El valor político de las operaciones anfibias.

Si algo debe caracterizar a las operaciones anfibias es la flexibilidad. Su posibilidad de adaptarse a situaciones que demanden un desembarco en fuerza contra una playa defendida o al movimiento buque-costa en una zona de desastre para llevar ayuda humanitaria.

Over the Horizon: Amphibious Ops a Dual-Use Tool for U.S. Policy Kit

By Robert Farley | 15 Feb 2012

Over the past two weeks, the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps conducted Bold Alligator, an exercise off the Atlantic seaboard designed to refine expertise in amphibious operations and test new amphibious capabilities. The exercise included the USS Enterprise supercarrier, three amphibious assault vessels -- the USS Wasp, the USS Kearsarge and the USS Iwo Jima -- as well as a bevy of support vessels. Nine international partners joined Bold Alligator in some fashion, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and the United Kingdom, with the French LPD Mistral representing the most significant allied commitment. The exercise demonstrated, to both domestic and international audiences, the continued importance of amphibious capabilities within the U.S. policy “toolbox,” while also providing an opportunity to refine and extend those capabilities.

While Bold Alligator, or something like it, would probably have taken place under any budgetary context, the exercise represented a reaffirmation of the Navy’s commitment to amphibious operations at a time of tightening budgets. From a budgetary standpoint, amphibious warfare also benefits enormously from the advocacy of the Marine Corps, which continues to view amphibious warfare as a core capability. Bold Alligator simulated a high-intensity combat landing into terrain controlled by insurgents fighting a friendly government, and involved both sea and air elements. The basic necessities for such operations, however, also apply to amphibious relief missions of the sort conducted in Southeast Asia after the 2004 tsunami, or Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. While relief operations might be a harder sell in Congress than “hard” military capabilities, they tend to happen more often than forced-entry amphibious assaults and have substantial political effect, at least on a regional scale. Combining the two concepts and working on both simultaneously allows the Defense Department to develop relief expertise while maintaining a hard combat edge.

Internet and data capabilities may seem secondary to major amphibious operations. However, most amphibious operations in the future will be rich in political context, whether they involve forced entry or not, and the ability to manage data and the political environment represents an absolutely critical capability for modern amphibious warfare. Consequently, information technology played a major role in this exercise. Coordination between a large number of warships and international partners requires the sharing of a tremendous amount of data between widely separated units a “network-centric warfare” concept that applies to both high-intensity combat and low-intensity relief operations. Consequently, Bold Alligator provided an opportunity to test the latest in military communications technology.

However, information technology also matters in other ways. International relief operations can’t exactly be crowd-sourced, but a wide range of ship-to-shore connectivity could nevertheless improve the ability of amphibious forces to meet relief needs. Spencer Ackerman’s discussion of internet connectivity aboard the USS Wasp highlights this issue: The Navy maintains clear channels of contact between ships, but the ability of individuals aboard ship to use the Internet in time-economical fashion is limited. In the context of an amphibious assault, this is entirely understandable. In an amphibious relief operation, however, Internet connectivity provides a unique capability for aggregating expertise -- on the geography, history or demographics of a particular area, for example -- and for delivering such expertise to the operational actors who can use it.

Widespread Internet access aboard ships in such situations could also prove a useful generator of public diplomacy content, especially in contexts where the Navy -- or civilian political authorities -- desires to make its contribution clear and transparent. Obviously message discipline would suffer, but the ability of “providers” of relief on ship to connect directly with “consumers” of relief on shore could dramatically improve the effectiveness of relief operations. In multilateral operations, the ability of providers to connect with one another with minimal central control could similarly reduce redundancy and enhance efficiency.

While no nation other than the United States has such capable amphibious forces, many other navies accept the basic concepts of amphibious operations and seek to replicate those capabilities on a smaller scale. The Russian purchase of the French Mistral-class amphibious command ship is designed to give the Russian navy the command-and-control capabilities to manage littoral operations. Similarly, the People’s Liberation Army Navy is developing a “system of systems” designed to facilitate cooperation between space, air and sea assets in its version of the “Near Abroad.” During NATO’s Libyan intervention, French and British amphibious assets undertook the mission of managing sea and air assets, including coordination with onshore rebels.

Nevertheless, the capacity of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps to execute such an operation, and to integrate international partners into it, serves as a reminder of just how far ahead of its competitors the United States is on amphibious operations. If the U.S. isn’t quite the only game in town, it’s surely the player with the most effective global reach. Indeed, the participation of a supercarrier and three large flat-deck amphibious warships would very nearly exceed the combined naval aviation capabilities of the rest of the world.

In effect, Bold Alligator simulated the most likely conflict/relief scenario that the U.S. military is likely to face in the near future: a multilateral maritime deployment involving a wide range of ship types and capabilities. Forced entry through amphibious assault may be less likely, but the capabilities demanded by both operations are substantially similar. Not coincidentally, either scenario requires the tightest possible collaboration between national and international partners. Making sure that such a capability remains honed and attentive to the latest developments in information technology, not to mention the social networking landscape, helps to ensure that a crucial crisis “tool” will remain available to U.S. policymakers.