why did the U.S. Marines (an amphibious force) fight in Afghanistan (a landlocked country)?
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For historical and bureaucratic reasons, the United States Marine Corps evolved from its traditional role as shipboard naval infantry into the Department of the Navy’s Army, complete with armor, field artillery, mechanized fighting vehicles, and rotary and fixed-wing aviation. A significant portion of their combat support and combat service support functions are still provided by the Navy since originally they were never intended as a separate independent branch; for example, famously the Marines do not have their own medics or doctors. Further they have some odd blind spots in their force structure: they do not have mechanized/motorized cavalry, and consequently lack certain scouting and reconnaissance capabilities that equivalent army formations have. But nevertheless, despite this rather strange historical evolution, the Marines more or less have the same land war fighting capability as the Army, and are perfectly capable of fighting deep inland, even in landlocked countries. During the GWOT, there was tremendous political pressure not to expand the size of the military and most certainly not to resort to a draft. As a result, the us military was stretched very thin fighting two wars at once, and it was all hands on deck for the better part of a decade, where every Army, Marine, National Guard, and Reserve unit was either deployed, just coming back from deployment, or preparing for the next deployment. As a result there wasn’t the capacity to have the Marines sit Afghanistan out just because the country is land locked, which is not at all a limitation for them to fight effectively.
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