why did the U.S. Marines (an amphibious force) fight in Afghanistan (a landlocked country)?
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Marine here. Though amphibious operations are our bread and butter, they’re not the entirety of what we as a force are capable of doing. Every branch has something they can do better than anyone else, but it doesn’t mean that’s ALL they do. Hell, even the Army can conduct operations on water.
We were at war in Afghanistan, and the Marines are a piece of our warfighting capacity. Afghanistan is a big country with a lot of people, and conducting an occupation and counterinsurgency operation at a certain scale takes as much as we can provide, especially with a concurrent war in Iraq and American forces already stretched relatively thin at times with global commitments.
You don’t neglect to employ an entire military branch of almost 200,000 personnel just because the mission doesn’t completely line up with conventional wisdom on how that branch is intended to operate. You make it work.
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