Marine Corps, NATO Allies Brush Up on Amphibious Assault, Communication Skills

Netherlands Maritime Force photo

CAMP LEJEUNE, North Carolina — Dozens of Marines and sailors poured from a landing craft as soon as its tailgate opened, splashing into knee-deep water with weapons raised and packs strapped to their backs.

As the forces — American, Dutch and British — stormed the beach, they fanned into a semicircle, securing territory while hundreds of other warfighters performed varying parts of an amphibious operation that overtook the coast.

Slightly upshore, another utility landing craft lowered its back door, letting vehicles charge through the shallow water and onto the North Carolina sand. The small boat then began its return to the large amphibious assault ship that brought it — which now floated in far-off waters — a blue-tinted silhouette on the horizon.

The cycle repeated as the sun rose higher into late morning. Faraway warships released smaller landing platforms that carried troops and vehicles to shore, swiftly readying for battle upon reaching land. Helicopters circled overhead, prepared to provide direct air support as needed, the sounds of rhythmic blades cutting in and out.

The flurry of activity across air, land and sea, however, was only a practice exercise that followed a fictitious scenario.

The event served as the culmination of the first leg of Atlantic Alliance 25, a joint operation between the U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps, Dutch naval forces and British Royal

Commandos held for the first time this summer with the goal of bolstering collective defense among NATO allies. Atlantic Alliance 25 succeeds Bold Alligator, a similar amphibious exercise among allies that was last held in 2017.

“This is the largest amphibious exercise in over a decade here in the western Atlantic,” Rear Adm. David Patchell, vice commander of the U.S. Navy’s 2nd Fleet, said in an interview on the beach, while troops rushed from the water behind him.

More than 8,000 Marines, sailors and commandos from the United States, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom were involved in the three-week exercise that spanned the Eastern Seaboard from North Carolina to Maine. It took more than two and a half years to plan.

The ship-to-sea drill at the beach within Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in North Carolina was the first stop of many for the thousands of participants who focused on force integration, amphibious assault skills, bilateral reconnaissance, naval strait transits and more as they traveled up the East Coast. Other exercise sites included Fort Story and Wallops Island, both in Virginia, as well as Rangeley, Bangor, Pickerel Pond and Cutler — all in Maine — and Lakehurst, New Jersey.

Three amphibious assault ships — the USS New York, USS Oak Hill and the Netherlands’ HNLMS Johan de Witt — took part in Atlantic Alliance 25. Other platforms included a Bell AH-1 Cobra attack helicopter and a Bell UH-1 Iroquois utility helicopter, as well as ground systems like the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle and the Leopard 1 armored recovery vehicle.

Royal Netherlands Navy Rear Adm. George Pastoor said it took about two weeks for the Johan de Witt to sail from its homeland to the U.S. East Coast for the operation.

“It has about 500 people on board,” Pastoor said. “It’s a mixture now of Dutch and American crew. … We’re working together as one integrated team to make operations like this happen.”

It is important for NATO nations to run drills together “every now and then” to ensure that the partnering militaries are “interoperable and interchangeable,” he noted.

Successful collaboration between allied forces was a priority for many Atlantic Alliance 25 participants.

“Having allies and partners here is really important because we have to be ready to fight globally, whether it’s in the High North in support of NATO, Indo-Pacific, in the Middle East, the Mediterranean — anywhere — and we have to be able to fight as a combined force,” Patchell said.

Maj. Gen. Farrell Sullivan, commanding general of the 2nd Marine Division, added that these exercises are crucial “because we’re always trying to build readiness with our naval partners, our joint partners and our coalition partners.”

In the fictitious plot that troops engaged with for Atlantic Alliance 25, the Eastern Seaboard posed as “a contested, strategic waterway with multiple adversaries that have high-end capabilities,” Sullivan said.

Each scenario in the exercise was based on a potential real-world event, aiming to hone the ability to “fight as one integrated littoral force” and achieve “synergy” across air, ground and sea, Patchell noted.

“We’re all paying attention to what’s going on around the globe because we are a globally employable force,” Sullivan said. “And so, as we see things develop in different conflicts, we measure ourselves against that to see whether or not that is something we can counter.

“And then we look to the future,” he continued. “We’re always paying attention to where we think things are going from a warfighting perspective, so that we are trying to stay one step ahead or many steps ahead.”

As time goes on, exercises such as Atlantic Alliance become more complex as they incorporate the latest elements of modern warfare.

Participants in Atlantic Alliance 25 rehearsed with familiar technologies as well as new tools and strategies that are becoming increasingly prevalent in the global threat environment, Sullivan said. For instance, small uncrewed aircraft systems and counter-drone systems are becoming paramount in modern warfare, such as in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, and therefore increasingly employed in military training, he noted.

U.S. and Dutch operators both applied some oft-used drone technology during the exercise and “experimented with some new capabilities, particularly from a counter-UAS perspective” by testing their ability “to use kamikaze drones to take out other small UAS,” Sullivan said.

“I think you have to assume if you’re going to deploy anywhere around the globe today — whether you’re in training or conflict or crisis — you should expect to see robots, drones and other things flying around you,” Sullivan said. “And the ability to detect whether they’re friendly or not and your ability to kinetically or not kinetically affect those is extremely important.”

Data sharing — such as passing information between a sensor and a shooter — was another technological focus area of Atlantic Alliance 25 in an effort to ensure that “when the time comes to actually operate in conflict and crisis for real,” the services are not “learning these things for the first time,” Sullivan said.

Passing data seamlessly and rapidly to enable joint or coalition support is both extremely important and extremely challenging, he said.

“Every time” the U.S. Marine Corps collaborates with the U.S. Navy and NATO partners, the parties are tweaking and refining network diagrams to boost secure data sharing and communication, he added.

That fits into the Defense Department’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control initiative — its years-long campaign to link sensors and shooters through a combat cloud and use artificial intelligence to speed up decision-making.

U.S. Marine Corps Capt. Lucas Aaron, one of the Marines who participated firsthand in the ship-to-shore operation, said establishing reliable communication for coordinated planning proved to be the most significant challenge during the exercise, especially with cell phone use restrictions and “connectivity issues” between computers.

The information relay hurdle extended across platoon squads and fire teams, but was amplified between amphibious ships like the USS New York and the HNLMS Johan de Witt, Aaron said. He found that communicating in the amphibious space was much different from doing so in a “normal garrison environment.”

“You can get so sucked into trying to make sure that you’re married in with what the battalion wants, the regiment wants and the overall maritime battle staff wants, but then you have to go across the ship, down 10 ladders and make sure that the lieutenants, the staff sergeants, the sergeants and below are getting the relevant information they need so they can continue to conduct planning while you’re also focusing up and out,” Aaron said in an interview. “That’s probably been the biggest struggle.”

The run-around can turn into a “manhunt” within a ship to contact the person you need, he said. There are phones in each room, but sometimes it is unclear which room a person might be in at any given moment. However, Aaron said the forces have learned to “bubble up and pulse word out” every two hours by checking in on staff to see if there is new information to exchange.

He recalled “a pretty major miscommunication” that occurred during the amphibious drill at Camp Lejeune regarding where his landing craft should arrive onshore. His company landed about 800 meters up the beach from the objective. Even with the miscommunication, they were able to adapt “on the fly,” adjusting as needed, he said.

“After the beach landing, everything else went as [smoothly] as it could, minus just overall time of movement,” Aaron said. “But that’s just as we continued to iron out some kinks in the way we’re communicating.”

Any technological solutions that could alleviate these communication obstacles would have to be “software-based systems,” due to warfighters’ inability to utilize Bluetooth and cellular service, he said.

Communication kinks and all, Aaron was grateful for the practice that Atlantic Alliance 25 provided, particularly since the drill at Camp Lejeune was the first time doing an amphibious landing for many of those in his tactical unit, including himself.

“It provides value, especially as the operational environment continues to get more complex,” Aaron said.

Given those complexities and changes, Aaron said it is “not uncommon to think” that the United States and NATO allies might need to organize an amphibious readiness group based on who possesses the capability at the time of need. That makes Atlantic Alliance 25 “a great rep and set writ large for everyone.”

Working hand-in-hand with international forces turned out to be “eye-opening” and “relatively easy,” he added.

U.S. Marine Corps Staff Sgt. Andrew Stone also participated in the exercise, conducting a ship-to-shore drill at Camp Lejeune dealing with M777 howitzer artillery systems.

The tactical unit that Stone was a part of brought three howitzers onto the USS Oak Hill, where they remained at sea for three days. Then, given the signal, the Marines loaded a landing craft with the artillery batteries and charged onto the beach to reach a designated point where they set up the weapons and achieved firing capability within an hour of landing, he said.

“Most Marines don’t get to do actual amphibious raids like that,” Stone said in an interview. “So, our ability to do that — and especially with the Navy using their [Landing Craft Utilities] and disembarking from the ship and everything like that — it’s just a big learning experience.”

U.S. Marine Corps Capt. Matt Frost, who also worked with the howitzers in the exercise, described them as “the biggest weapon system that can shoot no matter what the weather is,” without constraint from low cloud ceilings or otherwise, making it a crucial component of warfare.

It is “very rare” for a howitzer to go ship to shore, “and then even [more] rare is them going straight into a live fire,” Frost said. While transporting the heavy system was no small feat, the team did so successfully as part of the exercise, proving that they have the capability if a real need arises, he said.

And collaborating with the partners that they do not always train alongside, such as the U.S. Navy, “went really smoothly,” Stone added.

“We’re Marines,” said U.S. Marine Corps Cpl. Anthony Pelle, who worked alongside Stone and Frost during the exercise. “We’re supposed to be amphibious. Doing this exercise actually helps us move forward towards a goal that we’re all trying to achieve.”

 

Topics: Internation Cooperation, Marine Corps News