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158 australian maritime issues 2009: spc-a annual
This essay will bring a Navy single Service perspective to the Army’s MOLE warfighting
concept; however it will also endeavour to view littoral operations in the true context of
a joint maritime operation to identify any shortfalls in the concept. In conducting this
analysis this essay will draw upon the White Paper, the Future Joint Operations Concept
(FJOC), the Future Maritime Operating Concept - 2025 (FMOC), Adaptive Campaigning - Future
Land Operating Concept (AC-FLOC), and current and developing joint and single Service
concepts and doctrine. Furthermore, this analysis will focus on the joint idiosyncrasies of
the littoral environment and the decisive actions or multidimensional manoeuvre aspects
of MOLE and postulate about the future relevance of the MOLE concept.
The Littoral Environment – Intrinsically Joint
Although MOLE is predominantly about the use of land forces, it is a
joint warfighting concept. 8
MOLE makes the claim of being a joint warfighting concept, however, from a Navy
single Service perspective the concepts of manoeuvre and operations in the littoral
environment are intrinsic to a maritime force. At face value the MOLE concept does not
break conceptual ground. Utilising the sea and the littoral as a manoeuvre space to support
and influence land operations has been a feature of military operations for centuries.
For example, in the Second Punic War of 218-201 BCE, control of the sea and the use of
the adjacent Mediterranean as a manoeuvre space was employed to avoid the terrain
ashore. This was a decisive factor employed by the Romans to defeat the Carthaginians
who were forced to undertake a perilous march through Gaul in which more than half
their troops wasted away, weakening the Carthaginian army and leading to a Roman
victory. 9 In a modern context the Allied island hopping campaign through the Pacific in
World War II (WWII) was a prime example of a joint littoral manoeuvre operation. The
Pacific campaign of WWII laid the foundation for the concepts of Littoral Manoeuvre
and Operational Manoeuvre from the Sea which have become the raison d’être of marine
forces worldwide. 10 While in a more recent Australian context the basic tenets of littoral
manoeuvre have been utilised in recent operations in the Solomon Islands, East Timor,
Sumatra and Fiji, albeit in benign and extremely limited discretionary operations. 11
Despite a long history of military forces using the littoral environment as a manoeuvre
space in the ADF, the Navy, Army and Air Force all continue to look at the littoral
environment through very different single Service lenses. The nature of operations in
the littoral environment however, requires a vision beyond a simplistic single Service
perspective, because littoral operations necessitate an interdependence of maritime, land
and air forces of an order of magnitude more intimate than any other type of operation. 12
Successful littoral operations require cross-domain planning, training and effects like
no other environment. In the absence of an ADF marine force, whose primary role it is
to operate in the littoral environment, the ADF has developed concepts for manoeuvre
operations in the littoral in a piecemeal and single Service stove-piped fashion. This is