The U.S. defense community is obsessed with the idea that amphibious assault and airborne operations are dead. This is 100% the wrong way to think about trends in power projection [THREAD] https://twitter.com/BrookingsFP/status/1275903785290944513

Last time I checked, there are only three ways into a country: land, sea, and air

Cyber is cool, but we aren’t sending tanks over the wires.

And no disrespect to Space Force but I don’t see us dropping in troops from orbit Starship Troopers style anytime soon.

So if we give up on amphibious assault and airborne operations then … what? We’re just going to assume that we have a friendly land base nearby to stage from? That would be convenient, but what if we don’t?

If the United States is going to remain a global power, we need to not only be able to project air and sea power, we need joint forcible entry capabilities to project power onto land. That includes forcible entry from the sea and from the air.

It is certainly true that the threat environment has evolved while our tactics have not. As Gen Berger points out in his article, we are facing mature precision strike regimes with 1930s tactics. That ain’t going to work.

But that’s a call to adapt our concepts for forcible entry, not give up on it entirely. Yes, old ways of amphibious assault aren’t survivable into the teeth of dense ASCMs. Nor a D-Day drop into IADS. But adaptation and innovation in the face of new threats is essential in war.

The machine gun rendered prior ground offensive tactics obsolete in the early 20th C., a lesson Europeans painfully learned in WWI. By WWII, operational approaches had evolved, replacing trench warfare with the blitzkrieg. Offensive ground maneuver didn’t end – it changed.

The U.S. military has been too slow to respond to the proliferation of precision-guided weapons, and for too long has assumed that waning U.S. advantages in power projection can be solved with more $$.

But the reality is that how we fight needs to change. More quantities of the same “wasting assets” won’t change the equation. Gen. Berger’s call is the right one – to divest of legacy assets that are not survivable in high-threat environments and innovate with new approaches.

But as we do so, defense analysts shouldn’t be so keen to leap to the idea that we don’t need airborne and amphibious capabilities. We just need new ways of executing these tasks.

FWIW, Gen Berger did *not* say that the USMC should not have an amphibious assault capability, only that given the focus on China as the “pacing threat,” the USMC should not be sized to conduct “large-scale forcible entry operations followed by sustained operations ashore”.

In plain English, this is simply acknowledging that in a war with China the Marine Corps isn’t going to be invading mainland China and marching to Beijing. In a realistic conflict scenario, there are other important roles for the Marine Corps to play.

Gen. Berger's article in the Marine Corps Gazette: http://docplayer.net/185134524-The-united-states-marine-corps.html

A good thread on this issue by @BA_Friedman https://twitter.com/BA_Friedman/status/1276133059830702081