The commandant of the Marine Corps said Wednesday that the additional active-duty Marines authorized in this year’s defense policy bill will be used to boost capabilities like intelligence, cyber and maintenance.
The fiscal 2017 National Defense Authorization Act would increase the Marine Corps to 185,000 active-duty Marines, 3,000 more than the president requested.
Gen. Robert Neller said those extra forces will go to things like intelligence, electronic warfare and cyber, as well as some “mundane” things where the Corps is currently lacking, like maintenance, communications and engineering.
“If we do get an end strength increase and we get the money to go recruit, train and equip those Marines, they’ll be performing tasks and providing capabilities that we don’t think is existing in the current force in either sufficient quantity, or they don’t exist at all,” he said at the U.S. Naval Institute’s Defense Forum at the Newseum in Washington.
Still, he said the service would have looked to increase those capabilities going forward even without the end strength increase, by taking Marines doing one job and moving them to another community.
“We were going to do that and take that risk,” he said.
The defense policy bill has already passed the House and is expected to pass the Senate this week. But the bill is an authorization bill, so it does not actually provide any funding for those priorities. Instead, the Defense Department, as well as the rest of the federal government, will begin 2017 still under a continuing resolution.
