The Navy and Marine Corps this week kicked off their second live-fire Bold Alligator exercise, with this year’s testing the blue-green team’s ability to work together and with international partners to respond to escalating crises.
The 12-day Bold Alligator 2014 will take place off the coast of Virginia and North Carolina, though one portion of the exercise will send MV-22 Ospreys as far inland as Indiana, Lt. Gen. Robert Neller, commander of Marine Forces Command, told reporters on Tuesday.
The U.S. team will bring amphibious ships, cruisers and destroyers, attack submarines, a Joint High Speed Vessel, a TAO oiler and a T-AKE dry cargo ship. Joining them will be ships from the Netherlands, Denmark, Mexico and Peru. Eighteen NATO allies and partner countries will join or observe the exercise.
Neller said the international cooperation piece is important because so many countries have substantial amphibious capabilities and are continuing to invest in them because they see the value of “using the sea as maneuver space and not having to deal with the footprint ashore.”
“The coalition piece is always harder. Amphibious ops are arguably the most difficult type of operation for any military force, just coming from the sea and aggregating the force and doing the logistics. And you add the coalition piece in there, so the communications and the information sharing and all that is where we’ll really make our money,” he added.
Neller said the United States will inevitably need to work with these countries in a future real-world amphibious operation, be it a humanitarian response/disaster relief effort, an embassy evacuation or other type of event. These future events can only be successful if Bold Alligator 2014 can help everyone work out the bugs in their “coalition-capable command and control.”
To stress this capability, most of the twists in the exercise will be a surprise to the participants, which Neller said is different from a more classic amphibious exercise.
“There will not be a single large amphibious landing where this entire force is put ashore,” he said. “In fact, the force doesn’t even really know yet what the specific events are going to be, they’re going to do this on the fly. They know there’s instability in the objective area and they’re going to have to provide support to certain countries in a fictitious geographical area. And then they’ll respond to this crisis and put the force together, package the force, the naval force, in response to those particular missions.”
Also embedded in the exercise will be opportunities to use American platforms for new purposes. The T-AKE will be used to both deliver dry cargo and to project forces ashore. And the JHSV will be used for bulk fuel transfer, truck transfer and to launch Special Operations Forces’ unmanned underwater vehicles. SOF personnel will also launch from the flight deck, and coalition forces will launch small boats from the well deck for riverine missions, Neller said.
Neller said the JHSV and noncombatant ships like the T-AKE will never replace amphibious ships, but they could certainly find ways to augment the ships’ capability in a contingency operation.
“Because it has a flight deck, because it has as well deck, because we can put equipment on it, because we can move it quickly, because we think we can put a ramp on it and maybe launch amphibian vehicles off the back and hopefully one day recover them, we’re going to continue to experiment with this,” he said of the JHSV.