Posted on November 18, 2024
A project to transform the Marine Corps and redefine its mission has run into choppy seas.
“Marines,” proclaim their recruiting ads, are “The Few. The Proud.” Nowadays, they also are: The Fractious. Their hymn (“From the halls of Montezuma …”) says Marines are “First to fight.” Today, for a number of senior Marines — including 22 retired four-star generals — the fight is intramural.
It concerns the U.S. Marine Corps’ future. And its understanding of itself, which is rooted in the past century, in major battles in major wars: e.g., Belleau Wood (1918), Iwo Jima (1945), the Tet Offensive (1968), Fallujah (2004). The Corps’ intensely practical, and perhaps perishable, élan is at stake in the heated debate about how Marines fit into the nation’s security strategy.
In March 2020, the USMC announced Force Design 2030, a 10-year plan to reconfigure the Corps and shrink it by 12,000 (currently there are 174,500 Marines) to conform to a national defense plan primarily — too much, critics of Force Design contend — focused somewhat on Russia but mostly on China. To that end, Force Design involves eliminating all the Corps’ tank battalions and bridging companies, reducing from 24 to 21 the number of infantry battalions, reducing the number of artillery battalions from 21 to five, and deactivating a number of aviation (helicopter and fixed-wing) squadrons.
Force Design envisions a USMC transformed for assisting the Navy to control seas, and to deny access to seas, by an adversary’s — China’s — naval forces. Hence the shedding of components intended for sustained land operations. For example, about 90 percent of the Corps’ approximately 450 tanks have already been transferred to the Army.
The principal architect of Force Design, now-retired commandant Gen. David H. Berger, said the Corps’ future depends on a willingness “to discard legacy things.” Force Design’s critics say the Corps’ essential utility is being discarded.
The Corps’ diminished fleet of amphibious warships, combined with Force Design’s other curtailments, mean, critics say, that the Corps cannot be what it has been: a rapid-response force for crises anywhere. Neither can it be ready to meet various needs of U.S. combatant commanders and allies.
The current commandant, Gen. Eric M. Smith, is correct in his planning guidance, released in August, that, “As the war in Ukraine continues to demonstrate, the cycle from development to procurement to obsolescence in both hardware and software is lightning fast on a modern battlefield.” But this, too, is correct: Ukraine’s fight for survival demonstrates, as does Israel’s, the continuing relevance of warriors holding weapons.
And with two regional wars raging, the United States, while planning for China’s challenge, cannot discount the possibility of a multifront war. Then, Force Design’s “light, lethal and austere” (Smith’s words) China-centric USMC — shaped for surveillance, reconnaissance and ship interdiction — would be far from optimal.
Gary Anderson, former chief of staff of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, writing for RealClearDefense in August, said the Corps is transforming itself “from a robust combined arms team into a combination of light infantry and coastal artillery.” This is not what will be most urgently needed if there are two major regional conflicts.
Anderson said the Force Design Corps will be unable to quickly deploy “a potent combined arms team replete with armor, artillery, aviation, and assault engineers.” Instead, Force Design “has the Corps buying anti-ship missiles for use in a blue water fight that will likely never happen.” And retired Gen. Paul K. Van Riper, an astringent critic of Force Design, questioned whether Marines who fire an anti-ship missile can quickly escape in the minutes before an enemy’s counterattack.
Writing in the National Interest, Jim Webb, former Democratic U.S. senator from Virginia, who was awarded Silver and Bronze stars and the Navy Cross for heroism in Vietnam combat, said Force Design will undo the Corps’ value “as the one-stop guarantor of a homogenous tactical readiness that can ‘go anywhere, fight anybody, and win.’” Force Design’s Corps will be, he wrote, specialized for “short-term, high-tech raids against Chinese military outposts on small, fortified islands in the South China Sea.” This will disqualify the Corps for the kind of challenges it has often faced, and is “ignoring the unpredictability of war.” Webb also wrote: “The war you get is rarely the war that you game.”
The Corps, which produces hard people in soft times, and vows to be “most ready when the nation is least ready,” has often had its nature and function questioned. President Harry S. Truman, a World War I Army artillery officer, called the Corps “the Navy’s police force” with “a propaganda machine almost equal to Stalin’s.”
He said that in August 1950. One month later, he found the Corps came in handy at Inchon.
