Sea Power - September 2015

“The most critical requirements, from my perspective, that we need to address are in the area of command and control,” he said.

Dunford on July 31 was confirmed to become the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with LtGen Robert Neller selected to succeed Dunford as commandant.

After years of resisting the CoComs’ requirements for split and disaggregated operations, Walsh said, Navy and Marine Corps leaders decided that “ supporting CoComs is all about service relevancy. … We always talked about being a Swiss Army Knife, jack of all trades. If you’re sitting there saying, ‘No, you can’t use my Swiss Army Knife for those things,’ then you’re not really being supportive of that CoCom.

“So we said, ‘OK, we’re going to be that Swiss Army
Knife, we’re going to support disaggregation.’”
With that decision, they realized they had been
“hamstringing” the ARG/MEU commanders at sea “by
not giving them the right capability to go forward to do
this, whether it’s the comms [communications] capa-
bility, the aviation capability … but, most importantly,
the right workup training,” Walsh said.

That all had to start with providing them “the doctrine, the conops — the concept of operations — to support that,” he said.

So Fleet Forces Command and Marine Corps Combat Development Command developed a conops for split and disaggregated operations that was signed out last August, Walsh said.

That provided the foundation to develop the Naval Systems Training Plan and “the ROC-POE, the required operational concept and planned operating environment” that dictates what a ship needs in equipment, manning and training to function in specific conditions, he said.

“Then we were able to go in and do the training that was required in the ARG/MEU workups. We have to put money to the training — steaming hours, syllabus, bring in other capabilities” — to prepare the individual ships to perform missions that they might not have to do if the ARG remained together, Walsh said.

That also raised issues of what kind of equipment and manning are needed to operate alone, he said.

A key factor, as Dunford noted, was communications. An integrated The smaller amphib also might need to take some of the rotary-wing aircraft from the big deck for its independent mission, which would require an aviation detachment to maintain the aircraft and conduct air control, noted CDR Brent Cotton, one of Walsh’s aides.

The need to split the ARG also highlighted the sharp differences in capabilities of the three types of ships in the ARG.

The big deck, the LHA or LHD, “can do a lot. It’s a
big, huge ship, 40,000 tons,” Walsh said. “We can’t
afford three of those in the ARG.”
The new San Antonio-class amphibious transport
docks, or LPD 17s, have C2 capabilities as good or
even better than the big decks. They also have a hangar
to support an aviation detachment.

“The LPD 17, we knew it can’t do everything an LHA could do. But it could go off and do a lot of missions by itself. We saw it operate successfully,” Walsh said.

But the weak link in the ARG is the old dock landing ship (LSD), he said.

13 WWW.SEAPOWERMAGAZINE.ORG SEAPOWER / SEPTEMBER 2015 An AH- 1 Cobra lands on the flight deck of the amphibious assault ship USS

Kearsarge in the Atlantic Ocean Aug. 2. The Kearsarge Amphibious Ready Group (ARG) and the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) were conducting a Composite Training Unit Exercise in preparation for deployment. Although the ARG/MEUs historically were organized, trained and equipped to operate as an integral force, operational patterns over the last decade have split them up on deployment, with one or more of the ships and some of the Marines and their aircraft operating separately.