Spring Bored alerted me to an aspect of the MV-22 I hadn't considered: its tendency to start fires and melt carrier platforms when landing.
To me, the MV-22 is a symbol of the strategic inertia of the Marine Corps. The Marines have a long history of innovation, a history far too rich and detailed to delve into here. It ranges from the first use of close air support (grenades thrown from a biplane in Nicaragua), to the invention of the Combined Action Program in Vietnam, to the concepts of the three-block war and the strategic corporal in the 1990s. The most important innovation of the Marine Corps, however, is probably their perfection of amphibious warfare during the years before World War II. The concepts they perfected in the interwar years were used to win the war in the Pacific, and were taught to the Army for use on D-Day.
The Marines are still innovative on the operational and tactical level, as amply demonstrated by the actions of junior officers and enlisted Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the strategic level, however, they are not. The Marines recently released two new papers, Amphibious Operations in the 21st Century, and Seabasing for the Range of Military Options. The first calls ambitiously for the Marines to have an "intellectual renaissance" (so far so good) in "amphibious operations" (so close...and yet so far). The document states that adaptation to counterinsurgency operations has been "successful" (great news, I guess we can go home now) and that the time has come to re-focus on the Marines' core mission, amphibious operations. In particular, forced landings.
A forced landing capability is paramount, it argues, because then most other operations in the littoral will be possible. This sounds a lot like the "lesser included" argument used in the 1990s.
The same document that calls for an intellectual renaissance makes the limits of this renaissance clear by making several platform-specific endorsements. First, the MV-22 and EFV are critical to the future of amphibious warfare, not, interestingly, just because they are useful in forced landings, but because they are even more useful in "low-intensity" operations. Second, the MRAP is not a part of the Marines' future, because it's too heavy to fit on amphibious ships. And finally, the Navy should bring several battleships back on line, and should pay for them by giving up carrier groups.
It seems that the Marine Corps has already made up its mind. It used to be that the Marine Corps valued men over machines. As the saying went, the Army depends on its tanks, the Air Force its airplanes, the Navy its ships, but the Marine Corps depends on its people. Their unseemly need to procure the MV-22 speaks otherwise.
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