F-35 integrated with amphibious assaults

Fox News:

The Navy has ushered in a new era in amphibious warfare operations.

Launching a massive, fast-paced air assault from the sea, providing close-air support for amphibious assault forces, and bringing forward-operating surveillance and networking technology to maritime warfare are all part of the changing operational calculus introduced by adding F-35s to maritime attack.

With the goal of refining and preparing for these kinds of emerging maritime combat tactics, a high-tech U.S. Navy amphibious assault ship recently completed a deployment mission armed with as many as 13 F-35s.

The Navy’s USS America, a first-in-class new generation amphib, traveled the seas armed with 13 F-35s, senior Navy officials said. This brings an unprecedented measure of air attack and surveillance possibilities, including the option to provide stealth air support to amphibious assaults.

Amphibs could offer a smaller, more mobile type of aircraft carrier power projection capability, Vice Adm. Rich Brown, commander, Naval Surfaces Forces, told an audience Jan. 14 at the 32nd Annual Surface Navy Association Symposium.

"A big deck with that many F-35s is beginning to look like an aircraft carrier to me," Brown said.

Since potential adversaries now have longer-range weapons, better sensors, targeting technologies and computers with faster processing speeds, amphibious forces approaching the shore may need to disperse in order to make it harder for enemy forces to target them. Therefore, the notion of an air-powered, disaggregated, yet interwoven attack force, less vulnerable to enemy fire, could be launched to hit “multiple landing points” to exploit enemy defenses.

Execution of this new strategy is, depending upon the threat, heavily impacted by the arrival of fifth-generation aircraft, such as the F-35. Now operational as part of Marine Corps Air Ground Task Forces aboard the USS America, USS Wasp and USS Essex, the F-35B is intended to provide close-air support to advancing attacks, use its sensors to perform forward reconnaissance and launch strikes itself.
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There is more.

A lot will depend on the adversary.  Amphibious assaults on defended beaches have become rare since World War II.  Probably the biggest amphibious assault since then was the Inchon invasion in Korea.  But that operation caught an enemy flat-footed and cut off their lines of communication leading to a rout of North Korean forces back across the "DMZ."   There were some operations in Vietnam, but they were not against heavily defended shorelines.  In the first Iraq war, there was a feint using amphibious forces but no landing. 

What this report is talking about is a high tech assault against an enemy with high tech.