(Amerika) United States Navy

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Light Amphibious Warships Face Survivability Questions

The Department of the Navy is pursuing a new class of light amphibious warships that will be key to future operations in the Indo-Pacific region as the sea services work to counter China, experts say. But the platforms may need more defensive capabilities than some envision.

The amphibious force of the future will be characterized by the importance of smaller vessels, including the light amphibious warship, or LAW, said Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va.

The platform will offer the military increased flexibility and allow it to be more distributed and deployed with smaller sized Marine Corps units, said Wittman, ranking member of the House Armed Services subcommittee on seapower and projection forces.

That will ensure “that we can hold the Chinese at risk in various places, but also be able to move our assets around,” he said during an event hosted by The Hill in March. “We’ll still need the larger ships as logistical connectors, but … [we will] use amphibious platforms to be able to move equipment around, to be able to supply Marine Corps units.”

Moving forward, the United States will not see the large-scale amphibious assaults that took place during World War II, he predicted.

“That’s just not going to be the future,” Wittman said. “It’s going to be much more about how do we move things around, how do we increase the level of uncertainty with our adversaries?”

In a potential amphibious assault in the Western Pacific near China, the Navy and Marine Corps would face an environment saturated with a combination of anti-ship missiles, ballistic missiles and cruise missiles, said Bryan Clark, director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at the Hudson Institute.

Even with destroyer escorts, the threat would be more than a large amphibious warship could handle, he said in an interview. That currently leaves the service with few options. One includes using ship-based MV-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft to fly in troops from hundreds of miles away, which would keep the big-deck amphibs at a safe distance but leave Marines vulnerable.

However, a light amphibious warship could change that predicament, he said.

The vessel “could carry troops and some of their gear ashore in smaller packages so that the larger amphibious warships will stay farther away,” he said. “For the Chinese, it may not be worth it to launch an anti-ship ballistic missile.”

The ships would be harder to target and the cost exchange may not be ideal, he noted.

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