Out of the Mountains (49 page)

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 (A
2
AD) 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 supplying 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.

The British Royal Marines' Commando
21
structure, designed in
2000
, went three levels below the brigade, organizing for modularity at the battalion, company, and troop (platoon) levels. Commando
21
is worth discussing in detail, since it was a considered response to the demands of littoral warfare at the turn of the century and was tested in battle during the
2003
Faw Peninsula operation. Commando
21
gave the Commando (a battalion-sized unit) a modular structure of six companies, each of which could be broken down and reassembled in various ways to create a flexible mix of firepower and maneuver.
43
The six companies included a command company, a logistics company, two close-combat companies, and two standoff companies. The command company had a headquarters, a reconnaissance troop (a platoon-sized unit with patrols and snipers), communications teams, an antitank guided weapon (ATGW) troop with Milan or Javelin missiles, an
81
mm mortar troop, and a heavy machine-gun troop with .
50
-caliber machine guns. This capable organization was intended not to fight as a single group but rather to distribute its elements among the other companies while keeping a reserve of firepower, ammunition, and personnel. Close-combat companies had three troops, each with three close-combat sections (squads) and a maneuver support section (a heavy-weapons squad).
44
Close-combat sections comprised a pair of four-man fire teams, so the basic building block of the commando group remained the team or “brick.” Standoff companies had one close-combat troop (for local protection, to help carry ammunition, and as a limited assault capability), one ATGW troop with Milan missiles, and a machine gun troop with .
50
caliber heavy machine guns. One of the two standoff companies was mounted in tracked Viking armored vehicles, the other in Wolf (armored) Land Rovers, later replaced by the Jackal armored all-terrain wheeled vehicle; close-combat companies moved on foot, in helicopters, or on landing craft from supporting ships.
45

This structure (which was how
40
and
42
Commando were organized for the Faw operation) gave the Commando enormous flexibility in urbanized terrain, letting it disaggregate fires and forces down to a low level but quickly reaggregate them. It could be fought as two half battalions, by pairing each close-combat company with a standoff company and giving each a portion of command company assets. It could also be fought as four company groups, as eight half-company groups, or in troop and section groups. Thus the Commando had the ability to mass fires and fighters at decisive points; it could disperse to pass through broken terrain, and concentrate to overwhelm an enemy. The Commando
21
structure also represented a very significant increase in firepower over the previous organization, with numerous new heavy weapon systems and an extra fighting company. The structure's major weakness was its lack of protected mobility for logistics and personnel and its dependence on external airlift, sealift, and ground transport.
46
Commando
21
is still officially in force, but it was operationally short-lived: once the invasion phase ended in Iraq, the Royal Marines' next deployment was to Afghanistan, where the need to be interchangeable with army battalions in a rural, landlocked theater led Commandos to regress to their previous organization (essentially the same as a British Army light-role infantry battalion) while on counterinsurgency operations. (Indeed, Commando
21
is a microcosm of the broader pattern we've seen already: creative thinking about urbanized littorals, which flourished in several organizations at the turn of the century, was sidelined by the urgent need to fight guerrillas in the land-locked Afghan mountains after
9
/
11
.)

That said, experiments conducted in Australia, the United States, and Great Britain in
2003
–
8
suggest that even the Commando
21
level of modularity may not be enough in the future: there may be a need to go down to four-person teams (even pairs, as in Mumbai) that can operate independently, group themselves around a mobility platform (in the manner of a Somali technical), and aggregate into larger units for specific tasks.
47
Each team will need a mix of weapons and communications systems so that it can control remote fires from ships, artillery, drones, or aircraft, gather surveillance data, collect and report electronic intelligence, and call for assistance as needed. These “splinter teams” will often operate within a larger organization, and also occasionally provide a framework for small interagency teams including diplomats, aid workers, police, intelligence personnel, or medical specialists. Logistically, teams will need to be self-sufficient for at least the first seventy-two hours of an operation, because it usually takes that long for the chaos of a contested air-sea entry to settle down and for regular resupply to begin. In Timor, for example, I had my first hot meal (of dehydrated combat rations) about thirty-six hours into the operation, which was a pretty typical lag time for infantry troops in the first wave. Our first resupply was on D+
3
, after the operation had begun to settle down; air and sea assets began to be freed up from the task of moving troops into theater and started running logistic support missions instead. The first fresh food got to us in our new operational area, out on the jungle border between East and West Timor, on D+
42
, six weeks into the operation. Troops who stayed in the urban area around Dili got their first fresh food on about D+
14
(indicating that the logistics system was fully up and running by then).