CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. – As amphibious assault ship USS Boxer (LHD-4) loomed offshore on Saturday, Navy air-cushioned landing craft cycled between its well deck and Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base to offload elements of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit to a southern California beach.
Boxer and its 1,200-member crew returned Sunday to its berth at Naval Base San Diego, marking the end of an extended operational deployment that broke apart its three-ship amphibious ready group.
The deployment played out differently than what Marines, sailors and their commanders had expected just a year ago.
Through their 2023 pre-deployment workups ahead of the planned early 2024 deployment, the 15th MEU and the Boxer ARG grappled with a host of problems. In December, Naval Air Systems Command grounded all MV-22B Osprey tiltrotor aircraft. The Marine Corps also dealt with open-water restrictions on the service’s new Amphibious Combat Vehicle, which was making its maiden operational deployment.
The material condition of Boxer, the ARG/MEU’s flagship, led to additional delays. Transport dock ship USS Somerset (LPD-25) left San Diego in January with a Battalion Landing Team of 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, a contingent that included light armored vehicles. Dock landing ship USS Harpers Ferry (LSD-49) and its complement of BLT 1/5 Marines and sailors, including the first ACV platoon to deploy at sea, left San Diego in April and joined Somerset.
Meanwhile, Boxer started its deployment on April 1 but returned to San Diego ten days after supporting MV-22B Osprey recertifications when it experienced an issue with its starboard rudder, USNI News reported at the time. Assessments and repairs initially were delayed as Navy officials sorted through a lack of available space at West Coast shipyards. Repairs were completed by early July, and the big-deck ship left San Diego in mid-July and began its deployment.
By then, Somerset and the embarked 15th MEU Marines participated in exercises Cobra Gold in Thailand, Tiger Strike in Malaysia, and Balikatan in the Philippines, where the MEU’s ACVs from Harpers Ferry made their operational debut. Before returning home, Boxer and elements of the MEU joined in disaster relief assistance in October after Typhoon Krathon struck the remote Philippine island of Batan.
“What is our story? There’s just so much,” said Col. Sean Dynan, the 15th MEU commander. “The key thing that I anchor on is we had an idea of how we were going to operate and we did exactly that but in unexpected circumstances. That goes back to the adaptability, the flexibility and the resiliency of the amphibious force.”
ARG/MEU commanders and their ships often train and prepare their staffs and subordinate units to do disaggregated operations, with one or two ships – and often their embarked Marines and naval detachments – split off from the other ships for contingency missions, liberty port visits or training exercises with other U.S. forces and partners.
But rarely has the three-ship amphibious force departed on separate schedules after wrapping up final certification exercises before deployment.
“One of the things we had to our advantage is we got to train all together. We completed all of our certifications here for Camp Pendleton, met all of the requirements for both the Navy and the Marine Corps, so we were ready to go,” said Navy Capt. Tate Robinson, commander of San Diego-based Amphibious Squadron 5.
“That enabled us to build a lot of working relationships between my staff and the colonel’s staff, so we were ready to go.”
Then came the call to deploy Somerset by itself with its complement of MEU Marines.
“We modified the training – again, meeting all the [mission-essential tasks] – to make sure that the staff that we embarked aboard Somerset was ready to go forward and do what she needed to do as a single-ship employer right there, with full support of our staff sitting over here,” Robinson said, speaking alongside Dynan on a Red Beach bluff as an LCAC approached from the ship offshore. “Both of us manned up extra watches that we wouldn’t normally stand in port to make sure we supported our ships down range as they moved around.”
The ARG/MEU got around the Indo-Pacific. Boxer logged 32,000 miles over its five-month deployment, and “Somerset did more. She sailed all the way to India,” the commodore said.
“It was a staggered deployment model, but we were able to conduct, over that 304 days, over 80 exercises, engagements or operations, which was fairly substantial,” said Dynan. “And that ranged from nine major exercises that went from Hawaii with Rim of the Pacific exercise, all the way to India for Tiger Triumph. So that was pretty substantial.”
The unexpected schedule and deployment was far from a morale buster. “One of the things that is interesting is you had over 400 Marines and sailors assigned to the 15th MEU who either extended or re-enlisted,” Robinson said. “That’s 25 percent of the force,” Dynan said.
“You’ve got people that have actually been part of it and then volunteered more and say, ‘I’m going to go do this,’” Robinson added. “You just can’t buy that sort of motivation.”
Unifying the Team
The deployment was very different from what the senior leaders had expected, but they said both command staffs worked well together even as the force split off and sailed across the Indo-Pacific. The commands and elements were stretched across a wide area and, at one point, separated by 13 time zones.
“We were able to adjust to it, and that’s just part of the flexibility of an amphibious force embarked on ships,” Robinson said. “We give the country and the combatant commanders options of what it is we’re going to be able to do. We received different taskings, so we flexed to it and went out and did it. But again, it’s foundational with the training that we received.”
What made it work well, the commanders noted, was the melding into a singular amphibious force.
“We’re a combined staff. So we were able to speak for one another and when we’re at sea, we are supporting his efforts. And then when we’re ashore, then he’s supporting mine,” Dynan said, referring to Robinson. “That relationship is growing in importance just based off of the overall changing environment,” he added.
When he got a brief, Robinson said, he expected his staff to do that alongside their Marine counterpart. In a short time, it became seamless. “We were getting to the point where he would say something that maybe he needed to do, and I’d be like, absolutely what he said,” the commodore said. “Or … it would just be like, ‘yeah, what that guy said, we’re gonna go do that.’”
Dynan said, “when we weren’t together it just felt like we were missing the other half.”
That focus and approach as a combined force wasn’t just relegated to the command spaces aboard the ships. Marines themselves took on more ownership while aboard the ships. “Both the Marines and the ships completed damage control qualifications so that they were ready to support the ship when they needed to,” Robinson said.
“The joke when I was growing up,” said Dynan, “was when the ship was in General Quarters, the Marines go to the rack. That wasn’t the case, not in the current environment. A [drone] or a missile doesn’t decide whether it hits a Marine space or a sailor space. So we’ve got to be able to be a part of the solution for those types of problems.”
Marines have taken on greater roles in helping defend the ship, too. The MEU’s capabilities included the Light Marine Air Defense Integrated System that can knock down enemy aerial drones.
“We bring counter-UAV capability aboard the ship, and it gets integrated into the ship’s defense,” Dynan said, “and the aircraft themselves are a big part of the defense of the amphibious task force.”
“The circumstances alone require us to work together,” he added. “With the capabilities combined, we realized we were far better prepared to defend and fight for the ship when we integrated our staffs’ combined capability.”
An unplanned, disaggregated deployment would have posed some logistical challenges as the ships and embarked forces moved throughout the Indo-Pacific region. But “even with the change in the employment model, we were able to accomplish all the things that we had set out” to do, Dynan said.
The 15th MEU, like other Marine air-ground task forces that have deployed to the Indo-Pacific region, operated with a hub-spoke-node model.
“We deployed four F-35s up to Iwakuni and then we’re still able to put the other six F-35s aboard the ship. We established distributed logistics network across the theater that [included] Singapore, Australia, the Philippines.” The MEU also established “a fairly robust liaison with cells across the entire [area of responsibility],” he added.
“So having that established, we got that out early and just maintained it for the duration of the deployment,” said Dynan. “It really created some sustainable and flexible logistics for the force. It allowed us to tie it in with higher headquarters. It allowed us to make sure that we maintained some consistency and we were always in command throughout.”
The deployment highlighted the need to train on the fundamentals of amphibious operations.
“It’s again back to the basics and being able to do all of the things that you’re trained to do – and you’ve got that solid,” Robinson said. “You know how to do ship-to-shore movement. It doesn’t matter if it’s Camp Pendleton, if it’s Korea, if it’s the Philippines. … We’ve got a process. It works to do that. It doesn’t much matter where it is. Again, it’s back to the flexibility of having an embarked MEU with the amphibious shipping. We can do quite a bit, and do it in very short minutes.”
