Basically if the Falklands get discounted according to the criterion of not having division sized units landed then no country fits that very odd definition of a superpower you gave earlier and certainly none of the historical expeditionary forces were ever actually expeditionary forces (which of course defeats the entire point of this thread which wasn't even asking for anything like what was being described as superpower worthy expeditionary forces.
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Anglo-French forces landed from Malta and Cyprus if I'm not mistaken. Those were of course nearby friendly ports.
Landings being conducted on the territory of the nation that requested them would be relevant since that would most definitely qualify as host nation support. Doesn't matter that southern Korea was more or less run over by the KPA. A definite section of it wasn't and it was from there that the host nation government operated and provided host nation support for the Americans to field an expeditionary force to engage the enemy
in another part of the host nation. Sure they had opposed landings, but in the Pusan Perimeter they had a permissive enough environment to build up forces noticeably for a future landing (which the Americans attempted to deceive the North Koreans into thinking it would be at Kunsan). Pretty much every expeditionary force in history has gone through a similar dynamic:
- the AEF and BEF in World War I France disembarked in a permissive environment and then went straight into the worst war environment ever experienced up to that time
- the American forces in South Korea, well just see above.
- the Cuban forces in Angola, disembarked in a permissive environment and then went on to engage rebel Angolan armies
and the South African army.
Okay sure, if that's what you think. It doesn't seem to fit with any other definition of a super power that I've ever seen which usually refers to the ability to project power globally (note that expeditionary forces are far from the only way to project power globally) and the definition seems to rely very heavily on seaborne landings as some kind of yardstick when the Soviets relied on a very different doctrine to achieve similar purposes. For instance the Soviet Union as
noted here (highlighting such as italics from the original):
Between submarines equipped with missiles, surface ships, aircraft carriers, aircraft and airborne troops (and let's face it, there were practically no circumstances under which any superpower is going to be staging a force directly from home to engage an enemy force directly in combat when they could be staging their forces from nearby allied territory (which has the added benefit of giving the staging forces a chance to rest and if necessary adjust to local/regional conditions and time differences) and the fact that pretty much foreign military adventures short of World War III are going to be in Third World countries with much weaker forces, the Soviet Union as a super power most was able to achieve any of its expeditionary force goals if it wanted to. All military operations need to have some kind of goal, and usually that goal is to achieve victory (however defined) with the fewest casualties and least amount of resources expended as necessary. The US would have needed a force capable of a combat landing against opposing forces because it didn't border it's most likely World War III battlefields (central Europe, the Korean peninsula, the Middle East). The USSR on the other hand definitely did: barring Cuba, where else would it really expect to be fighting World War III in areas it didn't border? And why build up a force capable of sailing directly from say Odessa all the way to Cuba to do a forced entry against occupying American forces there in the event of a World War? Logic would dictate spending that money on building up a force structure relevant to fight the more essential battles, and one lonely communist island in the Caribbean is just never going to an essential battle. For central Europe, Korea and the Middle East the US would have precisely needed to at least have the force structure in place to allow it to field a force capable of going from the US to say Europe to conduct a combat landing because there could be (very rare) scenarios where there are no friendly Western European governments left to provide allied support for continued US combat operations in Europe. If the situation had somehow been reversed you would likely also have seen a reversal of what each thought necessary for its military to be able to do.