Italy Joint Landing Force Works To Find Its Feet
ROME - As Italy's joint Army-Navy landing force, known as COMFORSBARC, enters its third year, planners say they are getting closer to making the mix work as training puts the partners in new roles.
Since March 2006, units from the Navy's San Marco amphibious regiment have been training under a joint COMFORSBARC landing force command structure with the Army's Venice-based Serenissima regiment, which was formed to protect the Venice lagoon.
The bottom line, one official said, is bulking up to carry more weight at the international level.
"It was just fundamental to have bigger numbers," said Fabrizio Maltinti, landing force chief of staff and Navy commander.
While the San Marco now numbers 1,400 troops, the aim is to create a brigade level force of 4,000 by 2010, including a ground combat element of 2,500.
As part of training in 2008, Lagunari, as the Serenissima regiment soldiers are known, will head up onto the beachhead during an amphibious exercise to run the land-based command-and-control portion of a joint force landing operation.
"This will involve the Serenissima commanding an element of the Grado assault battalion of the San Marco," said Maltinti.
"The Lagunari will also possibly mount a command-and-control operation at sea this year," he said. "Running an operation from a command vessel, rather than from the land, requires a different mind-set."
In the run-up to the exercises planned for this year, a company of Lagunari trained for a month in both 2006 and 2007 with the San Marco regiment. Two cycles of training for Army personnel - one for 190 and one for 150 personnel - also will take place this year.
Overseeing the mix is a permanent command, now numbering 130, including 45 Army staff, and led by Navy Rear Adm. Claudio Confessore, who masterminded the Italian Navy's landing of troops in southern Lebanon in 2006 to start the U.N.'s beefed- up peacekeeping mission in the wake of the Lebanon-Israel conflict.
From the Army, Confessore's deputy is Brig. Gen. Emanuele Sblendorio.
The Lebanon landing was typical of a modern amphibious landing: more unloading and logistics than assault under fire.
To handle the job of rapidly bringing onto land the enormous quantity of gear needed for peacekeeping, the San Marco units rely on three 8,000-ton landing platform dock vessels: the San Marco, San Giusto and San Giorgio.
A fourth vessel has long been on the Navy's wish list, but despite an uptick in Italian procurement, a new acquisition remains on the drawing board. Planners are nevertheless aiming high, and they have set their sights on a 17,000- to 20,000-ton version that could ferry 600 to 700 landing troops and carry LCM 8 landing craft, rather than the smaller LCM 6 craft that fit into the current LPD fleet. Room for a hovercraft is also being mulled.
The new vessel would have the same on-deck aircraft and helicopter-hosting capability as Italy's new Cavour carrier, which is set to join the Garibaldi in service and will hold 12 helicopters, including the EH101, NH90 or SH-3D, or up to eight aircraft - now, the Harrier; in coming years, the Joint Strike Fighter.
Italian shipbuilder Fincantieri, meanwhile, is offering the Navy various designs to ponder, including a modular concept that could weigh from 14,000 to 21,000 tons, depending on specifications, and host a 50-by-15-square-meter floodable dock.
"Ideally, we would add such a vessel to the three LPDs we have, then buy two more, as the LPDs are retired from service," Maltinti said.
Another asset on the wish list is a wheeled amphibious vehicle.
"The San Marco was not allowed to use its tracked amphibious AAV-7 vehicles in Kosovo, and we would like the new force to have a wheeled variant like the Piranha or the Patria," one naval official said.
Local player Iveco is also developing an amphibious wheeled vehicle using its experience from developing the Centauro wheeled tank, he said.
"The Centauro has a combat weight of 28 tons, and we would need it slimmed down to 20 tons to fit requirements."
The official said plans launched in 1999 to give the Navy's VCC tracked vehicles amphibious cladding and a propulsion system, with four prototypes tested, had meanwhile been slowed in favor of the plans for a wheeled vehicle buy. ■
E-mail: tkington@defensenews.com.
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