USMC Doctrine Changes

I need to find it again but I read an article that the USMC are looking at repurposing the Independence Class LCS as a modern day high speed APD or assault transport. Interestingly it also said part of any conversion would need to include an improvement in sensors and self defence capability against air attack.
 
jsport said:
https://www.defensenews.com/opinion...-marine-corps-should-acquire-army-watercraft/
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That's too sensible an idea to get traction. The Besson's, especially the Kuroda subclass of two, would be almost perfect. The manufacturer had a number of variants listed on their website a few years ago that would be better for the mission, but as an off the shelf solution and given the Army is for some idiotic reason trying to get rid of them it makes sense to transfer them the the Marines.

If nothing else they could use them to practice their new 'tactics'.
 
Saw another article cheerleading the USMC's modernization plans with the usual "why do we need a tank when we got drones to kill tanks" and so forth. I got to wondering about what they have in the way of firepower on their AFVs now? I know they were looking at putting an unmanned turret with 30mm chain gun on the ACV but have they gotten around to that yet? Besides for that do they have anything other than .50 cals and maybe a few LAV-25s left?
 
From the article:

“Without overstating the issue, it failed miserably. An aggressive red team that had been studying the United States for the last 20 years just ran rings around us. They knew exactly what we're going to do before we did it,” Hyten told an audience Monday at the launch of the Emerging Technologies Institute, an effort by the National Defense Industrial Association industry group to speed military modernization.
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Being predictable is bad. Got it. Forgetting the other side also gets a say, and may not follow your script, also bad. Giving the other guys your script and then expecting them to follow it, and being surprised when not only do they not follow your script, they take it and turn it against you.... Well at least this time they didn't stop the game when they saw they were losing. What I get from this is that a lot more wargaming needs to be done, and by the officers who will be making the tactical decisions at all levels.

The Pentagon would not provide the name of the wargame, which was classified, but a defense official said one of the scenarios revolved around a battle for Taiwan. One key lesson: gathering ships, aircraft, and other forces to concentrate and reinforce each other’s combat power also made them sitting ducks.

“We always aggregate to fight, and aggregate to survive. But in today’s world, with hypersonic missiles, with significant long-range fires coming at us from all domains, if you're aggregated and everybody knows where you are, you're vulnerable,” Hyten said.
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This is interesting. As in it upturns the entire history of naval warfare and fleet actions interesting.
Even more critically, the blue team lost access to its networks almost immediately.

“We basically attempted an information-dominance structure, where information was ubiquitous to our forces. Just like it was in the first Gulf War, just like it has been for the last 20 years, just like everybody in the world, including China and Russia, have watched us do for the last 30 years,” Hyten said. “Well, what happens if right from the beginning that information is not available? And that’s the big problem that we faced.”
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I don't think this is the big takeaway. It's just the fog of war. Forgetting the fog of war is a thing since you haven't really had to deal with it for a couple generations is a problem, forgetting the other guy can do the unexpected is a problem, but that's just overconfidence from having it too easy.

Concentration = death is the problem. If a single ship or other asset is unable to protect itself, separating leads to defeat in detail. If concentrating forces leads to massed attacks by weapons that can be launched at an area and then pick out targets once they arrive, that leads to losing everything at once. If you can't fight alone, because you need support to survive, and you can't fight together, because that just makes you a big fat juicy target, how do you fight at all?
 

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