why did the U.S. Marines (an amphibious force) fight in Afghanistan (a landlocked country)?
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There isn’t a hell of a lot of difference in the capabilities of the Marine Corps and Army, in fact the Army is generally *more* capable. The last I read the Marines were offloading heavy artillery to the Army. At any rate, this means that the central commander of a conflict is capable of calling up Marine and Army units as needed for whatever engagement. The Marines cleared Fallujah, not the army, and that didn’t require a beach-head landing. The Marines were in country, they had the right people, equipment, and training to execute the mission.
The military is a little different than a corporate structure. A central commander, typically a 4 star general (or a ‘full general’), can use the military kind of like Legos. They fit the right pieces together to execute a mission directed by the President; those pieces will include all Military branches and the Coast Guard. This means there is a ton of overlap in mission, particularly with the Marines and Army but even between the Navy and the Air Force. Increasingly, the Army and Marines are sent to kill people and break their stuff, and the Navy and Air Force are there to make sure everyone is supplied and ready shoot and break. Indeed, in most conflicts the central commander is also a NATO commander, so that full general will be able to deploy any of the USA’s own mission ready forces, but also constituent country forces.
Incidentally, that is one of the reasons Russia and China hate NATO but will never actually challenge a NATO country – the coordinated movement, deployment, and force capability of an integrated NATO military can wreck any modern military that exists today with scary levels of efficiency.
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