Sea Power - December 2015

guidelines. Those guidelines will emphasize “naval integration, combined arms warfighting and expeditionary maneuver,” and require the Corps to prepare for not just the “low-end” counterinsurgency missions that have dominated the last 14 years, but also the “middle- and high-end” engagements against potential near-peer adversaries, he said.

And, after 14 years of ground combat, Walsh said,
Neller has directed Marine leaders to “look for white
space in our exercise schedule for naval exercises.”
Combat Development Command also will be
responsible for refining and helping to implement
Expeditionary Force 21, the future-looking operational
concept developed by Neller’s predecessor, Walsh said.

In his introduction to MCWL’s 2016 Initiatives Port-
folio, the lab commander, BGen Julian Alford, said each of
the listed efforts “is tied to our understanding of how we
must operate in the future as outlined in Expeditionary
Force 21. It is clear that our service will continue to fight
in chaotic, uncertain and cluttered battlespaces” that are
likely to be “in the dense structures of the urban littorals
against an asymmetric threat enabled by the rapid pro-
liferation of commercial technology and weapon systems.”
Armellino echoed those points and noted that
because most of the emerging megacities are located on
or near coastlines, “it stands to reason that” as a naval
expeditionary force, “the Navy-Marine Corps team will
collaborate to operate in those environments.”
The colonel emphasized the distinction between
“amphibious” operations, which usually connote a
forcible entry from the sea, and “expeditionary,” which
requires “extended lines of operations, usually in aus-
tere conditions, but not always in combat.”
Being expeditionary means “we have the ability to
deploy and sustain the force, conduct combat opera-
tions or security operations, either within the littorals
or farther inland,” he said.

Those are the attributes that recent studies show the Marine Air-Ground Task Forces (MAGTFs) — the Corps’ scalable, combined-arms operational organizations — need to possess. And it is those capabilities that MCWL will help develop, “within the broader combat development process,” Armellino said.

The lab was created in 1995 by the newly installed commandant, Gen Charles C. Krulak, who accurately perceived the widespread but mostly low-scale military challenges the Corps would face in the post-Cold War era. In the following 20 years, MCWL has been at the forefront of developing a wide array of capabilities and operating concepts required to function in the dispersed and often unpredictable missions in which Marines have been involved.

In addition to examining the use of “alternative platforms” to augment traditional amphibious vessels in expeditionary missions, and new ways to support forces ashore, its experiments have focused heavily on what size,

35 WWW.SEAPOWERMAGAZINE.ORG SEAPOWER / DECEMBER 2015 An Internally Transportable Vehicle fords a flooded road during an experimental exercise at Fort Hunter Liggett, Calif., Sept. 10. The experiment was designed to assist the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory in capturing useful information in order for it to design a newer, more effective vehicle in the future.