...the Marines have not stormed a hostile beach since Inchon during the Korean War. And influential military thinkers — including, most notably, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates — have begun to question whether the Marines will ever do it again.
In a speech last month, Gates said rogue nations and nonstate movements such as Hezbollah now possessed sophisticated guided missiles that could destroy naval ships, forcing them to stay well away from shore and making any sort of beach landing by Marines extremely dangerous.
Countries including China and Iran have guided missiles and other defenses to deter a beach landing, said Andrew Krepinevich, president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, who has written skeptically of traditional amphibious landings. Minor powers, meanwhile, could hardly resist the kind of landing the Marines practiced in Dawn Blitz, he said...
For more than eight years, the Marines have been fighting hundreds of miles from the sea in Iraq's Anbar and Afghanistan's Helmand provinces. They have remade themselves as experts on counter-insurgency. They have subdued and co-opted militant movements in Iraq. Now they are trying to do the same in Afghanistan.
But in that period they have not trained on a large scale to take a beach from a hostile force...
...many officers concede that Gates has a point. The development of defensive technology means the Marines must rethink how they come ashore and avoid fortified beaches or landing zones.
But many Marines believe the ability to conduct amphibious landings is what makes them different. Take away their unique characteristics, and you take away the Marines' reason for being.
"There is a paranoia, bred into every Marine, that the Marine Corps will be made to look like the Army, and then in lean times something will get cut — the 'extra' army [only in America]," said Emerson "Emo" Gardner, a retired lieutenant general who served as a close advisor to Gates.
Given the unwavering support for the Marines in Congress, there is little chance the service would be eliminated. Nonetheless, when Gates observed last month that the Army was becoming more like the Marines, and the Marines more like the Army, the Corps began to worry [emphasis added]....
Even if such amphibious landings are eliminated, the Marines still have a different approach to warfare. In counter-insurgency campaigns, for example, Marines often try to degrade militant groups, while the Army focuses on protecting the civilian population [emphasis added, Marines sound like SOF].
"There is a lot of value in having an independent Marine Corps, simply because they do have a different view of land warfare than the Army," said retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles J. Dunlap, who writes frequently on the future of warfare...
