Amphibious warfare
Preparation and planning: A naval landing operation requires vessels to troops and equipment and might include amphibious reconnaissance. Military intelligence services obtain information on the opponent. Amphibious warfare goes back to ancient times. The Sea Peoples menaced the Egyptians from the reign of Akhenaten as captured on the reliefs at Medinet Habu and Karnak. The Hellenic city states routinely resorted to amphibious assaults upon each other's shores, which they reflected upon in their plays and other art. The landing at Marathon by the Persians on 9 September 490 BC was the largest amphibious operation until the landings at the Battle of Gallipoli.

Marines: In 1537 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, decided to train and assign amphibious-assault skilled units to the Royal Armada specifically for fighting on and from ships. The Spanish Marines were born under the name Compañías Viejas del Mar de Nápoles ("All-Spanish Sea Companies of Naples"). The idea was to set up a permanent assignation of land troops to the Royal Spanish Navy that would be available for the Crown.
The first "professional" marine units were already task-trained amphibious troops, but instead of being disbanded, they were kept for the Spanish Crown's needs. Their first actions took place all along the Mediterranean Sea, where the Turks and pirate settlements were risks for commerce and navigation: Algiers, Malta and Gelves.
In 1565, the island of Malta was invaded by the Ottoman Turks during the Great Siege of Malta, forcing its defenders to retreat to the fortified cities. A strategic choke point in the Mediterranean Sea, its loss would have been so menacing for the kingdoms of Western Europe that forces were urgently raised to relieve the island. It took four months to train, arm and move a 5,500-man amphibious force to lift the siege.
Other countries adopted the idea and subsequently raised their own early marine forces as well.

Development: From the 15th to the 20th centuries, several European countries established and expanded overseas colonies. Amphibious operations mostly aimed to settle colonies and to secure strong points along navigational routes. Amphibious forces were fully organized and devoted to this mission, although the troops not only fought ashore, but on board ships.
By their nature amphibious assaults involve highly complex operations, demanding the coordination of disparate elements; when accomplished properly a paralyzing surprise to the enemy can be achieved. However, when there is a lack of preparation and/or coordination, often because of hubris, disastrous results can ensue.

Terceras Landing: Álvaro de Bazán, Marquis of Santa Cruz, was an early proponent of amphibious warfare. The "Terceras Landing" in the Azores Islands on 25 May 1583, was a military feat as Bazán and the rest of commanders decided to make a fake landing to distract the defending forces (5,000 Portuguese, English and French soldiers). Special seagoing barges were also arranged to unload cavalry horses and 700 artillery pieces on the beach; special rowing boats were armed with small cannons to support the landing boats; special supplies were readied to be unloaded and support the 11,000-man landing force strength. The total strength of the amphibious force was 15,000 men, including an armada of 90 ships.

Queen Anne's War: A superb example of successful combined operations, of both military branches and different imperial units, is the Siege of Port Royal (1710). The siege was a combined arms, British/Colonial American amphibious assault upon the Acadian Provincial capital Port-Royal (Acadia) of French Canada, during Queen Anne's War (the name of the American theater of the War of the Spanish Succession). The battle is known as the seminal moment in the conquest of Acadia. The siege resulted in the British imperial Force conquering French Arcadia and renaming Port Royal, Annapolis Royal.

The War of Jenkin's Ear: One famous instance of a failed amphibious assault was in 1741 at the Battle of Cartagena de Indias in New Granada, when a large British amphibious assault force commanded by Admiral Edward Vernon, and including a contingent of 200 Virginia "Marines"(not originally meant to be so) commanded by Lawrence Washington (older half brother of George Washington), failed to overcome a much smaller, but very heavily fortified Spanish defence force and were forced to retreat back to the ships and call off the operation.

King George's War: The Siege of Louisbourg (1745) took place in 1745 when a New England colonial force aided by a small British fleet captured Louisbourg, the capital of the French province of Île-Royale (present-day Cape Breton Island) during the War of the Austrian Succession, known as King George's War in the British colonies.
The northern British colonies regarded Louisbourg as a menacers, calling it the "American Dunkirk" due to its use as a base for privateers. There was regular, intermittent warfare between the French and the Wabanaki Confederacy on one side and the northern New England colonies on the other (See the Northeast Coast Campaigns of 1688, 1703, 1723, 1724). For the French, the Fortress of Louisbourg also protected the chief entrance to Canada, as well as the nearby French fisheries. The French government had spent 25 years in fortifying it, and the cost of its defenses was reckoned at thirty million livres.
Although the fortress's construction and layout was acknowledged as having superior seaward defences, a series of low rises behind them made it vulnerable to a land attack. The low rises provided attackers places to erect siege batteries. The fort's garrison was poorly paid and supplied, and its inexperienced leaders mistrusted them. The colonial attackers were also lacking in experience, but ultimately succeeded in gaining control of the surrounding defences. The defenders surrendered in the face of an imminent assault.
Louisbourg was an important bargaining chip in the peace negotiations to end the war, since it represented a major British success. Factions within the British government were opposed to returning it to the French as part of any peace agreement, but these were eventually overruled, and Louisbourg was returned, over the objections of the victorious British North Americans, to French control after the 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, in return for French concessions elsewhere.

French and Indian War: The Siege of Louisbourg (1758) was a pivotal operation of the British military in 1758 (which included Colonial American Provincial and Ranger units) during the Seven Years' War (known in the United States as the French and Indian War), a war that ended the French colonial era in Atlantic Canada and led to the subsequent British campaign to capture all of French North America by the war's end.

Another major amphibious landing took place during the Seven Years' War, the Siege of Quebec in 1759. The British, in addition to colonial American Ranger units, had raised experimental light infantry units to integrate aspects of the ranger ideal into the regular army. They also produced the first specially designed landing-craft in order to enable their troops to cross the Saint Lawrence River in force. After considering and rejecting a number of plans for landings on the north shore of the river, Major General James Wolfe and his brigadiers decided in late August to land upriver of the city.
The British prepared for their risky deployment upstream. Troops had already been aboard landing ships and drifting up and down the river for several days when on 12 September Wolfe made a final decision on the British landing site, selecting L'Anse-au-Foulon. Wolfe's plan of attack depended on secrecy and surprise—a key element of a successful amphibious operation—a small party of men would land by night on the north shore, climb the tall cliff, seize a small road, and overpower the garrison that protected it, allowing the bulk of his army (5,000 men) to ascend the cliff by the small road and then deploy for battle on the plateau. The operation proved a success, leading to the surrender of the city, and heavily influenced subsequent engagements.
In 1762 a British force, with a small colonial American ranger contingent, successfully landed at Havana in Cuba, besieged the city and captured it after a two-month campaign thanks to improved coordination of land and sea forces.
In the same year, 1762, British Royal Navy sailors and marines succeed in taking the capital of the East Indies: Manila in the Philippines as well.

American Revolutionary War: In 1776 Samuel Nicholas and the Continental Marines, the "progenitor" of the United States Marine Corps, made a first successful landing in the Raid of Nassau in the Bahamas.
In 1782 The British rebuffed a long Franco-Spanish attempt to seize Gibraltar by water-borne forces. In 1783 a Franco-Spanish force invaded the British-held island of Minorca.

The Second British Empire: In 1798 Minorca experienced yet another of its many changes of sovereignty when captured by a British landing.
As the British Empire expanded worldwide, four colonies (Halifax, in Nova Scotia; Bermuda; Gibraltar; and Malta) were designated Imperial fortresses, from which Britain's domination of the oceans and the Mediterranean and Caribbean seas was maintained, including its ability to deny safe passage to enemy naval and merchant vessels while protecting its own merchant trade, as well as to its ability to project superior naval and military force anywhere on the planet.