SAN DIEGO — The Marine Corps will, in a matter of weeks, have the first draft of a comprehensive plan for sending Marines to sea on nearly every vessel in the Navy's fleet.

Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Joseph Dunford said the plan will focus at first on Marines assigned to the service's crisis-response task force in Africa and those rotating through Darwin, Australia. He expects the concept of operations to be refined over time.

"I think we're pretty far. What I tasked the staff to do is to come up with something we can implement this year," Dunford said Feb. 12 during an interview at West 2015, an expo and conference by the U.S. Naval Institute and the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association International.

That plan will detail how Marines deployed with these special purpose units will use vessels other than amphibious ships to operate from the sea, including how they'll embark, what sort of aircraft can be used, how aircraft will be maintained and how ships that were never designed for Marines, their gear and their aircraft, can handle a variety of missions.

While focusing on Africa and Australia first, the concept of operations will be implemented in other locations, Dunford said.

"We want those Marines, particularly in Southeast Asia, on a day-to-day basis, to do the kind of forward engagement necessary and also give them a crisis-response capability," he said.

The Corps is engaged in a complex effort to determine how small teams of Marines can embark on mobile landing platforms, surface combatants, military cargo ships and nearly every other vessel.

The project is driven by a demand for amphibious ships, but fiscal limits that make it unaffordable to build every vessel combatant commanders want. The Gator Navy currently has 30 amphibs, and will grow to 33 in the next few years. Despite that, the fleet will still be short of the 50 amphibs combatant commanders say they could use on any given day.

"The requirement, again, is somewhere between 33 and 50, and we've got to do the best we can to close that gap," Dunford said.

Dunford said he has worked with Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jon Greenert to make sure vessels' flight decks can support MV-22 Ospreys. Also, several three-star generals recently spent time learning about the variety of ships in the Navy, their characteristics, their capabilities and their weaknesses.

"This would be a great opportunity to use the V-22 and small number of Marines doing a small forward presence, doing an engagement where they're more flexible ashore, but a crisis-response capability as well, but at the low end of the spectrum," Dunford said.

Virtually anything that the Navy has that floats could see Marines on its decks, said Jim Strock, director of the Seabasing Integration Division at Headquarters Marine Crops' Combat Development and Integration office. This includes auxiliary ships like T-AKEs and mobile landing platforms, to combatants like aircraft carriers, destroyers and submarines.

Using this eclectic collection of vessels will help put Marines closer to hotspots, Strock said. For example, SP-MAGTF Crisis Response operates in Africa, but is based in Spain. By using these alternative ships, Marines and their gear can get to a mission faster and remain on station longer, rather than staying in Europe until they are tasked and relying on a supply chain that stretches thousands of miles between continents.

The concept was tested in July when Marines from a Fleet Anti-Terrorism Security Team went aboard an aircraft carrier, a destroyer and the dry cargo ship Matthew Perry. Later, during exercise Bold Alligator in November, forces from Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command launched rigid hull inflatable boats from the joint high speed vessel Choctaw County.

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