What Will Replace the Marine Corps?
In his book on maritime power To Rule the Waves, author Bruce Jones points out that, if the United States is to wage war with anyone other than Canada or Mexico, we need to do it with naval power. Ever since the invasions of Normandy and Okinawa where the Army provided significant amphibious landing forces, the leading edge of the projection of combat power ashore has been the United States Marine Corps. That is no longer the case.
Since 2019, the Marine Corps has largely abandoned its amphibious capability in favor of a limited mission of deterring or fighting a war with China in the South China Sea, all to fulfill the vision of the former Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger. The concept is called Stand-in Forces. To buy the anti-ship missiles required to carry out his vision, Berger divested the Marine Corps of all of its tanks, much of its artillery, all of its heavy engineering and assault bridging and breaching capabilities as well as significant aviation assets, But as Jones points out we still need some way of projecting naval power ashore. The question now is who will do it? There are several possibilities. (READ MORE: Biden Has Allowed the Marine Corps to Become Irrelevant)
One candidate would be our special operations forces. They certainly have the combat skills to attack a defended shore. But, there is a problem. If they are to obtain the tanks, engineers, and other heavy assets needed to assault a hostile beach, they will lose the agility that makes them “special” in the first place. Amphibious operations in today’s hostile littoral environment take constant skill and practice. The Marine Corps used to have this because it and the Navy kept amphibious forces deployed in the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, and the Western Pacific. These Marine Expeditionary Units (MEUs) practiced constantly for amphibious operations. If a crisis popped up, they could be brought together into a brigade-sized landing force and further reinforced quickly to the division or corps level if needed. For example, during Operation Desert Storm, the Marine Corps mustered two combined arms divisions for the ground assault and a brigade off the coast of Kuwait for an amphibious operation if needed.
Since then, Gen. Berger has released the Navy from its commitment to maintain the number of ships needed to keep up the constant overseas MEU rotation because he believed that the capability was no longer needed.
The army is a second option. Some army units could be targeted for amphibious assault missions, but the army considers itself the nation’s force for fighting big wars on land. It has traditionally left the “lesser contingency” missions such as embassy and civilian evacuations and pop-up humanitarian assistance to the forward-deployed MEUs. Retooling the army to take aboard amphibious operations is not impossible, but it would be painful for the organization and expensive for the country.
A third option is to outsource amphibious operations to allies — after all, the British have recently shown interest in expanding their capabilities — however, economy of scale becomes a problem if large operations are needed. The British Army and Royal Marines combined would be hard-pressed to fill a good-sized soccer stadium. The Japanese have shown some interest in expanding their overseas expeditionary capability, but they would have some constitutional problems in developing a serious amphibious capability. In any case, we would have to build a consensus on what wars we would jointly fight. (READ MORE: Elon Musk and OpenAI Are at War. Your Data Is at Stake.)
There is a fourth option. That is to rebuild the Marine Corps as a worldwide force constantly ready to take action. One of the mysteries of the Marine Corps’ decision to concentrate on an anti-ship mission in the South China Sea is whether or not the joint force combatant commander responsible for the region even wanted this Marine Corps contribution. The current Indo-Pacific commander has not yet weighed in on the subject. A recent war game conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found the Stand-in Force concept to be duplicative and less effective than capabilities already possessed by other services and unable to contribute “heavily” in most scenarios. (READ MORE: A War-Ravaged Sudan Teeters on the Edge of Crisis)
There might even be some unanticipated goodness here. The capabilities that Gen. Berger discarded were Reagan-era legacy systems. The Marine Corps could experiment with newer and more capable tanks, artillery, and engineering systems and pick the best. In any case, we will have a dangerous gap in our national power projection capability for a number of years. In the future, we will have to be more careful in the power that we give a single service chief.
Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps Colonel who lectures on Alternative Analysis at the George Washington University’s Elliott Scholl of International Affairs. He served as a Special Advisor to the Deputy Secretary of Defense from 2003-5.
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