COLUMN ONE : It’s High Tide for the Marines : A massive U.S. landing on the beaches of Kuwait could be a turning point in the war. And the ability of the Corps to fight its way ashore may well determine its future.

Some moonless night in mid-February, as the waters of the Persian Gulf lap high along the shoreline, the largest U.S. amphibious landing operation since the Korean War may begin on a remote stretch of beach in Kuwait.

And the future of the U.S. Marine Corps could hang in the balance.

In what will appear to be random attacks, warships will shell the beach and allied warplanes will drop bombs on Iraqi encampments along 100 miles of coastline. Marine reconnaissance teams and Navy commandos will probe the shore, attaching hidden explosives to all obstacles.

And when the tide reaches its peak, those charges will detonate, and Kuwait will echo with the thunderous burst of gunfire, and the sky over one three-mile stretch of beach will vibrate with the chatter of helicopters. The hour will have arrived.

If months of meticulous planning pan out, those will be the only signs that betray in advance the assault of two Marine brigades, 18,000 Leathernecks, sweeping ashore in wave after choreographed wave of boats, amphibious tracked vehicles, Hovercraft vessels and helicopters.

This is “forcible entry”--the old-fashioned Marine Corps way across the beach--familiar to Late Show watchers who have seen countless reshowings of John Wayne’s performance in “Sands of Iwo Jima.”

It isn’t yet certain that such an amphibious landing will actually take place. Although the approximately 18,000 Marines on assault ships off the Kuwaiti coast have been openly “rehearsing” in the Gulf for weeks, some believe the operation may be a feint to throw the Iraqis off guard.

But many analysts insist that an amphibious landing is all but inevitable--and that it could even surpass the last big U.S. attack from the sea--at Inchon, South Korea, in 1950. This week, the U.S. battleship Missouri, firing at targets in Kuwait, used its giant 16-inch guns for the first time since Korea.

But the style of any such engagement, and the challenges associated with it, will be far different from those that John Wayne sought to portray in the movie about the Iwo Jima landing of more than four decades ago.

* Instead of all packing into lumbering landing craft, part of the Marine landing force would be ferried ashore aboard huge 58-m.p.h. Hovercraft called LCACs--for landing craft, air-cushion--that can speed 60 tons of troops and equipment from 50 miles out.

* Lightly armed infantrymen would be speeded to the landing zone by CH-53 Sea Stallion and Super Stallion and CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters, which provide tacticians a wider range of attack routes than the old “Mike-boat” amphibious landing tracks in use during World War II.

* Naval gunfire would be supplemented by air-to-ground missiles fired from Cobra and AH-1W Super Cobra attack helicopters. And today’s Marine tanks are faster and far more advanced than the ones used in the Iwo Jima attack.

* AV-8B Harrier jets, capable of taking off vertically from the decks of amphibious assault ships, would sweep low over the beach area, providing close air support for troops. “The air would be poisonous,” a Pentagon official says.

But besides the increased speed, the new technology also brings problems to the battlefield. For example, while Hovercraft are fast and can carry a battle tank on their own, strategists still haven’t figured out how to get them off the beach if they are damaged.

“A few good shots in the air bag, and there’s no telling what would happen to one of those things,” says James A. Donovan, a retired Marine colonel who is an associate director of the Center for Defense Information in Washington.

And the new mix of low- and high-tech weaponry and equipment in the Marine Corps’ arsenal makes today’s amphibious operations all the more complex and difficult to carry out.

But there’s more than a single landing at stake for the Marine Corps. If the assault effort goes well, it could open a new era for the Corps, with massive new spending on amphibious technology and training designed to ensure the concept a major role in U.S. military doctrine.

It also would put to rest predictions by Gen. Omar Bradley and other military leaders of the 1940s and 1950s that Iwo Jima-style landings had gone the way of the horse cavalry, and the United States would never again embark on large-scale amphibious operations.

“The Marines are always looking over their shoulder at the suggestion that they should be disbanded or reduced to a ship’s police unit,” says Jeffrey Record, a Washington-based military analyst who co-authored a 1977 study on the future of the Corps.

“This would be the first opportunity since Inchon for the Marines to reaffirm their most distinctive, if not their principal, mission,” Record says. “The question whether they’re going to hang on to what they’ve got . . . will depend . . . on how well they perform.”

The history of amphibious warfare dates to 490 BC, when Greeks faced an attack from the sea mounted by invading Persians during the Battle of Marathon.

Julius Caesar trained some of his legionnaires as marines--troops ready for service at sea and on land--and used them successfully in two invasions of Britain.

Later, the British successfully used amphibious operations in the expansion of their empire, most notably in the capture of Quebec from the French in 1759, when they sailed up the St. Lawrence River to surprise the city’s defenders.

The Marine Corps was born on Nov. 10, 1775, when the Continental Congress agreed to establish two battalions. The Corps’ first attack by sea came in a raid on the Bahamas in 1776, when its men landed on New Providence Island and captured two undefended forts.

Although the Corps touts its early 19th-Century attacks on Mediterranean pirates, referred to in the Marines’ Hymn as “the shores of Tripoli,” historians list Gen. Winfield Scott’s attack on Veracruz, Mexico, in 1847, as the first great amphibious assault in U.S. history.

Like the assault on Inchon a little more than 100 years later, Scott’s landing of 12,000 men is credited with changing the direction of the war.

The largest amphibious assault in history was the attack on the Normandy coast by 156,200 Allied troops, both airborne and seaborne, on D-Day--June 6, 1944.

But the Marine Corps had already earned its modern reputation--and formed much of its tactical doctrine--during the series of bloody assaults on Guadalcanal, Saipan, Tarawa and other Japanese-held islands in the Pacific in the earlier years of the war.

The planning that led to those successful campaigns, and to the modern mission of the Marine Corps, began in the 1920s, largely in response to the disastrous amphibious assault mounted by the British and French at Gallipoli, Turkey, in World War I.

“The crux of the matter was getting from ship to shore with the necessary men and materiel,” wrote retired Marine Brig. Gen. Edwin H. Simmons. “A good deal of attention was focused on landing craft and the possibility of amphibian vehicles.”

By 1938, the Marines had assembled the textbook for modern amphibious landings, and were well along in developing the basic types of landing craft and amphibious vehicles that were used in World War II, Simmons wrote in a monograph.

But the Leathernecks themselves concede that if they are to be able to mount amphibious operations into the 21st Century, they will need new and ever more costly equipment to replace much of their current arsenal.

With the proliferation of long-range and high-speed weapons throughout the Third World, opposed landings, even those against Third World forces, are going to require amphibious vehicles that get to the beach faster and from farther away than ever before.

In the mid-1980s, that realization prompted Marine Corps leaders to look for new technology that would enable them to put forces ashore rapidly from ships that lurk “over-the-horizon” and out of range of such weapons as Chinese-made Silkworm missiles and aircraft-borne Exocets.

The “over-the-horizon” strategy became the rationale for one of the most sweeping, and expensive, turnovers of inventory in the Marine Corps history.

Among the new equipment the Corps is seeking to buy in large volume is the LCAC that seems likely to be battle-tested in the Persian Gulf.

But the transition to this new world of amphibious landings is far from complete. For all the high-tech equipment in use in the Gulf, as much as two-thirds of any Marine landing force this time will arrive in vehicles that have changed little since the days of Iwo Jima.

Ironically, this most decisive of amphibious assaults could come just as the Marine Corps is struggling to broaden its institutional scope beyond such narrow operations. When the crusty and blunt-spoken Gen. Alfred M. Gray became Marine Corps commandant in July, 1987, he ordered Leathernecks to drop the term “amphibious” from their unit names and recast themselves as go-anywhere, do-anything “expeditionary forces.”

“ ‘Expeditionary’ is a more accurate term, signifying that Marines are not limited to amphibious operations but rather are capable of a wide spectrum of deployment and employment options,” said a statement announcing the return to the “expeditionary” label, dropped in 1965 when the Marines followed French “expeditionary forces” into Vietnam. “The Marine Corps is an expeditionary intervention force with the ability to move rapidly, on short notice, to wherever needed to accomplish its mission.”

While the 18,000 Marines await the order to land from 31 ships offshore, four times as many Leathernecks, roughly 72,000 men and women, are lined up along the coast south of Saudi Arabia’s border with Kuwait.

Although they are shoulder-to-shoulder with U.S. Army forces, Marine leaders observe emphatically that their own infantrymen, armed with tanks and armored dune buggies and artillery guns and antitank weapons, arrived on the job at least a month before the Army.

“Amphibious operations for us are just one way of getting there, and when we get there, we’re a fighting force,” says Corps spokesman Fred Peck. “We’re not . . . designed to fight on the plains of Central Europe, but we . . . can get there in a hurry.”

But with the defense budget shrinking almost daily, the size of tomorrow’s Marine Corps may ride on the Corps’ unique ability to fight its way ashore.

Now at 194,400 men and women, the Corps already is slated to shrink to 174,000 by 1996 under Defense Secretary Dick Cheney’s across-the-board reduction of U.S. forces. But analysts say without the amphibious landing role, that force might be cut further, to half its current size.

As a result, military strategy may not be the only consideration in deciding whether to land Marines on Kuwaiti beaches.

“How can you keep the Marines and the Navy out of the act--that gets a little bit sticky,” says Donovan of the Center for Defense Information. “We’ve got all these naval amphibious ships. . . . To deny them the opportunity . . . could, in coming months or years, be the basis for a lot of accusations.”

But shrinking defense budgets already have begun to threaten some of the central features of the “over-the-horizon” strategy--and with them, the Corps’ hold on the amphibious landing mission.

In a move that has been fiercely resisted by Congress, Cheney has proposed terminating the V-22 Osprey, a Marine-Corps-backed push to develop an assault aircraft that can take off vertically, like a helicopter, and fly like a fixed-wing plane.

And the Corps’ fast-aging fleet of amphibious ships already is heading into retirement. About 20 LPH ships, used as helicopter platforms for amphibious landings, are on the verge of decommissioning.

The first of 20 ships slated to take their place must be funded by 1996, the date by which Cheney has said the defense budget will have fallen by almost 15%.

Around the same time, the Marines expect to have completed development of a replacement for the P-7 “Amtrack,” a small amphibious tank, and will be seeking hundreds of millions of dollars to begin procurement of the vehicle built to help keep pace with vessels like the LCAC.

The fact that the Navy is preparing to retire two of four battleships, weapons that are considered crucial to providing gunfire in support of amphibious landings, also bears witness to the Marine Corps’ besieged position.

The result is that the Corps could remain stuck where it is now, in a time warp between World War II and the 21st Century. Unless the modernization comes across-the-board, the World War II-vintage “Mike-boats” may be here for some time.

As a result, the pressure is on for an amphibious landing of some sort in the Gulf War. One senior Marine officer rates the probability of a beach-storming at about 95%.

If the amphibious assault does come, tacticians say it likely would begin in mid-February, as the tides in the Persian Gulf run high.

“The only thing thing that’ll stop us from doing one is if (Iraqi leader) Saddam Hussein quits before it happens,” says a senior Marine officer. “It’s too good a card not to be played, and short of capitulation on the part of the enemy, it will be a card that’s played.”

Still, many analysts suspect that all the to-do about a possible amphibious landing has been a feint, a ruse designed to force thousands of Iraqi troops to hug the shoreline, where they would have to defend themselves against a seaborne assault.

Some Marine proponents argue that even that might be worth the cost.

Whether the Marines ever came ashore, two Marine brigades “could tie up as many as 20 opposing divisions, because you have to defend wherever they might land,” says Cyrill L. Kammeier, a retired Marine captain who edits the quarterly Amphibious Warfare Review.

LAUNCHING AN AMPHIBIOUS ATTACK

The current U.S. amphibious force in the Persian Gulf consists of more than 15 ships, carrying 20,000 Marines. Surprise is essential to a successful landing, so feinting attacks would be used to distract the enemy. The assault requires close coordination between air support, naval bombardment and the landing forces.

SEALS IN ACTION: Before the landing, small teams of SEALS would conduct reconnaissance missions on beach obstacles. The night before the attack, SEALS would destroy or mark beach obstacles for the landing force.

AIR STRIKES: As with other assault plans, massive air strikes would begin to soften enemy targets before the attack. Tomahawk cruise missiles could be used on hardened targets where direct hits are important. Several landing areas would be bombarded to create confusion about where the landing would take place.

BEACH OBSTACLES: Marines may face beaches lined with razor wire, laced with land mines and choked with napalm-burning antitank ditches. Specially designed amphibious vehicles land first to breach minefields and clear obstacles. They use wire-guided line charges-explosives attached to a line that, when launched, are designed to land among the obstacles and destroy them. Special plows on the front of the vehicle turn up any remaining mines. It takes about 20 minutes for a team of vehicles to clear one landing site.

Napalm burning in ditches Antitank posts Land mines Razor wire Underwater contact mines Underwater barbed wire

BEACH ASSAULT

A. U.S. ships would begin naval bombardment days before the landing. Battleships can deliver a 2,700-lb. projectile more than 25 miles.

25-35 MILES: Battleships and support vessels

B. Scores of helicopters, escorted by the attack aircraft, would take off from assault ships and move thousands of Marines and artillery miles inland before the landing force hit the beach. These Marines would prevent any reinforcements from reaching those defending the beach. The Marine forces would fight toward each other in an effort to link up.

15-20 MILES: Helicopter assault ships

C. Under darkness, the Marine force would arrive in waves at two-minute intervals: first, special mine-clearing vehicles, then rifle companies, light armor and finally support units. In about 30 minutes, more than 3,000 troops and 150 armored vehicles and artillery pieces can be landed at a beach site. Hundreds of aircraft provide close air support.

2-3 MILES: Landing Craft

D. After the Marine forces link up, they would establish an airfield and supply depots. After gaining control of the area, usually 2-4 days after the landing, other troops would come ashore.