Amphibious Warfare Dead, or Is It?
By Gary Anderson
December 09, 2024
Amphibious operations were declared dead one-hundred years ago after the failed triple entente landings at Gallipoli early in the first World War. The amphibious assaults at places like Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and Normandy during World War II disproved that theory but were soon left in the shadow of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The advent of nuclear weapons and "push button" warfare gave rise to conventional wisdom that defensive technology rendered amphibious assaults obsolete. Harry Truman went so far as to declare that the U.S. Marine Corps and its amphibious operations specialty had become obsolete. The Marine Corps, however, forced Truman to revise prevailing conventional wisdom after the Marine Corps’ historic landing at Inchon turned the tide of the Korean war.
The Battle of Inchon reinvigorated military amphibious warfare doctrine until just a few years ago. This time it wasn’t the President of the United States, but rather the Commandant of the Marine Corps that sought to end the Marine Corps reign as the masters of amphibious warfare and ability to conduct large scale combat operations. By 2019, Marine commandant General David Berger concluded that, once again, defensive technology had made traditional amphibious operations obsolete.
General Berger instead conceived of a new mission for the Corps, that by employing defensive technology in the form of anti-ship missiles along China’s first island chain with small, dispersed Marine teams known as stand-in-forces (SIFs).
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/12/09/amphibious_warfare_in_dead_or_is_it_1077312.html
