated the successful landing.”27 The urbanized littoral terrain undoubtedly contributed to the slowness of this advance: the Marines secured Incheon in only twelve hours, but it took another twelve days to secure Seoul.
The most recent world (as distinct from U.S.-only) example of an opposed amphibious assault was in 2003, when British forces seized the Faw Peninsula in southern Iraq. The aim was to capture Iraq’s oil infrastructure intact and protect the landward flank of a naval task group that was clearing sea mines in the Khawr Abd Allah waterway. This was an essential part of the coalition effort to open the estuarine approach to Umm Q asr, Iraq’s only deepwater port. It was a joint (sea-air-land) operation involving 3 Commando Brigade, 40 and 42 Commando groups, helicopters, artillery, engineers, and the U.S. 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), supported by U.S. Air Force bombers and AC-130 Specter gunships, U.S. Navy F/A-18 fighters, and naval gunfire support from one Australian and three British warships.28
Unlike Incheon (but in common with most amphibious operations since the mid-1950s), this operation relied on air strikes and helicopters rather than battleships and surface landing craft. On the night of March 20, 2003, an assault force in helicopters launched from amphibious ships at sea after a short but intense air bombardment by land-based and carrier-based aircraft. Royal Marines from 40 Commando (a battalion-sized unit) air-assaulted directly onto their objectives just after 10:00 p.m. and seized oil infrastructure on the eastern side of the Khawr Abd Allah waterway. They bypassed the beach entirely. Simultaneously, U.S. Navy SEALs captured the Mina al-Bakr offshore oil terminal, and Polish GROM special forces captured the Khawr al-Amaya terminal (both of these were offshore oil platforms in the Faw Peninsula area). One hour later, the Royal Marines’ 42 Commando, supported by Cobra attack helicopters, ground-based artillery, and naval gunfire support, tried to land just north of the town of Al Faw but had to abort due to bad weather and an aircraft crash. They completed their assault landing in a different location the next morning. At the same time, on the western side of the waterway, 15th MEU left its staging area in Kuwait, crossed the land border into Iraq, bypassed the city of Umm Q asr, seized the port area intact, and then drove northward up the western coastline of Khawr Abd Allah. The Marines met heavy resistance from Iraqi irregular fighters in the urbanized terrain along the coastline, but soon reached their objectives.
Meanwhile, combat engineers and mine clearance divers, inserted by hovercraft from the sea, worked frantically to clear a beach wide enough to land British Army light armored vehicles, but they had to abandon this attempt due to large-scale mining by the Iraqis. The armor had to return to Kuwait, and ended up entering Iraq by land twenty-four hours later.29 As the British after-action review commented, the “co-operation between the Commando Groups and the MEU, the ships and helicopters from the Amphibious Task Group, the tanks and other elements of 1 (UK) Armoured Division, and the AC-130 Specter gunships and coalition Close Air Support sorties that supported the amphibious operation provided useful lessons for the all-arms approach to littoral operations.”30 Both Incheon and Al Faw, of course, also underline the incredible complexity of amphibious operations in urbanized littorals, and the difficulty of conducting a Normandy-style beach landing against a prepared enemy.
This type of operation will almost certainly happen again (and it would be extremely unwise to rule it out in conventional state-on-state operations), but a more likely scenario in the irregular operations that are the historical norm is that an advance force might have to seize a port, harbor, or airfield as a sea or air point of entry for follow-on forces, perhaps against light irregular opposition, then put it back into service as a base of operations. In fact, seizing a lodgment area large enough to cover both a seaport and an airfield will probably be a prerequisite for virtually any long-term operation in a littoral environment. As in the Faw Peninsula, this may involve a combination of helicopter-borne or air-landed forces as well as amphibious forces.
For example, on the first day (D-Day) of the Australian-led intervention in East Timor in September 1999, my company’s parent battalion had the objective of securing Komorro airport on the edge of Timor’s capital city, Dili, then immediately advancing into the city, through a densely urbanized littoral environment (parts of which happened to be on fire) to secure the harbor. We were a light infantry unit specializing in helicopter air assault, but for this operation we air-landed in C-130 transport aircraft directly onto the airstrip, then pushed out on foot and in light vehicles to seize the harbor. We had control of the port by nightfall on D-Day, allowing follow-on forces (armored vehicles) to land from the sea in navy amphibious ships that came into the harbor and docked under cover of darkness. The whole city was secured by sundown on D+1. The initial lodgment perimeter was quite large: it had a frontage of about four miles and covered the airfield, the port, and a critical road bridge over the Comoro River, which separated the two. The air assault troops had to hold the bridge for just over twenty-four hours, until armored units landing by ship were able to move inland and link up with them. Air traffic controllers, airfield operations units, and a harbor terminal operations group landed the first night and put the port and airfield back into operation as bases for further expansion of the foothold. The landing was only lightly and sporadically opposed—the enemy melted away once they realized the scale and speed of what was happening, though they returned after recovering from their initial shock. Similar initially unopposed landings occurred in the Falklands in 1982, in Somalia in 1993, and in Sierra Leone in 2000; this seems to be a fairly normal pattern in littoral operations against irregular opponents, or where (as in the Falklands) the task group achieves operational surprise by landing in an unexpected place. These kinds of joint air-land-sea insertions are know
n in Australian parlance as “entry from air and sea” (EAS) and in U.S. doctrine as “joint forcible entry operations.” They’ll probably be more common than Incheon-style surface assaults in future conflicts.31
As in the Faw Peninsula, modern thinking tends to focus on bypassing coastal defenses using helicopters and airborne forces. But in the cluttered and fully urbanized environment of the future, even without organized enemy defenses, finding unobstructed places to land will be highly problematic, and exits from landing areas surrounded by megaslums will be even harder to find. That said, there’s little mention of urbanized littorals in amphibious doctrine as it stands today. Indeed, the words urban and city don’t appear at all in the current (2009) U.S. joint publication on amphibious operations, which states that “the preferred tactic against coastal defenses is to avoid, bypass, or exploit gaps whenever possible.”32 Neither is littoral urbanization discussed in doctrine for joint forcible entry operations, published as recently as November 2012.33 In contrast, the August 2011 version of the capstone U.S. Marine Corps doctrine, Marine Corps Operations, talks extensively of “complex expeditionary operations in the urban littorals” and the difficulty of moving in restricted sea-space in coastal environments, suggesting that Navy and Marine thinking is further along in this regard than joint doctrine—although even Marine doctrine doesn’t engage with the challenges of dramatically enhanced connectivity that were described in Chapter 4 and will be present to an even greater degree in the urban, networked littorals of the future.34
The previous (2001) version of Marine Corps Operations also talked about littoral urbanization in detail, but subscribed to a then-current concept of coastal envelopment known as “operational maneuver from the sea” (OMFTS). Under OMFTS, Marines would launch from ships over the horizon (about twenty-five miles offshore) directly onto objectives up to two hundred miles inland, using a technique called “ship-to-objective maneuver” to bypass shore defenses, and thus avoiding the traditional pause to build up forces and supplies at a beachhead.35 Helicopters and MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft would move troops ashore, while surface vessels (including amphibious armored vehicles and hovercraft) might move to undefended or lightly defended points on the coast. The idea was to deploy forces through both vertical and surface means but keep the command, aviation, and logistics components afloat and well offshore, through a concept known as “sea basing.”36
This suite of concepts was never fully implemented, in part because (as we’ve already seen) the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq took Marines into landlocked environments, and in part because of resource shortfalls occasioned by those wars and the subsequent recession. As a result, much of the equipment for OMFTS wasn’t purchased, and capabilities that were acquired (such as the MV-22 Osprey) were used for quite different tasks in Iraq and Afghanistan. As these wars end, thinkers across the world are reengaging with a changed environment. In the decade since OMFTS was first proposed, it’s become even clearer that rapid urbanization in the littorals, the development of advanced antiaccess/area-denial (A2AD) technologies (such as sea mines and area-denial munitions) by some adversaries, and the lack of funding for OMFTS may render the idea of bypassing urban coastal areas moot. When the entire coastal strip is one giant urbanized area—Mike Davis’s “planet of slums”—there may be nowhere to bypass to, and thus no option but to enter the complex and dangerous environment of coastal cities.
. . . And into the Fire
Once they’ve navigated the complex littoral approach, landed from air and sea, and established themselves in an urbanized area, military forces may find they’ve jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. The first, most critical issue will be expeditionary logistics.
The idea behind sea basing, obviously enough, was to sustain forces ashore directly from ships at sea, rather than creating a land base (by seizing a port or bringing ships close to land to conduct logistics over the shore) in the traditional manner. The advantage of sea-based logistics was that it avoided the need to capture and hold a port, and kept vulnerable and expensive ships at sea and out of the littoral clutter. In deep water, away from coastal shipping traffic, ships would be safer from land-based attack, could stay out of the complex hydrography of the shoreline, avoid the threat of mines in shallow waters, and be better protected against submarines. The sea base would carry fifteen days’ worth of combat supplies (food, fuel, ammunition, and spare parts) for a battalion-sized marine expeditionary unit on board an amphibious readiness group, which would comprise a large helicopter assault ship or similar “big-deck” amphibious ship plus several smaller landing ships.37
Sustainment from the sea base could be vertical (using helicopters and tilt-rotor aircraft) or surface (using landing ships and hovercraft). The preference was for vertical sustainment, of course, because surface sustainment would mean bringing hovercraft and ships close inshore on a regular basis, and might also entail holding a land-based port or dock to enable ship-to-shore transfer of supplies. (Either event, of course, would negate the advantages that led the U.S. Navy to pursue sea basing in the first place.) In practice, exclusively vertical sustainment is rarely feasible for more than the first few days of an operation: there’s stiff competition for limited air and sealift, ships have trouble carrying enough fuel to operate aircraft from far offshore for long periods, and most supply vessels lack a capacity for selective offload—the entirely nontrivial ability to find and offload a particular item, perhaps deeply buried in a ship’s hold or a stack of containers, without having to unpack the entire ship’s cargo (a complicated activity that can’t be done at sea and which would probably require a secure beachhead).38 This suggests that sea-based logistics needs further thought (and possibly new equipment and software) if it’s to work in an urbanized littoral, and that most operations in the near future will involve seizing some kind of land base, ideally including a port and an airfield, as a logistics hub.
But that will invoke another, much bigger problem: urban overstretch. Remember that the reason military forces might be going into urban littorals, in this scenario, is precisely because cities are under stress, lacking capacity, overwhelmed, and unable to meet their people’s needs. So seizing a city’s port and airport and drawing logistical support—water, fuel, food, labor, construction materials, and so on—from the local economy via contract (the standard method of the last two decades) is not going to work. It will just exacerbate the very problems the force is trying to fix, making the military a parasite on an already stressed urban metabolism. To avoid this, we’ll need to bring all our own stuff. Self-contained expeditionary logistics is extremely expensive, but that’s what may be needed—at least initially. It follows that a force may also need to assist local communities under stress (as in the 2004 tsunami example mentioned earlier). Repairing and maintaining urban infrastructure (roads, bridges, and buildings) as well as operating ports, docks, and airfields will be important needs. So will bulk water purification, energy generation, and public health support—including the ability to handle mass-casualty situations and evacuate or decontaminate people after an industrial disaster or disease outbreak. Like most aspects of logistics, all this is much easier said than done.
Lightening the logistical footprint—in particular, reducing demand for fuel, water, and electricity—will be important, to minimize the expense and danger of bringing in bulk commodities, and to extend the “dwell time” before a force is forced to either transition to standard ground lines of communication or leave an area. Solar, biofuels, and wind energy, individual recharging systems, well-drilling capabilities, and so on—a complete suite of technologies for reducing the burden that expeditionary forces place on their environment—are being examined as ways to address this issue, through programs such as the Department of Defense Operational Energy strategy and the USMC Expeditionary Energy program.39 This isn’t just a problem for forces that are actually on the coastline—Marines’ experience of the difficulty and danger of suppl
ying fuel and water to remote inland areas led to the USMC Energy Summit in 2009 and the Experimental Forward Operating Base (ExFOB) program.40 In 2010, the U.S. defense department created the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Operational Energy Plans and Programs, under the leadership of Sharon Burke, an extremely well-regarded expert in energy and natural resource security.41 These efforts show that the military (in the United States, at least) is recognizing the importance of expeditionary energy. Besides just focusing on reducing their own footprint, militaries may find that the ability for expeditionary forces to transfer technologies to a local community in a sustainable way, as a leave-behind capability, and to bring in technologically appropriate energy systems for populations becomes important as part of an exit strategy from coastal cities under stress.
I’ve discussed logistics before tactics, in part because in real-world operations, logistics issues are often the most important. Moreover, as this discussion makes clear, logistical challenges in the urban littoral will be immense, and overcoming them will be a prerequisite for being in these environments at all. But assuming the military can surmount these difficulties, the challenge of urban close combat will be just as hard. The main issues will revolve around organization and protection.
Organization
The ability to quickly aggregate and disaggregate (mass and disperse) forces and fires is the critical aspect of organizing for urban combat. Like the Somali fighters described in Chapter 2, ground forces will need to move dispersed (perhaps in the same swarming style, with semiautonomous teams moving independently along multiple pathways through an urban environment) but then fight concentrated (massing their fires, or moving rapidly to join each other, piling on to reinforce success or recover from a setback). This implies a modular structure, perhaps down to a much lower level than in the past. The U.S. Army’s modular force concept, for example, considered the need to mix and match units, creating flexible organizations that can bring to bear a variety of different capabilities depending on the environment, but brought this modularity down only to the level of the brigade combat team, which remains a fixed organization.42 Clearly, a BCT (which, depending on type, can be around four thousand people, with hundreds of vehicles) is a huge organization for urban operations, even though in practice brigades are task-organized, with battalions, companies, and sometimes platoons allocated among headquarters based on mission.