Out of the Mountains (48 page)

This suggests that
pre-conflict sensing
—trying to understand as much as possible about a given environment before it gets into crisis, so that we know the relationships among different actors in the society, understand the extent of different groups' territorial control or popular support, and can track flows and patterns in cities and towns that explain their systems logic—will be critically important. Hyperlocal context, the sort of open-source (but denied-area) information that relies on insider insights, will be essential here, and this information will need to be time-stamped and geospatially located in order to make sense. It will be too late to surge knowledge and understanding, or the trust that comes from it, once a crisis is already under way. In a connected world, this kind of pre-conflict sensing need not involve anything intrusive or underhand—no nefarious sneaking around or spying—since most of what we need to know is open-source information, is already being gathered and published by local people and civil society organizations, or is well known to diasporas in our own countries. Triangulating among various groups' perceptions and gathering on-the-ground information to correlate with and corroborate remote sensing data will still be a requirement, but this is vastly easier today than at any time in the past.

When nonstate armed groups in urban areas do become our enemies, we can expect to see the same kinds of swarm tactics discussed in Chapter
2
, as well as the networked collaboration between online and street-level groups examined in Chapter
4
. We will encounter small, lightly equipped, fast-moving groups of adversaries who can operate on water, on land and possibly in the air, can move through the city by “infesting” it (as discussed in Chapter
2
), and can synchronize actions across multiple groups and wide areas using cellphones, text messages, Twitter feeds, and visual signals. They will engage superior forces using hit-and-run tactics, will hide in the complex physical terrain of a city, will target the population rather than security forces, and will exploit complex human and informational terrain to avoid getting pinned down in a straight fight that they might lose. Thus, one of the main frustrations of operating in this environment will be the fleeting and distributed nature of combat engagements, where the enemy is rarely if ever seen, fights can be over in seconds, and you always seem to get to the scene of an incident just a little too late. In Krulak's terms, this will be three-block war, but on one block.

How, then, will military forces need to organize and operate for this environment? In the first instance, they'll need to get there.

Getting Ashore . . .

Getting into the littoral zone will involve amphibious operations, but these probably won't look much like
Saving Private Ryan
, with massed naval gunfire stonking a heavily defended beach, and troops wading ashore from flat-bottomed boats, under intense fire from dug-in positions protected by obstacles underwater and on the shore. This may be a depiction of amphibious assault in conventional war, but there are many types of amphibious operations—including amphibious raids, demonstrations and withdrawals, and amphibious support to other operations.
26
And, as we saw in Chapter 4, naval forces can help ground troops maneuver along coastlines (using the sea as a maneuver space, embarking them to avoid encirclement, and reinserting them to outflank an adversary), while ground forces can land to protect the flanks of a naval force operating in a constricted coastal waterway.

The last large-scale opposed amphibious assault in which U.S. forces were engaged was sixty-three years ago, during the Korean War, at the battle of Incheon in September
1950
, mentioned briefly in Chapter
1
. Incheon involved an opposed landing in urban terrain, followed by extremely slow and heavy house-to-house fighting, as U.S. forces advanced from the port of Incheon into the contiguous city of Seoul, which had a population of roughly one million at that time (its population today is almost ten million). The city had been depopulated and damaged during its capture by North Korean forces that July, but still represented a tough challenge. The operation entailed a difficult approach through constricted coastal channels, with little sea room, an enormous tidal range, and no opportunity for ships to maneuver. Underwater obstacles and defended islands hampered the attack. The landing force had to assault into an urban harbor, landing across seawalls and docks. Once the port was secured there was an urgent need to put it back into service so that other forces could be brought ashore to advance into Seoul. General Douglas MacArthur's bold move to cut off North Korean forces by landing at Incheon is widely regarded as a strategic masterstroke, but as Russell Stolfi has argued, it was “followed by a ground advance to Seoul so tentative that it largely negated the successful landing.”
27
The urbanized littoral terrain undoubtedly contributed to the slowness of this advance: the Marines secured Incheon in only twelve hours, but it took another twelve days to secure Seoul.

The most recent world (as distinct from U.S.-only) example of an opposed amphibious assault was in
2003
, when British forces seized the Faw Peninsula in southern Iraq. The aim was to capture Iraq's oil infrastructure intact and protect the landward flank of a naval task group that was clearing sea mines in the Khawr Abd Allah waterway. This was an essential part of the coalition effort to open the estuarine approach to Umm Q
 
asr, Iraq's only deepwater port. It was a joint (sea-air-land) operation involving
3
Commando Brigade,
40
and
42
Commando groups, helicopters, artillery, engineers, and the U.S.
15
th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), supported by U.S. Air Force bombers and AC-
130
Specter gunships, U.S. Navy F/A-
18
fighters, and naval gunfire support from one Australian and three British warships.
28

Unlike Incheon (but in common with most amphibious operations since the mid-
1950
s), this operation relied on air strikes and helicopters rather than battleships and surface landing craft. On the night of March
20
,
2003
, an assault force in helicopters launched from amphibious ships at sea after a short but intense air bombardment by land-based and carrier-based aircraft. Royal Marines from
40
Commando (a battalion-sized unit) air-assaulted directly onto their objectives just after
10
:
00
p.m. and seized oil infrastructure on the eastern side of the Khawr Abd Allah waterway. They bypassed the beach entirely. Simultaneously, U.S. Navy SEALs captured the Mina al-Bakr offshore oil terminal, and Polish GROM special forces captured the Khawr al-Amaya terminal (both of these were offshore oil platforms in the Faw Peninsula area). One hour later, the Royal Marines'
42
Commando, supported by Cobra attack helicopters, ground-based artillery, and naval gunfire support, tried to land just north of the town of Al Faw but had to abort due to bad weather and an aircraft crash. They completed their assault landing in a different location the next morning. At the same time, on the western side of the waterway,
15
th MEU left its staging area in Kuwait, crossed the land border into Iraq, bypassed the city of Umm Q
 
asr, seized the port area intact, and then drove northward up the western coastline of Khawr Abd Allah. The Marines met heavy resistance from Iraqi irregular fighters in the urbanized terrain along the coastline, but soon reached their objectives.

Meanwhile, combat engineers and mine clearance divers, inserted by hovercraft from the sea, worked frantically to clear a beach wide enough to land British Army light armored vehicles, but they had to abandon this attempt due to large-scale mining by the Iraqis. The armor had to return to Kuwait, and ended up entering Iraq by land twenty-four hours later.
29
As the British after-action review commented, the “co-operation between the Commando Groups and the MEU, the ships and helicopters from the Amphibious Task Group, the tanks and other elements of
1
(UK) Armoured Division, and the AC-
130
Specter gunships and coalition Close Air Support sorties that supported the amphibious operation provided useful lessons for the all-arms approach to littoral operations.”
30
Both Incheon and Al Faw, of course, also underline the incredible complexity of amphibious operations in urbanized littorals, and the difficulty of conducting a Normandy-style beach landing against a prepared enemy.

This type of operation will almost certainly happen again (and it would be extremely unwise to rule it out in conventional state-on-state operations), but a more likely scenario in the irregular operations that are the historical norm is that an advance force might have to seize a port, harbor, or airfield as a sea or air point of entry for follow-on forces, perhaps against light irregular opposition, then put it back into service as a base of operations. In fact, seizing a lodgment area large enough to cover both a seaport and an airfield will probably be a prerequisite for virtually any long-term operation in a littoral environment. As in the Faw Peninsula, this may involve a combination of helicopter-borne or air-landed forces as well as amphibious forces.

For example, on the first day (D-Day) of the Australian-led intervention in East Timor in September
1999
, my company's parent battalion had the objective of securing Komorro airport on the edge of Timor's capital city, Dili, then immediately advancing into the city, through a densely urbanized littoral environment (parts of which happened to be on fire) to secure the harbor. We were a light infantry unit specializing in helicopter air assault, but for this operation we air-landed in C-
130
transport aircraft directly onto the airstrip, then pushed out on foot and in light vehicles to seize the harbor. We had control of the port by nightfall on D-Day, allowing follow-on forces (armored vehicles) to land from the sea in navy amphibious ships that came into the harbor and docked under cover of darkness. The whole city was secured by sundown on D+
1
. The initial lodgment perimeter was quite large: it had a frontage of about four miles and covered the airfield, the port, and a critical road bridge over the Comoro River, which separated the two. The air assault troops had to hold the bridge for just over twenty-four hours, until armored units landing by ship were able to move inland and link up with them. Air traffic controllers, airfield operations units, and a harbor terminal operations group landed the first night and put the port and airfield back into operation as bases for further expansion of the foothold. The landing was only lightly and sporadically opposed—the enemy melted away once they realized the scale and speed of what was happening, though they returned after recovering from their initial shock. Similar initially unopposed landings occurred in the Falklands in
1982
, in Somalia in
1993
, and in Sierra Leone in
2000
; this seems to be a fairly normal pattern in littoral operations against irregular opponents, or where (as in the Falklands) the task group achieves operational surprise by landing in an unexpected place. These kinds of joint air-land-sea insertions are known in Australian parlance as “entry from air and sea” (EAS) and in U.S. doctrine as “joint forcible entry operations.” They'll probably be more common than Incheon-style surface assaults in future conflicts.
31

As in the Faw Peninsula, modern thinking tends to focus on bypassing coastal defenses using helicopters and airborne forces. But in the cluttered and fully urbanized environment of the future, even without organized enemy defenses, finding unobstructed places to land will be highly problematic, and exits from landing areas surrounded by megaslums will be even harder to find. That said, there's little mention of urbanized littorals in amphibious doctrine as it stands today. Indeed, the words
urban
and
city
don't appear at all in the current (
2009
) U.S. joint publication on amphibious operations, which states that “the preferred tactic against coastal defenses is to avoid, bypass, or exploit gaps whenever possible.”
32
Neither is littoral urbanization discussed in doctrine for joint forcible entry operations, published as recently as November
2012
.
33
In contrast, the August
2011
version of the capstone U.S. Marine Corps doctrine,
Marine Corps Operations
, talks extensively of “complex expeditionary operations in the urban littorals” and the difficulty of moving in restricted sea-space in coastal environments, suggesting that Navy and Marine thinking is further along in this regard than joint doctrine—although even Marine doctrine doesn't engage with the challenges of dramatically enhanced connectivity that were described in Chapter
4
and will be present to an even greater degree in the urban, networked littorals of the future.
34

The previous (
2001
) version of
Marine Corps Operations
also talked about littoral urbanization in detail, but subscribed to a then-current concept of coastal envelopment known as “operational maneuver from the sea” (OMFTS). Under OMFTS, Marines would launch from ships over the horizon (about twenty-five miles offshore) directly onto objectives up to two hundred miles inland, using a technique called “ship-to-objective maneuver” to bypass shore defenses, and thus avoiding the traditional pause to build up forces and supplies at a beachhead.
35
Helicopters and MV-
22
Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft would move troops ashore, while surface vessels (including amphibious armored vehicles and hovercraft) might move to undefended or lightly defended points on the coast. The idea was to deploy forces through both vertical and surface means but keep the command, aviation, and logistics components afloat and well offshore, through a concept known as “sea basing.”
36