- The Marines are shopping for unmanned boats that can act as platforms for suicide drones.
- The boats might be higher positioned to help amphibious landings with precision drone assaults.
- Unmanned boats will have the ability to circle small islands, responding to pressing requests for assist.
The U.S. Marine Corps is taking a totally new tack to offering fireplace help throughout amphibious landings: unmanned boats stocked stuffed with suicide drones.
The shipbuilder Metallic Shark has introduced it’s constructing a brand new sort of unmanned floor vessel, which the Marines plan to equip with loitering munitions. Such a ship would act as a cell fireplace help platform, servicing requires fireplace with salvos of drones geared up with explosive expenses.
The Marines are reconfiguring for struggle with China, and so they’ve already decided the long run battlefield: the South China Sea.
If the U.S. and China ever do come to blows, the Marines plan to roll up Beijing’s fortified islands within the South China Sea, hopping from one island to the following, utilizing one seized island to assist seize one other—all whereas retaining Chinese language air and naval forces at bay.
Most of those islands, constructed up from atolls, shoals, and islets with dredgers and bolstered with concrete, are literally fairly small. Fiery Cross Reef, for instance, is simply 677 acres. Mischief Reef, in the meantime, is barely bigger at 1,379 acres (simply over 2 sq. miles).
Initially constructed beneath the guise of being scientific analysis stations, many of those bases characteristic ground-based radars, anti-ship missiles, artillery, and military-grade airfields able to supporting fighter jets.
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The Marines are getting ready to storm these islands and reconfiguring the Corps to do it. The service is retiring all of its most important battle tanks and 16 out of 21 artillery batteries. The Marines consider their M1A1 tanks are just too heavy and cumbersome to land on considered one of these tiny islands, solely to danger shedding them to a handheld anti-tank weapon.
As for artillery, most of those islands are so small that howitzers cannot be employed at a secure distance from enemy fireplace, or may not have the ability to present oblique fireplace at such shut ranges.
Amphibious forces hitting the seashore will nonetheless want some type of fireplace help, to blast aside bunkers, strongpoints, and different cussed defenses. Whereas the Marines could have their very own AH-1Z assault helicopters and F-35 fighters, enemy air defenses may hold them from performing the shut air help mission.
