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thedrifter
11-18-08, 07:47 AM
After Iraq, Marines to Get Back to Basics
By David Axe November 17, 2008 |

During the Cold War, the Navy's "big-deck" amphibious assault ships, with full loads of Marines, helicopters and Harrier jump jets, rotated through two stations: one in the eastern Mediterranean, and another in the Pacific. The idea was that the Pentagon would always have a reinforced battalion of troops close to potential hot spots, primed for action.

Iraq changed all that. Since 2003, with the Marines busy in the sandbox, it became impossible to keep a battalion at those old sea stations, and the Marines' "expeditionary" amphibious skills decayed as a result.

Now, with the Marines beginning a gradual pull-out from Iraq after five years of war, it's time to "get back towards our expeditionary culture," Colonel David Coffman, commander of the Marines embarked on the big-deck USS Boxer, told Danger Room.

The Boxer expeditionary strike group -- six Navy and Coast Guard vessels carrying 2,200 Marines -- is at sea off the West Coast working up for a six-month cruise to the Pacific region, beginning early next year. Boxer's group is the first in years to sail fully loaded, and with no major pre-planned combat or humanitarian mission. Instead, it will just sail around, Cold War-style, ready to leap on emerging crises.

Plus, with the addition of USS New Orleans, one of the latest San Antonio-class "small-deck" assault ships, the Boxer group can carry and effectively operate the full load of around 30 helicopters and Harrier jump jets. This hasn't been possible for a decade or more, as the Marines have had to store increasingly bulky and heavy armored vehicles (MRAPs, for example) on smaller ships' flight decks.

But Boxer's is an old-school cruise with a twist, coming on the heels of a period of experimentation for the U.S. sea services.

In the past couple years, while the Marines were fighting in Iraq, the Navy's amphibious ships stayed busy testing out different humanitarian concepts. Boxer herself toured Latin America earlier this year with a load of doctors taking the place of her Marines. Boxer's sister ship Kearsarge took over that mission beginning in August, again carrying doctors instead of Marines.

Naval analyst Bob Work says that big-deck amphibious ships won't be used for such humanitarian missions once the Marines depart Iraq. "In the future, Kearsarge would go out with Marines on board -- and they'll do different types of missions."

Sort of, Coffman said. He stressed that humanitarian assistance -- responding to a natural disaster, famine or political crisis -- has emerged as a primary mission for the Navy and Marines. And having all his troops, all his choppers and even his armored vehicles gives him more humanitarian tools, Coffman said.

"We don't see [humanitarian missions] as a 'that might happen.' We're preparing for that as a fundamental tasking of what expeditionary strike groups and Marine expeditionary units are forward-deployed to do." In other words, with Boxer, humanitarian "soft power" now has taken its rightful place alongside old-fashioned, firepower-heavy "hard power."

With the Iraq war slowly (and I emphasize slowly) winding down, the Pentagon will enter a new era: one where Afghanistan is the major focus, and where the military finally has a little breathing room to get back to basics, and to apply some hard-learned lessons. Boxer is an early indicator of the direction the Navy and Marines are headed in the post-Iraq world.

[Photo: U.S. Navy]

Ellie