"New Light Amphibious Warship survivability" Topic

Well lo and behold someone's asking whether the new primary USMC delivery platform, the Light Amphibious Warship, can actually make it to its target and drop its cargo off.

link

For those not in the no, LAWs are ships the size of a WWII LCM with the speed of a bulk carrier (14-15 knots) and virtually no self defence capability.

Apparently the USMC and USN is banking on these ships "not being worth" targeting by the Chinese and their ballistic missiles. Seems the US is not paying attention – the Chinese aren't just packing ballistic missiles, there's hundreds of ships and aircraft packing lots of smaller cheaper missiles that will sink a small ship made to civilian standards ala the aforementioned LAW.

That's right – US strategy for WW3 is to hope the Chinese will ignore slow moving ships hauling antishipping weapons to sink Chinese ships.

I'm sure it will work out just great.

After D-Day, and the amphibious landings in the Pacific in WWII, I believe the doctrine is NOT to conduct any opposed landings in the future/past.

I'll bet they are counting for that to hold into the future.

We need to use misdirection, and/or overwhelming firepower to ensure we can land unopposed.

Any vessels that could be built to survive enemy weapons will be very expensive indeed, so I suspect "the beancounters" have done their homework on this.

Helo/Osprey assaults are probably a lot more likely, if/when needed to assault beaches held by the enemy.

Paratroop drops would also be an option, though I've read/heard that paratrooper training has been seriously curtailed. That shouldn't be too hard to reverse, if/when needed.