Hurtful Thoughts wrote:Manokan Republic wrote:The strategy is basically to do three things, bomb the shit out of the beach with long range rockets (with 300+ mile ranges), possibly from another nearby island, come in really fast after most the obstacles have been cleared or defenses destroyed, and destroy the remaining defenses with land vehicles. Essentially, the idea of mass infantry swarming the beaches is a thing of the past, since they've taken extremely heavy casualties. The goal is to avoid another D-Day scenario. So, vehicles with lower capacity, of 10-12 troops vs. 17 for the amphibious landing vehicle or the EFV is perfectly fine given their strategy is to rely on ground vehicles rather than masses of infantry, specifically with heavy autocannons that can actually penetrate heavy defenses or use air-bursting rounds to injure the troops inside them without having to score a direct hit (dramatically improving the probability to hit ratio), and given the fact their plan is not really to do a hot beach landing at all but bomb the beach in to oblivion before dropping off ground troops, it doesn't really matter if it's all that slow to being dropped off as it shouldn't be taking heavy fire when it lands anyways. Then a combination of amphibious vehicles likely with landing craft and with aircraft will be used, with the amphibious aspect of the vehicle being used to ford swamps, rivers, or hop short distances between islands without absolutely needing transport craft.
For a stealth insertion en-masse, the AAVP-7 still wins.
The chode sits low enough in the water it qualifies as a stealth-boat.
SEAL-team insertions already do stuff with wetsuits and rubber boats, using them to help the USMC "say hello quietly" using their indoors-voice with immediate light-armored support on the beach is a definate plus for wiping out the local air defenses to allow immediate follow-through of airmobile forces.
IIRC, MEU(SOC) was supposed to help somewhere between the UDTs casing the beach and the arrival of the armored cav larpers.
Well hence why I mentioned that an amphibious landing like this could be better for stealth; in particular if you could have completely underwater submersible vehicles that acted like submarines for say, at least 20 miles, you could avoid enemy fire by being so deep under water missiles and machine gun fire was simply ineffective and absorbed, and get on to land quickly. The thing is though, other than the fact such a vehicle doesn't really exist, although it could easily in theory, the other issue is that it wouldn't really be necessary if you've already defeated the beach obstacles by other means. But yes, for a stealthy landing, you wouldn't want to use airborne forces and a better submersible vehicle would be better. The AAV-7 still lacks a cannon though, so the firepower issue would make it less effective.
Navy seals stay hidden by remaining underwater, as do submarines, so if you were to get on the beach via underwater insertion, then for stealth purposes to avoid the enemy fire via camouflage, this would work. It could be seen as being comparable to stealth technology on say, a B-2 stealth bomber or something.