By CAPT (Ret’d) Chris Rawley USN
Thousands of harbors, bays, and estuaries dot the world’s coastlines, with many of them located in the vicinity of strategically important choke points. The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps are unprepared to defend nearshore areas from modern weapons systems while targeting emerging threats around them, putting future littoral operations at risk. The next evolution of small-footprint expeditionary naval forces offers a solution to these challenges.
Critical Littoral Infrastructure
On the morning of March 1, 2026—day two of the Iran war—an Iranian one-way attack drone struck a U.S. tactical operations center at Port Shuaiba, an industrial logistics hub south of Kuwait City. The drone flew low and slow, slipped past air defenses, and hit an unhardened operations center that logistics units had occupied after dispersing from Camp Arifjan. Warning systems did not give usable notice, and no drone defenses were available, resulting in the unfortunate deaths of six U.S. Army Reserve soldiers and over thirty wounded in action. The site—wedged among oil storage tanks, refineries, and cargo piers—had little overhead protection and, by multiple accounts, no counter-unmanned aircraft system (counter-UAS) defeat capability.
Shuaiba has been a critical Sea Port of Debarkation (SPOD) and sustainment node for U.S. forces in the Gulf for decades. In 2002–2003, Naval Coastal Warfare (NCW) detachments set up the defense of this same port complex for Operation Iraqi Freedom—with a force then consisting of Mobile Inshore Undersea Warfare Units (MIUWUs), Inshore Boat Units, Harbor Defense Commands, and Coast Guard Port Security Units. Over two decades later, when the threat arrived as a cheap Shahed drone rather than a suicide boat or combat swimmer, the joint force at the port lacked the sensing, warning, and defensive weapons to save American troops.
The Targeting Gap
The same nearshore problem set applies to Marine Littoral Regiments (MLRs). They need persistent sensing for targeting while defending against numerous low-cost air and surface drones. The Corps has invested heavily in MLRs, which consist of long-range anti-ship fires, smaller footprints, and a concept of employment built around Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO) inside an adversary’s engagement zone. What it has not yet built, at scale, is the training, organization, and command and control architecture to find, fix, track, and hand off rapidly evolving maritime targets—and to protect those same bases and ports from the attack drones that will hunt them.
The answer to both problems lies in the U.S. Navy’s historical Naval Coastal Warfare force, combined with modern technologies that expand sensing and engagement reach. The Navy already invented, fielded, and then partially abandoned the exact skill set EABO and modern port defense now require coastal surveillance sensors, organic waterside and ground security, and expeditionary operations centers that can fuse sensors for the fleet and for Marines ashore.
Coast Watchers to Cold War Sub Chasers
With origins in World War II, coastal warfare forces are no strangers to evolution. Small, isolated detachments of U.S. and allied coast watchers reported ship movements, guided air, and surface strikes, and denied the enemy the sanctuary of nearshore waters. Coast watchers radioed warnings to the U.S. Marines and Navy, tracking and reporting the movements of Japanese naval reinforcements attempting to resupply enemy troops at night. With contributions disproportionate to their size, they earned the praise and gratitude of Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey: “The Coastwatchers saved Guadalcanal, and Guadalcanal saved the South Pacific.”
Coast Watching morphed into Inshore Undersea Warfare (IUW) and matured under fire in Vietnam. Ports and anchorages across the coastlines and Mekong River delta were contested terrain and under constant threat of enemy attack. Mobile IUW Surveillance Units first deployed in 1965 protecting ports with sensors, boats, and patrols. The model was straightforward: put a deployable surveillance detachment on the coast, marry acoustic and radar sensors to boat patrols, and defend the harbors from the Viet Cong’s infiltrating boats, sapper swimmers, and mines. IUWs provided logistics protection for the war ashore—unglamorous work with strategic importance.
After Vietnam, the Naval Reserve retained mobile surveillance and harbor defense as core tasks. During and after the Cold War, the units were equipped with radar, thermal sensing, electronic surveillance systems, and the ability to deploy and monitor sonobuoys to share surface and submarine cueing data with fleet units that could then take over targeting.
From Cole to the Global War on Terror
The October 12, 2000, suicide-boat attack on USS Cole (DDG-67) in Aden, Yemen yet again exposed the vulnerabilities of high-value Navy assets in ports without mature shore infrastructure and defenses. Following the attack, active and reserve NCW Sailors deployed globally to protect high value shipping and ports from small boat attacks. During Operation Iraqi Freedom, they defended mine clearance forces, sealift, and other maritime infrastructure in Gulf countries and on Iraqi oil platforms in the Northern Arabian Gulf. In Southern Iraq and Kuwait, those detachments were the fleet’s eyes in the littorals: imperfectly equipped, often improvising landward security, but operationally present where scarce surface combatants could not loiter.
After the initial stages of Iraqi Freedom, the community optimized for preventing another small boat attack, enhancing the coastal patrol boat force while divesting the expeditionary sensing and fusion mission demanded by multi-domain threats. What disappeared, circa 2005, were the MIUWUs with their mobile sensors ashore and operations centers that existed to build a littoral picture and feed it to the fleet. NCW fell under the newly established Commander, Naval Expeditionary Force (CNEF) in 2006. In 2012 the boat force merged with Riverine units into the Coastal Riverine Force. They later became today’s Maritime Expeditionary Security Force (MESF), with squadrons redesignated as Maritime Expeditionary Security Squadrons to reflect broader maritime and littoral security missions.
The Corps’ Littoral Targeting Problem
In the June 2026 Proceedings, Capt. Mario A. Fajardo, U.S. Marine Corps, correctly identified EABO’s maritime targeting problem. His core point is that Marines forward ashore inside an adversary’s weapons engagement zone may be the only U.S. force positioned to find and track maritime targets when ships and aircraft cannot safely close. Yet the Corps still lacks the training, doctrine, and organization to turn distributed maritime sensing into targeting-quality data for joint fires.
Marine schoolhouses rightfully emphasize land threats over maritime targeting. Marine littoral regiment maritime sensing remains episodic and disconnected rather than persistent and fused. Fajardo’s proposed solutions require changes and investments on the Marine side, but the more readily available answer lies with NCW.
A Naval Coastal Warfare Renaissance
The problem can be more effectively solved through a renaissance of expeditionary, more ground-centric Naval Coastal Warfare posture—explicitly optimized around U.S. Navy Reserve CNEF units—paired with modern sensors and lightweight effectors that extend sensing and engagement reach. Rejuvenated Naval Coastal Warfare Units (NCWUs) should be trained and equipped with the recognition that force protection and littoral targeting merge into a singular problem when the same cheap ubiquitous platforms threaten both the SPOD and the EAB.
The Corps rebuilding coastal surveillance from scratch while CNEF units sit one reorganization away from the same mission wastes scarce end strength in both naval services. Instead of transforming Marine riflemen into maritime targeteers, employ Navy Operations Specialists and Sonar Technicians who have trained and qualified to track maritime targets from the beginning of their careers.
First, the post-Cole drift away from NCW surveillance forces ashore must be reversed. Though some amount of crewed patrol boat capability should be retained, the force should stop treating boats as their center of gravity. NCWUs can be organized around a rapidly deployable coastal operations center, mobile and disposable sensors, and a small security element that can hold a pier, a beach exit, or help defend an advanced base perimeter. The old MIUWU was closer to that model than a pure maritime security boat squadron.
Second, NCW should field the sensor-and-weapons suites that it can afford to acquire and deploy at scale. UAS can feed video and tracks directly into NCWU operations centers and from there into joint common operating pictures and fires networks. Cheap, expendable coastal sensors, including acoustic, radar, electronic surveillance, and electro-optical, will thicken awareness across the littorals. Highly portable commercial satellite communication systems and mesh networks can replace brittle, maintenance-heavy line-of-sight links, and MILSPEC radios.
Lightweight, containerized, and vehicle-mobile counter-UAS systems with both sensors and kinetic interceptors under a common autonomy layer would give NCWUs a practical answer to the one-way attack drone that killed soldiers at Shuaiba. The same sensing-and-engagement stack also yields an over-the-horizon offensive option to detect, track, and defeat unmanned surface vessel swarms.
Third, train and network for wartime: Reserve NCWUs should exercise routinely with deploying MLRs and larger fleet units. The goal should be a fused littoral picture measured in seconds, chat and targeting data that actually reach shooters, and tactics that treat the coast watcher, the boat, the UAS, and the anti-ship missile battery as a unified kill chain. These communities should share a common operating picture in peacetime training, long before a war zone forces the introduction.
These initiatives do not require inventing a new warfare community from whole cloth. While technology and threats have leapfrogged in capability, currently designed organizations have not. Reinvigorated NCWUs are the most rapid affordable option to defeat evolving littoral threats.
CAPT (ret.) Chris Rawley, USN served 30 years with afloat and expeditionary deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf, and across Africa.
