| From: TimF | 6/23/2021 8:19:18 PM | | | | | | Marines Pick Loitering Munition To Arm Light Vehicles And Drone Boats
So-called "suicide drones" will give Marine units a new option for finding threats and engaging them precisely on land and at sea.
thedrive.com |
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| From: TimF | 9/1/2021 8:04:34 PM | | | | | | U.S. Marine F-35Bs to Operate off Largest Japanese Warship Later This Year
By: Sam LaGrone
September 1, 2021
U.S. Marine F-35B Lighting II Joint Strike Fighters will operate off a Japanese warship later this year, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger said on Wednesday.
In November, the Marine F-35Bs will embark on one of the two 24,000-ton Izumo-class helicopter destroyers in an exchange that could lead to a similar program in which a U.S. Marine JSF squadron embarked aboard U.K. Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth (R08) this year.
“We’re not going to go on deployment but we’re actually going to fly U.S. Marine Corps F-35s off of a Japanese ship,” Berger said on Wednesday during a U.S. Naval Institute – CSIS Maritime Security Dialogue.
The Japanese government approached the Marines in 2019 to consider the exchange of aircraft in parallel to the retrofit that would allow Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force warships JS Izumo (DDH-183) and JS Kaga (DDH-184) to embark F-35Bs, USNI News reported at the time.
The warship will likely be JS Izumo (DDH-183). Izumo completed the first phase of the modifications to accommodate F-35s in July, according to Naval News. The modifications include adding lines to the deck and heat-resistant coatings.
“In this second modification, the bow shape of the Izumo will be changed from the current trapezoidal shape to a rectangular shape to make it easier to operate the F-35B, and other changes to the ship’s interior compartments are also planned,” reported Naval News.
The modification of Izumo and Kaga are paired with a planned JSDF buy of 42 F-35Bs to operate from the two ships. The first of the JSDF F-35Bs are set to arrive in Fiscal Year 2023.
The expansion of Japan’s F-35 capability comes as the Chinese have expanded their own naval capability to improve the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s amphibious capability...
news.usni.org |
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| From: TimF | 2/25/2022 6:14:10 PM | | | | | | Paul Douglas went to Marine boot camp at 50. Then he earned a Bronze Star and 2 Purple Hearts in WWII\When he was wounded, he took off his rank insignia so he wouldn't receive special attention.
Jeff Schogol | Published Feb 11, 2022
In late 1944, Douglas served with the 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment during brutal combat on the small Pacific island of Peleliu. Commanders expected the island to be captured in a matter of days, but the bitter fighting lasted more than two months, providing a preview of how tenacious the Japanese resistance would be in later battles.
Douglas, who was serving as a division adjutant, had been allowed to take part in the invasion on the condition that he stay away from combat, yet he routinely volunteered to be a stretcher bearer to evacuate wounded and fallen Marines from the frontlines, Howard Shuman wrote in a 1979 profile of Douglas for Challenge, an economics magazine.
During one of his trips to the front, Douglas saw that the Marines desperately needed a flamethrower and ammunition for rocket launchers, so he grabbed what was needed and braved heavy mortar and small arms fire to deliver it to the front lines.
He was eventually awarded the Bronze Star for his actions helping those Marines, but the battle went on and Douglas also received his first Purple Heart after being wounded by shrapnel.
At one point in the battle for Peleliu. Douglas killed a Japanese sniper hiding in a cave, after the shooter had killed two fellow Marines. He described his thoughts afterward in his 1972 autobiography, “In the Fullness of Time.”
“As I came out, covered with mud and blood, the thought went through my head that perhaps the fellow was a professor of economics at the University of Tokyo,” Douglas wrote. “What a world it is that causes each of us to seek the other’s life.”
By the end of the battle, 1,336 Marines had been killed and another 5,450 were wounded. The Army’s 81st Infantry Division also lost 196 soldiers, who were killed in action.
As a leader, Douglas was credited with putting his men first. Shuman wrote how during one battle, a Navy corpsman refused Douglas’ order to treat wounded Marines who were under heavy fire.
“He said he was a Harvard Medical School graduate with training too valuable to risk his life,” Shuman wrote. “Incensed by his refusal, Douglas took out his weapon, pointed it at the doctor’s head, and marched him to the front lines. Years later he told me he still shuddered when he thought about it: he had been so outraged that he had been prepared to shoot the man if he refused again.”
Douglas would also routinely pick up garbage so that enlisted Marines would not have to do so, and he refused to skip ahead to the front of the chow line, according to the Marine Corps.
When Douglas was shot in his left forearm during the battle of Okinawa, he took off his rank insignia so that corpsmen would not see that he was a major and prioritize him over the enlisted troops who were wounded.
“If I live to be 100 years old, I will never forget this scene,” Marine Pfc. Paul E. Ison later recalled. “There, lying on the ground, bleeding from his wound was a white-haired Marine major. He had been hit by a machine gun bullet. Although he was in pain, he was calm, and I have never seen such dignity in a man. He was saying ‘Leave me here. Get the young men out first. I have lived my life. Please let them live theirs.”
Following his second combat injury, Douglas spent 14 months in hospitals and left the Marine Corps in 1946 as a lieutenant colonel. His wound at Okinawa cost him the use of his left hand, which he described as a “paperweight.”
After the war, Douglas served in the U.S. Senate for 18 years, where he was a champion of Civil Rights legislation. He is credited with bypassing the chairman of Judiciary Committee from Mississippi to allow the Senate to vote on a 1957 civil rights bill.
He died in 1976 at the age of 84. The year after his death, the Douglas Visitors Center at Parris Island opened in his honor.
“Later in his life many honors came to my husband,” his widow Emily Douglas said at the time. “But there is none that would have so touched him, made him so astonished as well as thrilled, as having his name associated here at Parris Island.”
taskandpurpose.com
cdrsalamander.blogspot.com |
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| From: TimF | 10/20/2022 5:04:13 PM | | | | | | Marine Corps War Plans Are Too Sino-Centric. What About The Other 90% Of The World?
Loren ThompsonSenior Contributor
I write about national security, especially its business dimensions.
Oct 17, 2022,11:40am EDT
China has long been known in standard Mandarin as Zongguo, the “middle country.” Judging from President Xi Jinping’s remarks to the Communist Party congress this weekend, the idea that China is the center of the world is just fine with him.
However, the Pentagon’s 2018 National Defense Strategy may have gone too far in designating China as the central threat around which future U.S. military preparations must be organized.
The Chinese challenge to America is mainly economic in nature, and Taiwan looks to be the only place where Beijing might undertake a military campaign in the foreseeable future. For all its superpower pretensions, China remains an insular nation hemmed in by geography and its own internal challenges.
Nonetheless, U.S. military services have been striving since the release of the 2018 strategy to demonstrate their relevance to the Chinese threat. Nowhere is this more true than in the Marine Corps, where Commandant David H. Berger has undertaken a wholesale redesign of his service’s formations and plans.
Plans to replace aging amphibious warships with "Flight II" variants of these San Antonio-class ... [+]Wikipedia
Among other things, General Berger has called for eliminating all of the Corps’ tanks and a sizable chunk of its rotorcraft; creating smaller combat units; fielding a new class of light amphibious vessels capable of eluding enemy detection; and increasing Marine support of the Navy’s sea-control mission.
All of these changes have been initiated to bolster Marine relevance in the Western Pacific. They are intended to facilitate “Expeditionary Advance Base Operations” and “Littoral Operations In Contested Environments”—doctrines generated to combat China within the confines of the first island chain along its eastern coast.
And while the commandant states in his 2019 planning guidance that the 31 large amphibious warships the Navy currently operates to lift Marine units “will remain the benchmark of our forward operating crisis response forces,” he also raises doubts about the survivability of such vessels in what is now the most important theater of operations for U.S. military planners.
This has sown confusion in the Navy’s shipbuilding plans, which currently propose truncating a planned buy of 13 new LPD amphibious warships at three while commencing early retirement of the decrepit amphibs they were supposed to replace, and stretching out construction of larger LHA assault warships to twice the preferred interval—up to ten years.
If these proposals were actually implemented, they would leave the Marine Corps with a grossly inadequate lift capacity for dealing with crises in the Caribbean, Mediterranean, Persian Gulf and elsewhere, while fielding dozens of “light amphibious warships” likely to prove useless in most contingencies.
Thanks to its amphibious-landing capabilities and training to operate under austere conditions ashore, the Marine Corps has long served as America’s first-responder force, able to insert ground forces into crisis situations before other U.S. services or allies arrive.
According to NASA, over a third of the global population lives within 60 miles of the sea. Most of the world’s megacities, from Jakarta to Karachi to Lagos to Shanghai, are located on or near the ocean. Every country likely to challenge U.S. interests in the years ahead is accessible from the sea.
So, the value of a sea-based quick reaction force such as the Marine Corps is not hard to grasp. Marines have been used to intervene in the Caribbean dozens of times, and may yet do so again in Cuba or Nicaragua or Venezuela. It is a rare year when Marines are not called on to perform critical missions in the Mediterranean.
The problem with redirecting Corps preparations to the Chinese littoral is that the service is called on to develop capabilities that aren’t much use elsewhere—and might not make much difference even there.
The basic idea Marine leaders have advanced is that platoon-size units transported on light amphibious warships and equipped with long-range munitions can hop among the islands off the Chinese coast, disrupting the movement of Beijing’s naval forces and aiding U.S. military efforts to control littoral seas.
Unfortunately, this requires the Marine units to operate within range of Chinese weapons, which is why they need to be highly mobile and generate minimal trackable signatures. Commandant Berger freely admits that current Marine air defenses and reconnaissance assets are not up to the job—which is why money needs to be freed up to buy new equipment such as the light amphibs.
However, in an August 26 report, respected congressional naval expert Ronald O’Rourke raises a series of searching questions about this concept of operations:
Do Marine plans focus too much on China at the expense of other challenges and missions?
Can the Marines successfully gain access to littoral islands and then survive there?
Can the Navy resupply Marine units within range of Chinese weapons once deployed there?
If the proposed force redesign is implemented, would it significantly aid U.S. sea control in the region?
The short answer to these questions is that nobody can say today, because it all depends on what reconnaissance assets Beijing deploys between now and when the Marines are ready to execute their operational concepts in the Chinese littoral. It is not hard to imagine how a combination of long-endurance drones and orbital assets might preclude even small units from hiding in wartime.
The more immediate issue, though, is how this problematic approach to the China challenge might deprive the Marine Corps of capabilities needed to respond elsewhere. We are already seeing evidence that the consensus supporting a fleet of large amphibs suitable for responding to crises in other places is being undermined by confusion over Marine plans.
Getting rid of all the tanks on the assumption the Army can supply heavy armor in a timely fashion seems unrealistic. And eliminating squadrons of heavy, medium, and light rotorcraft is doubly questionable, given the fact that Marines are already breaking up deployed readiness groups to cope with diverse regional challenges. Those rotorcraft may not be needed to fight China, but there are dozens of other places around the world where they could prove more useful than a light amphibious warship.
forbes.com |
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| From: TimF | 10/29/2022 9:29:47 PM | | | | | | Marines make 6,100-mile trans-Pacific flight in Ospreys
Hawaii-based Marines with Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 268 recently concluded their deployment to Australia as part of Marine Rotational Force-Darwin with a 6,100-mile, island-hopping flight home.
Hawaii-based Marines with Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 268 recently concluded their deployment to Australia as part of Marine Rotational Force-Darwin with a 6, 100-mile, island-hopping flight home.
They left Darwin in Australia’s Northern Territory on Sept. 13, with two Marine Corps V-22 Osprey tilt-rotors and one KC-130J refueling aircraft departing for Royal Australian Air Force Base Amberley in Queensland. Over the next several days, the Marines would land in Fiji, American Samoa and the Republic of Kiribati before completing the final leg to Marine Corps Base Hawaii at Kaneohe Bay on Sept. 18.
stripes.com
Title makes it seem like it was one straight through flight when really it was island hopping over 5 days. |
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