Commentary
How did the United States Marine Corps transform itself from the worldâs premier expeditionary force-in-readiness to a poor parody of the French Maginot Line in just a few years? In his âForce Design 2030â plan, the 38th Commandant of the Marine Corps radically redesigned and restructured the Marine Corps to operate as a defensively oriented, narrowly specialized regional force under Navy command to attack and sink Chinese warships in the South China Sea. This new mission came at the expense of providing much needed crisis response and global force projection capabilities to all Geographic Combatant and Functional Commands in an increasingly unstable world. The crown jewel of this new warfighting organization are called Stand-in Forces (SIFs), which are small isolated detachments of Marines, armed with anti-ship missiles, persistently spread across islands in the so-called âcontestedâ areas of hostilities: specifically the first island chain.
To fund these largely experimental units, the Marine Corps divested proven capabilities needed to fight and win today anywhere in the world, an unwise and unproven approach termed âdivest to invest.â The Corps jettisoned all its tanks and bridging, most of its cannon artillery and assault breaching, and much of its infantry and new, state-of-the art aviation at a time when these certain capabilities are showing to be critical in ongoing conflicts.
In an act that can only be described as negligence, the Commandant reduced the Corpsâ long-standing requirement for 38 amphibious ships to 31 and stood silent as the Navy decimated the Maritime Prepositioning Squadrons (MPS) by reducing their numbers from 3 to 2 and the total number of ships from 17 to 7. The loss of MPS ships together with the reduction in the number of major amphibious assault shipsâand their poor state of maintenance and availabilityâmake it doubtful that the Marine Corps has the capability to project even a limited Marine Expeditionary Force in time to influence events before or after hostilities commence.
Some pundits hailed the Commandantâs plan as revolutionary, brave, and brilliant. Others saw it for what it wasâa national security disaster and the death blow to the nationâs global 911 force.
Much has already been written about the adverse impacts of what has been recently renamed âForce Design,â but not as much scrutiny has been applied to the SIF concept, which is a complete âhouse of cards.â The best definition of this term comes from the Cambridge English Dictionary: âa complicated organization or plan that is very weak and can easily be destroyed or easily go wrong.â And there in a nutshell is the SIF. Not unlike the French Maginot Line that was built prior to World War II to protect Franceâs eastern border against invasion, the McNamara Line that was designed to prevent the infiltration of South Vietnam from the North and Laos, or Japanâs island strategy to protect the homeland during the Second World War, the SIF concept will fail during hostilities.
Letâs examine three loadbearing cards holding up the entire structure, each of which will fall of its own weight:
The second card is survivability. We know from experience that lightly armed, isolated units inside âcontestedâ areas can be easily overwhelmed by superior forces. One needs to look no further that the Marine Defense Battalions formed prior to World War II. These battalions were manned and equipped with the best trained and most modern equipment then available. Not long after the Japanese attacked Peal Harbor, the garrison at Wake Island was overwhelmed and the battalion on Midway would have suffered the same end had the U.S. Navy not defeated the Japanese aircraft carriers in the waters offshore during the epic Battle of Midway. The same fate awaits the SIFs if isolated inside the contested areas. They cannot hide. They will be found, and if judged a threat, destroyed.
The third card is duplication and obsolescence. The Marines have essentially destroyed the combined arms capability of the operating forces to stand up 14 Naval Strike Missile (NSM) batteries and 3 Tomahawk Land Attack Missile Batteries. The Marines intend to only keep 3 NSM batteries permanently forward deployed, while the sole purpose of the other 11 batteries is to serve a rotational pool of manpower and equipment. The Corpsâ contribution to the other servicesâ anti-ship capabilities is minimal and duplicative. Worse, the other services are all investing in long-range, hypersonic missiles while the Marines are largely buying short-range, subsonic missiles that will be obsolete in the near future, if not already. The end result is that Marines will be marginalized, at best, on far flung island with ineffective missiles.
The Marine Corps has transformed to irrelevance. The poster child for its new look is the SIF, a âhouse of cards,â supporting a flawed operational concept. Even on paper, the SIF has minimal utility to confront threats from adversary general purpose forces or unconventional/irregular forces like those operating today in places like Ukraine, Syria, and Gaza where belligerents are effectively using combined arms together with emerging technologies to locate and destroy the opposition using fires and maneuver to great effect. No amount of slick talking points or empty words can alter the facts. Now is the time for a serious discussion about the future of the Marine Corps. Whatever the forum for this discussion, the participants must be balanced on both sides of the argument. The nation has gotten itself into this mess by only listening to one side of the conversation.
The Congress should be open to hearing perspectives from both sides on this critical national security issue, ideally through public committee discussions.
Please note that the opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and may not necessarily align with the views of The Epoch Times.
Source link
