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Cherry
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January 2006
Navy Riverine Force to Report for Iraq Duty in 2007
By Grace Jean
The Navy expects to deploy three riverine squadrons in 2007. The units will relieve Marines who currently are conducting maritime security operations in the ports and inland waterways of Iraq.
According to preliminary plans presented at a conference in Panama City, Fla., the force would have a fleet of 36 armed and armored combatant craft, with 12 boats per squadron, and would be able to transport the equivalent of one Marine Corps rifle company. Two crews would be assigned to each craft for round-the-clock operations.
Though the force would be deployed to Iraq initially, the idea is that these river commandos could be employed around the world, in hotspots where terrorists have developed niches along inland waterways—places such as the Niger delta, Colombia, Indonesia and the Philippines, said Rear Adm. Donald K. Bullard, commander of the Naval Expeditionary Combat Command.
The organization and training of these units will fall under the purview of the NECC.
The riverine crews' missions will include interdiction of arms or terrorist smugglers, barricade operations to stop inflow to a certain area, training other countries' law enforcement and visual and electronic surveillance of particular enemy activities, said Bullard.
“It's not any different if you take a look at what we do in the littoral,” said Bullard. “We're just extending those normal, long-time naval capabilities out from the littoral and into the inland waterway.”
The three units will be manned by 700 sailors drawn from across the entire Navy.
“We understand boats,” he said. “Currently, we don't have a riverine force, but we operate, in the Navy, 38 different types of boats.” For example, special operations forces operate high-speed craft and sailors also operate port security boats.
These riverine forces will train alongside the Marines using the Corps' current equipment, which includes the 38-foot small unit riverine craft and the 38-foot riverine assault craft.
“Right now, the equipment that the Marines have, as we relieve them, is sufficient for the Iraq mission,” said Bullard.
The Navy will study options for possibly buying new boats in the future.
“It may be not a single boat,” he said. Riverine missions may require a variety of boats. A high-speed craft, for instance, would be needed for security and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance interdiction functions. Another type of boat may be needed to move a rifle company.
The procurement of new hardware is tied to high-level budget deliberations currently underway at the Pentagon. Because the command is still evaluating requirements, Bullard declined to name any specific boats under consideration.
Military leaders, at home and abroad, have voiced the need for a riverine force.
“Two things happened last year,” Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Gordon Nash, director of the Navy's expeditionary warfare division, told conference attendees. The chief of operations from the Peruvian Navy visited Adm. Vernon Clark, then U.S. Navy chief, and informed him he had found 14,000 miles of navigable river mostly between Peru and Colombia. That area, Nash noted, is providing refuge to Colombian terrorists, and the Peruvian Navy was seeking help from the United States in monitoring that long stretch of water.
Then in November, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, Army Gen. John Abizaid, insisted he needed a riverine capability, Nash said. The Marines had decided to stand down their units, and Abizaid feared he would not have enough help patrolling the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
Speaking at the same conference, Lt. Gen. James M. Mattis, commanding general of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, said the enemy in Iraq has exploited the lack of U.S. dominance in inland-waterway warfare.
“The enemy is definitely going to frown when they hear the U.S. Navy is going into the brown and green water. They are not going to like that,” he said.
The Navy already has a riverine capability embedded in its special operations forces.
“But they're at capacity. So we're trying to increase capacity” with the new riverine force, said Bullard.
In a written response to questions from National Defense, a Naval Special Warfare Command spokesman said that the riverine force will cover more conventional types of operations, but that the riverine and special operations forces will train and fight together.
Likewise, the two commands will coordinate tactics, techniques and procedures, identify gaps and seams, work material solutions—such as boats, weapons, gear and ammunition—and coordinate the use of training ranges.
Going up the rivers is not a new concept for the Navy. As Bullard pointed out, the service has been conducting inland waterway operations for 230 years. But a fully equipped and trained riverine command squadron has not existed since the Vietnam War, when the enemy employed rivers to communicate and to transport people and arms.
“The Navy had to go into that battle space to interdict the enemy. And if you take a look, our riverine forces in Vietnam did very brave and very good things, just like this one will,” said Bullard.
"There is no such thing as a dnagerous weapon, only dangerous men."
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BS6's Dude
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DSumner, site SOP for new members is to fill out your profile and start a new topic in the New Personnel Reporting to introduce yourself.
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Cherry
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Jan 10, 2006
'Brown water' navy takes shape
By JAMES W. CRAWLEY
Media General News Service
WASHINGTON – The swift boats are coming back.
The Navy is creating a flotilla of gunboats manned by sailors trained more like soldiers.
The Naval Expeditionary Combat Command will be inaugurated in a ceremony Jan. 13 in Little Creek, Va.
Rear Adm. Don Bullard will oversee the creation of three riverine squadrons and a reorganization of the Navy Seabees, harbor defense units, explosive ordnance teams and military police units. In all, the command will train and equip 40,000 sailors.
“This is recognition that the Navy is implicitly accepting a supporting role in the global war on terrorism,” said Andrew Ross, a naval strategy expert at the University of New Mexico.
The last time the Navy deployed riverine forces was 40 years ago in Vietnam – when sailors aboard swift boats and other craft armed with machine guns and small cannons battled Viet Cong guerillas in the Mekong Delta.
It was known as the “brown water Navy” because the small vessels operated in silt-stained rivers, not the deep blue waters of the high seas.
During the next two years, the Navy will staff three boat squadrons, about 700 sailors in all. Each squadron will have 12 boats and also will be able to carry about 200 Marines into battle. The units will be used in counter-insurgency operations, such as patrolling waterways and coastlines, looking for terrorists.
Initially, Little Creek will be the squadrons’ home. Navy crews could replace Marines patrolling the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in Iraq early next year.
Bullard said the Navy would buy newer craft as it refines its needs.
“The technology has changed (since Vietnam),” said Bullard. “This war is not the Vietnam War.”
The Navy is looking past landlocked Afghanistan and arid Iraq to potential battlegrounds in the war on terrorism, said Bullard.
Potential insurgency hotspots where gunboats could be employed include the Philippines, Indonesia, South America and parts of Africa, military analysts say. They also could train foreign navies.
It will require sailors who are more comfortable wielding an M-16 than a mop, said Robert Work, defense analyst for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
The return of river patrols is good news, said Albert Moore of Conover, N.C. He is president of the Mobile Riverine Force Association, Vietnam veterans who fought in riverine units.
“They will have to learn from the past. I’ve got guys who have a lot of experience,” Moore said.
James W. Crawley is a national correspondent in Media General's Washington Bureau.
"There is no such thing as a dnagerous weapon, only dangerous men."
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Cherry
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Last Login: 4/26/2007 5:43 PM
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River War
January 27, 2006
The Navy Riverine units to be created this year will face a tough and dangerous task in Iraq, where insurgents increasingly rely on inland waterways to transport people and weapons. The Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which cut through the Iraqi heartland, also are vital avenues of escape for insurgents who strike in urban areas and slither away to avoid counterattacking American units.
The only maritime capability now addressing the river-borne insurgents comprises little more than 100 Marine Corps reservists and fewer than 20 boats, according to Navy and Marine Corps officials. And those units are being disbanded.
“Every commander that has rivers in their area of operation wants to have this capability,” said Marine Col. Ronald J. Johnson, commander of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) that returned from Iraq last February. “There is never enough. It's a valuable resource.”
Johnson, whose area of responsibility south of Baghdad included a stretch of the Euphrates River, used Riverine Assault Craft (RAC) to thwart terrorist use of Iraq's shallow waterways as critical lines of communication. He said the small river craft were in great demand by both Marine and Army troops.
“The Army units that operated on my flank, that had the Tigris, also requested this capability,” Johnson said.
The boats and their crew were assigned to Small Craft Company, part of the 2nd Marine Division based at Camp Lejeune and attached to the 24th at various times during the unit's seven months in Iraq.
“Insurgents move things up and down the rivers, go back and forth, because it's more convenient,” said Johnson, who used six RAC at a time for raids and quick surprise attacks on insurgents hiding among the local population along the river's shore.
Coalition efforts to drive insurgent cells out of Iraq's cities in 2004 led them to seek shelter in towns on the Euphrates along the route from the Syrian border to Baghdad, according to defense analyst Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. Insurgents also took refuge in the largely Sunni towns and cities along the Tigris from Mosul to Baghdad, he noted in a December 2005 working draft report dubbed “Iraq's Evolving Insurgency.”
“There are a lot of houses on the banks of the Euphrates, and on the Tigris,” Johnson said. “It's kind of like a premier residential area with a lot of population there.”
Marine Riverines attached to the 24th MEU conducted a river raid in late November near the village of Hard Duwaish, about 20 miles upriver from Fallujah, according to a Nov. 28 report in The New York Times. The Marine units were deployed earlier in November during the battle of Fallujah to cut off a possible escape route for insurgents after U.S. troops had encircled the city.
Though the need for fast-moving Riverines continues in Iraq, the Marines' Small Craft Company was disbanded as a result of “resource constraints” since Johnson's last tour, he said.
Navy Riverine units played a large role in the Vietnam War. The Navy's nascent effort to re-create a Riverine capability remains in the concept and development phase, but it plans a force far larger than the 100 Marines deployed to Iraq. The Navy's initial plan is to build three 12-boat squadrons with a total of about 700 sailors. A portion of that force will patrol the Euphrates and Tigris corridors.
These high-profile units will be part of the new Navy Expeditionary Combat Command (NECC) that will include the Seabees, explosive ordnance demolition units, the Naval Expeditionary Logistics Support Force and Navy prison guards at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Vice Adm. Albert T. Church, then-director of the Navy Staff, said in July that the Riverines are part of a larger Navy effort to take some of the strain off heavily taxed Marine and Army expeditionary forces. The Navy will take over some transport duties in Iraq, for example, and relieve Marines stationed in Djibouti and Cuba.
Rear Adm. Donald K. Bullard, commander of the NECC, said that while the Riverines will prove critical to coalition control of Iraq's waterways, they will be in demand in other theaters as well. In places such as Africa and South America -- as well as Iraq -- the Riverines will be a tool for helping partners in the war on terrorism, he said, exercising with and learning from many nations that do not have, or want, a blue-water navy.
“Many other countries only have a very small navy that is coastal,” Bullard said. “For us to get in and train in areas of security interdiction, customs and law enforcement means we increase their efforts in the war on terrorism.”
Although the idea of sailors guiding small river patrol craft in the shallows harks back to Vietnam, the concept is actually much older, dating to the ironclad monitors of the Civil War. Bullard noted that while there are some tactical lessons to be learned from the swift boats of the Mekong Delta, the battlespace has changed dramatically in terms of technology.
“Vietnam was more of a force-on-force type war,” he said. But in the war on terror, today's Riverines will have not only an offensive capability but will be trained for interdiction, customs and law enforcement, boarding, search and seizure, and more.
“As we reviewed the war on terrorism and the lines of communications around the world, we realized there are areas where there is potential for terrorist movement of weapons, people and arms, and other things on the rivers, because in many areas there may not be land lines of communication,” Bullard said. “We've got to make an impact and perform maritime security ops in that environment.”
Navy river patrols are a logical extension of the service's maritime domain between blue and brown water, Bullard said.
“We're working very closely with the Marine Corps, working the concept of operations for how they would train with us,” he said.
The first squadron training will begin in June, with full operational capability sometime in the first half of 2007, Bullard said.
“Once we get the first squadron it will evolve as we work the [concept of operations],” he added.
Another Navy official noted that Marines would be on some Navy Riverine boats “to pursue objectives.”
Adm. Mike Mullen, chief of naval operations, told an audience at the Naval War College in August that the Navy “is missing a great opportunity to influence events by not having a Riverine force” that can push the front lines of battle as far forward as possible.
“A naval force floating off the continental shelf with no impact onshore is not decisive,” he said. “Think of the vast areas of the world covered by shallow water -- those connected to the oceans by rivers and harbors and rugged shorelines. These are the decisive strips of sea that make all the difference, and we need to be there,” Mullen said, noting that nearly 30 percent of the North Persian Gulf is inaccessible by ships with drafts of more than 20 feet.
"There is no such thing as a dnagerous weapon, only dangerous men."
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