By Spencer Ackerman
Video production: Mark Riffee/Wired.com
ABOARD THE U.S.S. WASP — Over 14,000 sailors and Marines from 31 ships and 11 nations took part in the biggest amphibious exercise in a decade. Danger Room was there, cameras rolling.
One of the staging points for the exercise, known as Bold Alligator, was the U.S.S. Wasp, a big-deck amphibious assault ship weighing in at 40,000 tons. On Saturday, it was floating about 60 miles off the coast of North Carolina — which meant the only way on was by helicopter, taking off from Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point.
Luckily, we arrived on the Wasp just in time for the Navy’s senior officer, Adm. Jonathan Greenert, to address the sailors and Marines of the ship about the importance of the Navy and Marine Corps once again training how to storm a beach together — essentially, washing the barnacles off 10 years of Marine land warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq. Greenert, as he explained, has been preparing for this day since 2006.
The exercise is premised on coming to the aid of a friendly nation, called Amberland, which finds itself overrun with insurgents — luckily, near its coasts, where the Navy/Marine Corps team can rush in. But don’t think that Bold Alligator is just about ships.
Aircraft are key to amphibious assaults — to transport Marines ashore, to scout recon on enemy positions, to keep the ships well supplied, and so on. The Wasp’s aircraft handling officer, Lt. Andrea “Smash” Alvord, walked us through all the complexities of running air operations on an assault ship, as CH-53 and SH-60 helicopters and MV-22 Ospreys whirred right outside.
Ultimately, it wasn’t possible to board the U.S.S. Iwo Jima and go ashore with Bravo Company of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit as it tested out an experimental data network. But we were aboard the Wasp as all 31 ships lined up to sail through a very, very narrow ocean corridor — just 1,000 yards wide — to simulate passage through maritime chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz off the Iranian coast. “Red Teams” of contractors playing the role of the enemy, placing mock mines in the corridor and passing through the fleet in speedboats to test the ships’ ability to determine which boats contained friendly fishermen and which hosted guerrillas with rocket-propelled grenades.
It was difficult to determine independently how the game went. Reporters aboard the ships were spoon fed reports from officers about how the fleet performed — and we were assured everything went well. But success might have been designed in. The landing party did not face a hostile threat on the beach, as it probably would in realistic scenarios for an amphibious landing, and the live-fire part of the exercise won’t occur until Bold Alligator’s finale on Saturday.
Still, both the Navy and Marines will spend much of 2012 poring over its lessons as they refine how they fight as a team — far, far out at sea.
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