Publishing Disclaimer: In all of its publications and products, Military Review presents professional information. However, the views expressed therein are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Army University, the Department of the Army, or any other agency of the U.S. government.

---

 

Army Doctrine for Defending the Littorals

 

Capt. Daniel S. Hogestyn, US Army

 

Download the PDF

 

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower is famously quoted as saying, “Successful penetration of a defended beach is the most difficult operation in warfare.”¹ He did not, as one might assume, say this in the context of the Normandy landings but rather in a 1939 report on the planned defense of the Philippines. These preparations would prove wholly inadequate in the face of a well-trained and equipped Japanese amphibious force in December 1941. Optimistic appraisals of the stopping power of water are not a solution to defending against a determined adversary. The US Army faces a critical doctrinal gap in amphibious defense that undermines its ability to operate in maritime theaters, particularly the Indo-Pacific, where defending key littoral terrain is a primary mission requirement.

This gap is the result of a historical path dependency with roots in the early stages of World War II in the Pacific. US forces would not defend against a large-scale amphibious attack again after December 1941. However, modern strategic imperatives in the western Pacific have again placed the same terrain into the Army’s operational focus. The 2025 National Security Strategy states in no uncertain terms, “We will build a military capable of denying aggression anywhere in the First Island Chain.”² Current doctrine is functionally limited to conducting amphibious assault and is relegated almost entirely to joint and Marine Corps publications. Recent additions to Army doctrine on multidomain operations reflect the unique operational challenges of maritime environments but do not cover the tactical approach to denying enemy amphibious landings.

The Doctrinal Gap

Current doctrine on amphibious operations almost exclusively discusses conducting amphibious landings, with little detailed treatment of defending against them. Joint Publication 3-02, Amphibious Operations, provides an overarching framework for how the joint force conducts offensive amphibious operations.³ Marine Corps publications include significantly more tactical detail but similarly focus only on offensive operations. The Army published amphibious doctrine in the past but has no current publications dedicated to the topic at the service level.⁴

The most recent edition of Field Manual (FM) 3-0, Operations, the Army’s capstone doctrine for multidomain operations, includes chapter 7, “Army Operations in Maritime Environments.”⁵ Prior to this chapter, the overview of defensive operations only states that “Army forces may have maritime engagement areas” regarding the possibility of facing an enemy amphibious assault.⁶ While it serves as a comprehensive overview of the unique operational-level features of fighting from and for islands, archipelagos, and other littoral regions, this chapter is not intended as a guide to the tactical employment of combined arms in this environment. It includes brief overviews of Army-specific planning considerations and how to apply the operational framework to maritime environments; the possibility of defending against amphibious forces is recognized but not discussed in any detail.⁷ This chapter is a critical, yet incomplete, first step toward understanding the demands of littoral defense.

FM 3-0 covers the operational level of littoral warfare, but the Army provides no discussion of how to defend a coastline at the tactical level anywhere in doctrine. This is a significant gap given the strategic context in which tactical-level Army echelons could be employed. The Marine Corps is tasked with developing concepts and doctrine for the conduct of expeditionary amphibious operations.⁸ This does not preclude the Army from developing its own guidance for tactical-level formations on how to defeat enemy amphibious assaults. Army doctrine includes specific manuals on operating in the arctic, mountains, jungles, and deserts (Army Techniques Publications [ATP] 3-90.96 through 3-90.99, respectively) but not on littoral spaces.⁹

To be sure, the fundamental defensive principles and characteristics articulated in FM 3-90, Tactics, are terrain-agnostic and generally applicable to any environment, including littoral zones.¹⁰ A commander defending a coastline would still organize forces in depth, retain reserves, design counterattack plans, and prepare to assume the offensive, just as FM 3-90 prescribes. However, what remains absent from Army doctrine is the detailed guidance on how to integrate combined arms specifically for anti-landing operations. As a result of this doctrinal gap, there are no developed training standards, no combat training center scenarios, and no unit-level training guidance with which to systematically prepare Army units for the possibility of defending a coastline. This gap leaves such operations to be improvised based on general defensive principles rather than understood through institutionalized doctrine.

How We Got Here

Prior to World War II, US coastal defense doctrine evolved alongside revolutionary changes to amphibious operations spearheaded by the Marine Corps. Originally an Army-dominated sphere, the domain of the Coastal Artillery Corps, defense of the littorals was focused on fixed gun emplacements and mining to defend key ports on American soil. The failure of Allied forces at Gallipoli in World War I reinforced widespread belief that opposed amphibious landings were prohibitively costly or impossible against prepared defenses.¹¹ Marine Corps officers in the interwar period sought to correct Allied mistakes, publishing the Tentative Manual for Landing Operations in 1934, later revised as Landing Operations Doctrine in 1938.¹² This manual’s defensive counterpart, the Tentative Manual for Defense of Advanced Bases, was published in 1936.¹³ These two manuals are echoed in the modern Marine Corps operating concept of expeditionary advanced base operations, where Marine units are again charged with seizing and defending key littoral terrain to support naval maneuver.¹⁴ Advances in landing craft, naval and aerial fires, and amphibious tactics gradually decreased the efficacy of fixed harbor fortifications. The postwar disestablishment of the Coastal Artillery Corps reflected this changing character of amphibious warfare but also removed the Army’s only proponent for counterlanding doctrine.¹⁵

Between December 1941 and the summer of 1942, Japanese forces conducted near simultaneous offensives across Allied territory in the South Pacific and central Pacific areas. Out of dozens of amphibious operations in this period, only Guam, Wake Island, and the Philippines were defended by US forces. The Philippines is a critical case study for the importance of understanding amphibious defense today. US forces faced the daunting challenge of defending a sprawling archipelago with numerous potential landing sites across thousands of miles of coastline. Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s deviation from War Plan Orange to attempt a forward beach defense proved virtually impossible given limited mobility and wide dispersion requirements.¹⁶ Three years later, Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita drew on his own experience conducting amphibious operations in Malaya. He recognized this operational dilemma and adopted a defense-in-depth approach for his Fourteenth Area Army when defending Luzon, ceding the beaches entirely to focus on holding key inland terrain.¹⁷ Ironically, FM 3-0 chooses to highlight the British defeat in Malaya as a vignette, while similar lessons were being learned by US forces simultaneously.¹⁸ The defense of Guam and Wake islands were primarily Marine Corps efforts, and both fell to overwhelming Japanese forces within the opening weeks of the war. The US experience at defending against amphibious assault was brief and traumatic. These cases cannot be explained as simply strategic failures. If the Army intends to deny adversaries their offensive objectives in the First Island Chain, it must prepare to win these types of engagements if called on to do so.

In preparation for the island-hopping campaign to roll back Japanese conquests, as well as the theater-opening amphibious operations in the European Theater, the Army understandably focused on the offensive side of amphibious operations. The Army would retain an amphibious assault capability throughout the Cold War but ceded much of this ground to the Marine Corps. With the Army’s focus on Central Europe, where there was minimal threat from major Soviet amphibious operations, little effort was made to prepare Army forces for the possibility of coastal defense. US naval and air dominance over adversaries in East Asia during the Cold War similarly put the emphasis on conducting rather than preventing landings in that theater. This gap would continue through the end of the Cold War, after which the United States faced no adversaries capable of large-scale amphibious operations until recent years.

Two flawed assumptions perpetuate the gap in littoral defense doctrine. First, institutional convention assigns these spaces almost exclusively to the Marine Corps. The revision of FM 3-0 is a major step in breaking down this perceived barrier. Second, naval and air capabilities can prevent landings by themselves and make maneuver forces irrelevant. In the case of a conflict with the People’s Republic of China, US planners cannot take the presence of friendly air or naval assets for granted given the dramatic expansion of enemy antiaccess/area-denial capabilities that cover well past the First Island Chain.¹⁹ The expanding investment, training, and organizational focus of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on amphibious operations clearly suggests that they expect a landing to be contested onshore.²⁰ This doctrinal gap persists despite operational realities that may require Army forces to fight on the ground against amphibious assault in certain scenarios.

The Value of Littoral Defense Doctrine

The twentieth century witnessed far more successful amphibious operations than unsuccessful ones. However, accounts of these operations suffer from selection bias, as they mostly describe attacks that were not deterred by difficult conditions or well-prepared defenses. Even unsuccessful defenses against amphibious assault have led to measurably different outcomes based on force employment decisions guided by doctrine. Outcomes cannot be explained by the correlation of forces and means alone. Beach defenders have often exacted costly losses on attackers despite material disadvantages. Others have achieved significant strategic effects by delaying attackers from achieving their operational objectives.

Theodore Gatchel’s 1996 book At the Water’s Edge: Defending Against the Modern Amphibious Assault traces a variety of approaches to coastal defense. Categorizing these in broad terms as either “naval defense,” “defense at the water’s edge,” or “mobile defense,” Gatchel attempts to explain the variation of success primarily in terms of casualties and delay on the beachhead.²¹ For example, Japanese defenders were able to inflict significantly higher casualties over longer campaigns while defending Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa late in the war. In comparison to earlier landings in the central Pacific, these defenses did more to slow US momentum and increase casualties due to a change in defensive approach codified in doctrine from Imperial General Headquarters in March 1944.²²

All Gatchel’s cases from the Pacific Theater were eventually Allied victories, and this trend leads to compelling conclusions about the development of amphibious doctrine. Allied planners rightly didn’t attempt amphibious operations until the correlation of forces and means virtually ensured a successful landing, and often simply landed where the enemy was not whenever possible. The successful track record of amphibious forces therefore makes the prospect of defending a coastline seem unenviable, and often the product of some level of strategic failure to be in that situation, where the enemy gets to choose to commit to an amphibious assault in the first place. Gatchel offers two potential explanations for why most militaries do not have formalized doctrine on beach defense. First, most defenders are army officers, who by nature do not focus on amphibious operations as much as their naval counterparts on the attacker’s side. Second, defenders simply do not anticipate the enemy having the level of initiative to conduct such an operation if their strategic plans succeeded. Despite these reasons, the author argues that “the lesson for defenders in the future is that anti-landing doctrine is essential.”²³

A 2002 study by the Center for Naval Analyses sought to test the assumptions of the Marine Corps’ then–new operational concept, operational maneuver from the sea (OMFTS). Critical to this effort was analyzing the historical sources of “operational pause,” defined as the time between landing and advancing from the beachhead toward the operational objective.²⁴ OMFTS sought to minimize this operational pause as much as possible with an aim to limit the “chaos in the littorals.”²⁵ The report suggests that, contrary to the assumptions embedded in OMFTS, operational pause was largely a factor of enemy resistance, including enemy defensive doctrine.²⁶ This categorical variable modifies Gatchel’s types slightly; it includes forward, mobile, in-depth, and guerrilla defenses.²⁷ These types represent exceptionally broad approaches to defending against amphibious assault, yet the analysis makes it clear that defensive force employment matters greatly in the outcome of amphibious operations. Defenders must be guided by detailed doctrine in their tactical approach to this unique defensive scenario.

The Modern Littoral Defense Problem

Several technological developments have fundamentally altered the offense-defense balance in the littoral fight. First, long-range fires and lethal unmanned systems have extended commanders’ reach to interdict forces at sea, in the surf zone, on the beach, and during movement toward inland objectives. MacArthur’s own long-range strike capability, his B-17s, were destroyed in the war’s opening hours as they sat on the runway at Clark Field, eliminating a critical element of his defensive concept.²⁸ Modern defenders are unlikely to share this fate. Adversary long-range strike capabilities will inevitably hunt key fires assets and sensors, but the dense urban, mountain, and jungle environments of the First Island Chain will severely complicate their efforts. Traditional antiship and antiaircraft missiles are more mobile and have a lower signature than ever before. Combined with the proliferation of even stealthier unmanned intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and strike assets, the balance has swung in favor of the defender.

In selecting the landing site, the attacker still retains the initiative but has far fewer advantages than in previous generations. It is much harder to hide on the open sea than on land. Unlike in the Solomon Islands campaign, when civilian coast watcher networks visually confirmed the movement of Japanese ships through the archipelago, satellites and other ISR assets greatly expand the area at sea that can be searched for enemy vessels.²⁹ Defenders will rely on assets in the space domain, and it will require significant deception or degradation of these systems to hide an amphibious task group on the move.

On land, maneuver forces have experienced dramatic increases in mobility since World War II. Infantry mounted on Infantry Squad Vehicles, transported by rotary-wing aircraft or moved between islands via small craft, can reposition orders-of-magnitude faster than their predecessors. Both MacArthur’s and Yamashita’s forces were largely foot-mobile. And modern infrastructure along the First Island Chain—highways, improved ports, and modern airfields—further enhance defensive responsiveness. Ground forces can now move in hours what would have taken days. One of the only bright spots in the early days of the US defense of Luzon was the delaying action by the horse-mounted 26th Cavalry in the vicinity of Damortis; it is easy to imagine how much more effective MacArthur’s forces on Bataan would have been if they shared today’s tactical mobility.³⁰ This reaction speed is further served by an earlier warning provided by modern ISR capabilities. Even obstacles are more responsive; air- or ground-delivered scatterable mines can be rapidly deployed at beach exits or inland chokepoints to help contain a lodgment.

The proliferation of precision strike capabilities affects the defenders as well. US forces must operate under the threat of adversary long-range precision fires designed to strike fixed installations, logistics nodes, and command posts. The PLA’s expanding arsenal of ballistic and cruise missiles includes systems purpose-built to deny sanctuary to forces throughout the First Island Chain. Dispersal, mobility, and deception are prerequisites for survival. Doctrine must account for both exploiting defensive technologies and mitigating vulnerabilities to adversary standoff capabilities.

The Philippines are an exceptionally expansive archipelago with extensive potential landing beaches. However, while a key part of the First Island Chain and a treaty ally of the United States, they are not the most likely target of the PLA—it is Taiwan. Taiwan’s landing beaches are well known, prepared, and most importantly, limited in size.³¹ An amphibious force landing on the island will need to establish a lodgment somewhere, ideally one with wide beaches that can accommodate several amphibious combined arms brigades and provide access to major port facilities that can be seized to offload huge quantities of nonamphibious equipment and materiel. Therefore, the difficulty of defending everywhere is significantly reduced by natural obstacles and enemy operational objectives. Small, distributed units equipped with mobile antiship missiles and ISR assets can cover large areas by leveraging modern sensor networks and rapid repositioning, forcing the attacker to either accept prohibitive losses or abandon favorable landing sites. First-person-view drones and loitering munitions can compound this advantage by systematically destroying landing craft and amphibious vehicles during their vulnerable approach. These assets are too small and too numerous for shipboard defenses to effectively counter. Even if a lodgment is secured, mobile defenders employing these same technologies can contest breakout operations and interdict logistics, accelerating the attacker’s culmination before their operational objectives are achieved.

The defense of Ukraine’s Black Sea coast in early 2022 validates these technological and tactical advantages. The Russian Armed Forces assembled approximately half of their total amphibious capacity, to include over a dozen landing ships of different classes, off the coast near Odessa.³² However, Ukrainian defenders successfully deterred this prepared operation with a similar suite of capabilities as discussed above. Ubiquitous drone reconnaissance, coastal defense cruise missiles, naval mines, and prepared defenses ashore led the Russians to deem such an operation prohibitively costly.³³ While the strategic and operational contexts differ greatly between theaters, the fact holds that the balance of littoral warfare has shifted strongly in favor of the defender.

The Stand-In Force and Forward Presence

Taking advantage of this defensive boon requires something obvious: the presence of friendly forces. The geostrategic reality of the western Pacific means this is not a given. PLA long-range fires are tailor-made to hold US force projection assets at risk in the region and prevent or deter reinforcement in the First Island Chain during a crisis or conflict. However, US reinforcement of this terrain remains possible prior to or during a future conflict. Granted, a Taiwan scenario carries unique escalatory considerations and diplomatic sensitivities that would complicate large-scale reinforcement, but defense of US treaty allies elsewhere in the region involves different strategic calculations.

The stand-in force exists whether it can be reinforced or not. While primarily a Marine Corps effort, these forces include Army units such as the recently reported Army Rotational Force-Philippines.³⁴ Americans do not defend the littorals alone. The stand-in force augments allies and partners’ national militaries, which provide the bulk of combat power in the region. Regardless of the specific ratio between US and partner forces in any given scenario, it is critical that they share a common understanding of how to defend littoral and archipelagic territory. In many cases, they will be advised, assisted, and enabled by US Special Forces and advisory elements. All must be working from the same doctrinal sheet of music.

Maneuver elements of the stand-in force cannot simply serve as local security for high-value assets or function as tripwires designed to deter the Chinese. Effective deterrence requires that these forces are trained and prepared to deny aggression, not merely absorb it. Deterrence by denial, as opposed to deterrence by punishment, depends on the credible ability to defeat an adversary’s operational objectives.³⁵ Doctrine is the foundation of effective training to meet these ends.

Recommendations

The Army should produce a standalone publication on defending against amphibious operations. Given the detailed doctrine already provided in Marine Corps publications on conducting amphibious operations, there is no need to revive the Army’s now defunct offensive amphibious operations manuals. Additionally, major changes to existing publications such as FM 3-90 are unnecessary. The same general principles apply when defending a beach versus inland terrain, but new doctrine is needed to help commanders and their staffs understand the nuances of defending littoral terrain and the nature of the amphibious threat. While outside the scope of this article, such a publication should also address counterlanding operations against airborne and air assault forces, given the role they will likely play in any major amphibious operation by a potential adversary.³⁶

What should this new manual contain? If it is to aid tactical-level unit leaders, it must be structured in a way that supports its employment in the military decision-making process, and it must incorporate all warfighting functions. First, it should frame the effects of the littoral environment on operations. Army intelligence sections have limited experience in analyzing the effects of tidal ranges, surf conditions, beach types, and maritime avenues of approach on operations. Marine Corps publications contain significant detail on these variables as they apply to the conduct of amphibious operations.³⁷ It would not be difficult to synthesize this information for use from a defender’s perspective. These effects are often combined with the environmental constraints of mountains, the arctic, deserts, jungles, and urban terrain, but these regions all have their own dedicated publications. This doctrine must include a thorough discussion of adversary amphibious capabilities, doctrine, and tactics. ATP 7-100.3, Chinese Tactics, dedicates four pages to outlining how a PLA Navy Marine Corps brigade would conduct a hypothetical amphibious assault.³⁸ This is sufficient detail for a broad manual on the PLA, but echelon-specific detail is needed to truly guide intelligence preparation of the battlefield. Beyond supporting intelligence preparation of the battlefield, the manual should advise the tactical employment of friendly maneuver forces and enabling assets in the defense of shorelines. The tactics, techniques, and procedures required to either prevent an enemy lodgment or to force it to culminate before reaching inland operational objectives are not obvious given standard defensive doctrine.

Doctrine is only useful if units understand it and train on it thoroughly. Elements of littoral defense have been exercised in the annual Northern Strike exercise series held at Camp Grayling, Michigan.³⁹ Expanding access to similar exercises for maneuver units or integrating them into the defensive portion of combat training center rotations, especially those conducted at the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center, would allow units forward deploying to the Indo-Pacific Command area of responsibility to train and rehearse littoral defense as the scenario for their existing brigade-level defense validation. Relevant scenarios can also be worked into professional military education at each level beginning at the Captains Career Course—not replacing any current curriculum but simply providing the scenario context for already scheduled planning exercises. Finally, the Army should conduct deliberate wargaming of the tactical aspects of amphibious defense. Most of what is understood about modern amphibious operations is inherently speculative, given the limited operational history since World War II. A purposeful campaign to test out different tactical approaches and operational concepts can serve to inform any future doctrinal publications.

Conclusion

The littoral regions of the western Pacific are once again under threat. Even in conflict, it is not guaranteed that Army maneuver units will be directly engaging enemy amphibious forces. However, taking the requirement seriously will simultaneously prepare forward-deployed forces for that possibility and signal to adversaries that the Army is serious about supporting a strategy of denial. The barrier to action is low. Major changes to force structure or operational concepts are not needed to address this gap in training and doctrine. All that the Army needs is dedicated thought toward how units should prepare to make the enemy face “the most difficult operation in warfare.”

---

Notes

1. Theodore L. Gatchel, At the Water’s Edge: Defending Against the Modern Amphibious Assault (Naval Institute Press, 1996), 1.
2. The White House, National Security Strategy of the United States of America (The White House, November 2025), 24, https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf.
3. Joint Publication 3-02, Amphibious Operations (US Government Publishing Office [GPO], April 2025).
4. See, for example, Field Manual (FM) 31-5, Landing Operations on Hostile Shores (US Government Printing Office, 1962 [obsolete]); or FM 60-5, Amphibious Operations: Battalion in Assault (US Government Printing Office, 1951 [obsolete]).
5. FM 3-0, Operations (US GPO, March 2025), 171–89.
6. FM 3-0, Operations, 155–56.
7. FM 3-0, Operations, 175, 180.
8. Department of Defense Directive 5100.01, Functions of the Department of Defense and Its Major Components (Department of Defense, 2010), 36–37, https://www.esd.whs.mil/portals/54/documents/dd/issuances/dodd/510001p.pdf.
9. Army Techniques Publication (ATP) 3-90.96, Arctic and Extreme Cold Weather Operations (US GPO, February 2025); ATP 3-90.97, Mountain Warfare and Cold Weather Operations (US GPO, April 2016); ATP 3-90.98, Jungle Operations (US GPO, September 2020); ATP 3-90.99, Desert Operations (US GPO, April 2021).
10. FM 3-90, Tactics (US GPO, May 2023).
11. Russell F. Weigley, “Normandy to Falaise: A Critique of Allied Operational Planning in 1944,” in Historical Perspectives of the Operational Art, ed. Michael D. Krause and R. Cody Phillips (US Army Center of Military History [CMH], 2005), 393, https://history.army.mil/portals/143/Images/Publications/catalog/70-89-1.pdf.
12. US Marine Corps [USMC], Tentative Manual for Landing Operations (Headquarters, USMC, 1934 [obsolete]); Fleet Training Publication 167, Landing Operations Doctrine (Headquarters, USMC, 1938 [obsolete]).
13. USMC, Tentative Manual for Defense of Advanced Bases (Headquarters, USMC, 1936 [obsolete]).
14. USMC, Tentative Manual for Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations, 2nd ed. (Headquarters, USMC, 2023), 1-3.
15. The Coast Artillery Corps was disestablished in 1950 with most units transferred to the artillery or air defense artillery branches.
16. “Plan Orange,” Pacific War Online Encyclopedia, accessed 5 March 2026, http://pwencycl.kgbudge.com/P/l/Plan_Orange.htm; Louis Morton, The Fall of the Philippines, CMH Pub. 5-2-1 (US Army CMH, 1993), 65.
17. Dale Andradé, Luzon, CMH Pub 72-28 (US Army CMH, 1996), 7, https://history.army.mil/Portals/143/Images/Publications/Publication%20By%20Title%20Images/C%20Img/campaigns-wwii/pdf/21.pdf.
18. FM 3-0, Operations, 176.
19. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2024, Annual Report to Congress (US Department of Defense, 2024), 67, https://media.defense.gov/2024/Dec/18/2003615520/-1/-1/0/MILITARY-AND-SECURITY-DEVELOPMENTS-INVOLVING-THE-PEOPLES-REPUBLIC-OF-CHINA-2024.PDF.
20. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2024, 128.
21. Gatchel, At the Water’s Edge, 3.
22. Gatchel, At the Water’s Edge, 143.
23. Gatchel, At the Water’s Edge, 208.
24. Carter A. Malkasian, Charting the Pathway to OMFTS: A Historical Assessment of Amphibious Operations from 1941 to the Present (CNA Corporation, July 2002), 49, https://www.cna.org/reports/2002/D0006297.A2.pdf.
25. Malkasian, Charting the Pathway to OMFTS, 10.
26. Malkasian, Charting the Pathway to OMFTS, 99.
27. Malkasian, Charting the Pathway to OMFTS, 55.
28. Morton, Fall of the Philippines, 88.
29. John Brown, “Coast Watchers in the Solomons,” WWII History 3, no. 5 (September 2004), https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/coast-watchers-in-the-solomons/.
30. Morton, Fall of the Philippines, 134, 369.
31. Ian Easton, The Chinese Invasion Threat: Taiwan’s Defense and American Strategy in Asia (Project 2049 Institute, 2017), 105.
32. Igor Delanoë, “Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in the ‘Special Military Operation’ in Ukraine,” Foreign Policy Research Institute, 7 February 2024, https://www.fpri.org/article/2024/02/russias-black-sea-fleet-in-the-special-military-operation-in-ukraine/.
33. Mike Mattis, “Maritime Domain Lessons from Russia-Ukraine,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, 27 February 2025, https://www.csis.org/analysis/maritime-domain-lessons-russia-ukraine-conflict-focus.
34. Aaron-Matthew Lariosa, “U.S. Army Quietly Stands Up Rotational Force in the Philippines,” U.S. Naval Institute News, 2 February 2026, https://news.usni.org/2026/02/02/u-s-army-quietly-stands-up-rotational-force-in-the-philippines.
35. Glenn H. Snyder, Deterrence and Defense: Toward a Theory of National Security (Princeton University Press, 1961), 15.
36. Cristina Garafola, “The PLA Airborne Corps in a Joint Island Landing Campaign,” in Chinese Amphibious Warfare: Prospects for a Cross-Strait Invasion, ed. Andrew S. Erickson et al. (Naval War College Press, 2024), 153–72; Tom Fox, “The PLA Ground Forces’ New Helicopters: An ‘Easy Button’ for Crossing the Taiwan Strait?,” in Erickson et al., Chinese Amphibious Warfare, 173–92.
37. Marine Corps Tactical Publication 3-10C, Employment of Amphibious Assault Vehicles (Headquarters, USMC, 2020), 2-4–2-10.
38. ATP 7-100.3, Chinese Tactics (US GPO, August 2021), 7-17–7-20.
39. Michael Kroll, “Northern Strike Returns to Michigan,” Michigan Department of Military and Veterans Affairs press release, 28 July 2025, https://www.michigan.gov/dmva/newsroom/press-releases/2025/07/28/northern-strike-returns-to-michigan.

 

 

 

Back to Top

May-June 2026