COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Service: General
Navy considers sailors trained for close-quarters assault
JOANNE KIMBERLIN, The Virginian-Pilot
October 18, 2005
QUANTICO
— With the squeeze of an index finger, the machine gun jerked to
life – a metallic, menacing growl that chattered in the bone
marrow: rat-a-tat … rat-a-tat-tat … rat-a-tat-tat-tat
…
An acrid halo of steely smoke rose from the 84-pound gun. Spent shell
casings bubbled from an opening in its side. Three football fields
away, thumb-size bullets – as many as 550 per minute –
sparked off a battered tank parked on the hillside of a gun range.
These are the sights, sounds and smells of the “Dirt Navy,”
the buzz words for a new initiative that, if put into play, could
thrust sailors into a domain long reserved for foot soldiers.
The Navy has been pondering the idea since at least July, when the
service outlined plans aimed at making it more effective in the
small-skirmish, close-quarter arenas of a drawn-out war on terrorism.
Among the proposals: creating an expeditionary combat force. The move
would produce, according to one Navy official who spoke at the summer
briefing: “A sailor with a bayonet in his teeth, ready to go
ashore and mix it up.”
Less formidable than SEAL commandos but more fierce than average
swabbies, the hybrid sailor-soldiers would not elbow out Marines, said
Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chief of naval operations. Marines are the
Navy’s traditional combat troops, and blurring roles can be a
touchy business in the rivalry-prone military.
Last week at a Pentagon news conference, Mullen told reporters that the
expeditionary force is still just a “concept ” but that his
counterpart with the Marines – Gen. Michael W. Hagee – has
questioned him repeatedly about its purpose.
“Gen. Hagee tells me he gets asked about it everywhere he goes by his Marines,” Mullen said.
Mullen stressed that the new force would not compete with the Marines but complement them.
“The Marines need not be overly concerned about the Navy
displacing the Marine Corps mission,” Mullen said. “That is
not the intent.”
But demands in Iraq and Afghanistan have stretched the Marines thin,
even as the Navy’s “brown water” operations are
expected to increase – missions that call for close contact with
hostile coastlines.
Under the blueprint announced in July, a number of sailors would
“harden up” to fill the Marine void. The original concept
called for a battalion-size force, or 600 to 800 sailors, but planners
have been hammering out the nuts and bolts for months, and the reality
could be much different. Final plans are expected to be released this
month. No one at Fleet Forces Command in Norfolk would speak on the
record about combat sailors.
Training, however, is already being developed. Right now, Navy boot
camp includes little in the way of personal warfare tactics, which
means the service lacks experts of its own. At least some help has been
sought from private industry – such as Special Tactical Services,
a Virginia Beach outfit run by two former SEALs.
Special Tactical Services has landed a contract to help teach more sailors how to handle a machine gun.
On a recent autumn day at the Quantico Marine Corps base in Northern
Virginia, Special Tactical Services demonstrated some of the weapons
that might be found in the sailor-soldier’s arsenal: a 40 mm
grenade launcher, an MK43 “Rambo” gun and a mainstay of the
machine-gun nest – the thick-barrelled .50 caliber.
Pulling the trigger on a big gun is surprisingly easy; hitting a target
is not. Recoil and vibration rapidly reduce even a full-size tank to a
bouncing blur inside the tiny sights.
“Straighten your stance,” Special Tactical Services ’
Dale McClellan shouted over the boom-boom-boom as guns gobbled ammo
belts. “Short burst. Short burst. Now long.”
McClellan has been in the training business since 1997, when he and
partner Al Clark helped found Blackwater Security Consulting –
the Moyock, N.C.-based outfit now best known for dispatching tough-guy
security contractors to the world’s trouble zones.
In 2000, McClellan and Clark broke away to start their own company. In
the skittish years since Sept. 11, 2001, they’ve seen their
industry explode, with private firms stepping up to plug security
shortfalls and fill roles that once belonged solely to those in uniform.
Special Tactical Services has designed ballistic shields for aircraft
carriers and taught weapons skills to Army, Marine and Navy units, the
U.S. Border Patrol, a Canadian counter terrorism unit and a number of
local and federal law enforcement agencies.
“We’ve got the most highly trained military in the world,
and they’re very effective at what they do,” McClellan
said. “But they’re in a hurry to get the numbers through.
They need bodies in Iraq.”
Private-sector sessions deliver more one-on-one, McClellan said, and
more hands-on: “And we can do it cheaper and faster than the
military can.”
U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk, a Republican from Illinois, fired a final round at
a tank, stepped back from the smoking metal and eased off his helmet
and flak vest.
As a commander in the Naval Reserve, Kirk has a special interest in
military concerns. He came to Quantico to test-shoot to make sure U.S.
troops “don’t have a piece of crap ,” he said,
“but something that delivers when you need it most.”
Kirk thinks private industry can offer the military a “higher
standard” of training. He’s not comfortable, however, with
the vision of civilians directly drilling troops.
“They won’t be the ones going to war with them,” Kirk
said. “They should stick to training the trainers.”
McClellan said Special Tactical Services ’ machine gun contract
with the Navy calls for exactly that – to help the service design
its own program. He wonders, however, how long such set ups can work.
“The trainers are getting shipped to Iraq as fast as everybody else,” McClellan said.
Kirk acknowledged that many Army and Marine personnel are already on
their third deployment. That’s a major reason, he said, why the
Navy wants to shoulder more of the load.
The sailors of history were armed men who swarmed enemy ships and
beaches. During World War II, that job became the specialty of the
Marines. No one suggests a return to the old days; there are other ways
to “bring it to the enemy,” as Kirk put it.
Among the proposals:
- A “riverine” component that will take over operations of a now-disbanded Marine company.
- A force trained to overcome opposition on tricky ship boardings – currently the role of the over-tasked SEALs.
- Teams who accompany the boarding force to quickly gather intelligence about crew and cargo.
- Detachments with officers specially trained in foreign cultures and regions.
If the expeditionary force materializes, candidates will probably be
sailors who didn’t quite make the cut for the elite SEALs.
“You have to be really good to even try out for that,” said
Andrew Feickert, a defense specialist at the Congressional Research
Service. “It makes sense to put those sort of people together in
this sort of unit to see what they can contribute.”
Another military analyst said it also makes good money sense to switch
more sailors from long-range weapons to a more personal type of warfare.
“We’re fighting a different type of war now,” said
Bob Work of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
“This one has lots of boots on the ground. So if the Navy wants
its cut of the budget pie – and that’s always a concern
– it’s got to get in there. This one can’t be fought
from a mile or two offshore.”
Staff writer Dale Eisman contributed to this report.
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