Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger has a vision for the Corps unlike that of any of his immediate predecessors.
To say his 10-year plan to remake America’s most storied military service into an even smaller, more tailored fighting force is radical would not be far off the mark.
“If we don’t make some very fundamental changes, we’re going to get left in the dust,” Berger said at a forum in Washington last month.
Berger, who took command of the Marine Corps last July, immediately sent shock waves through the service with his Commandants Planning Guidance, which presaged a fundamental shift to reorient the Corps to be ready for a future war with China, which the Pentagon now sees as the most significant looming threat to U.S. military superiority.
It’s a significant departure from the last two decades, in which a Marine armored division led the siege of Baghdad, and Marine units regularly deployed to Afghanistan’s restive Helmand province for sustained counterinsurgency operations against the Taliban.
Berger wants the Marines to return to its naval roots, as he outlined in a follow-up document, Force Design 2030, a blueprint for his vision of a more nimble, amphibious “force-in-readiness” that “will be first on the scene, first to help, first to contain a brewing crisis, and first to fight if required to do so.”
But what he argues the future Marine Corps should not be is what it has been in the past, a de facto second Army configured for land warfare, weighted down with M1 Abrams tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and towed artillery.
“This capability, despite its long and honorable history in the wars of the past, is operationally unsuitable for our highest-priority challenges in the future,” writes Berger in his planning document. “Heavy ground armor capability will continue to be provided by the U.S. Army.”
Berger wants his Marines to be masters of what’s called the “WEZ,” or weapons engagement zone, the battle space within range of an adversary’s air, missile, and naval forces.
That requires shedding quite a few of the old “legacy” weapons.
Over the next decade, Berger wants to jettison all seven Marine tank companies, three of the 24 current infantry battalions, 16 of 21 cannon artillery batteries, two of six amphibious assault companies, three of 14 V-22 tiltrotor squadrons, three of five heavy-lift helicopter squadrons, two of five light attack helicopter squadrons, and reduce the overall size of the force by 12,000 Marines.
That would take the force down from the current 186,000 to around 174,000 Marines, roughly where the Corps was in the early 70s.
“We have to get smaller to get better,” argues Berger. “So, we’re going to begin to contract back toward where our sort of normal fighting weight is.”
Berger wants fewer manned fighter jet squadrons and, additionally, smaller, more affordable amphibious ships designed for naval campaigns in the western Pacific against China while leaving land wars in North Korea, Europe, or the Middle East to the Army.
That means more unmanned aerial vehicle squadrons and more long-range, precision ship-killing missiles.
The idea, says Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel, would be to deploy Marine units around islands in the South China Sea, each with the capability of contesting the surrounding air and naval space using anti-air and anti-ship missiles.
“Collectively, these forces would hem in Chinese forces, prevent them from moving outward, and ultimately, as part of a joint campaign, squeeze them back to the Chinese homeland,” writes Cancian in a recent analysis for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
“We are now at an inflection point. We have to pivot now toward modernization while sustaining the readiness that this committee has resourced,” Berger told the House Armed Services Committee in February. “This pivot, in my opinion, cannot wait until next year or the following. We must move now or risk overmatch in the future by an adversary. And that is a risk we will not take.”
So far, Berger’s redesign of the Corps has the support of Navy leadership, including acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly and Adm. Michael Gilday, chief of naval operations, but not everyone is on board.
Cancian worries that by going all-in on countering China, while deliberately not hedging against other contingencies, the Marines may be unable to pivot if a more prominent, as yet unseen threat emerges.
“If the Marine Corps has misjudged the future, it will fight the next conflict at a great disadvantage or, perhaps, be irrelevant,” he writes.
If fully implemented, the changes would leave the Corps poorly structured to fight the kind of campaigns that it had to fight in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq,” Cancian argues. “The Marine Corps might plan to defer these conflicts to the Army, but that has not worked in the past. Army forces have been too small to keep the Marine Corps out of sustained ground combat.”
Berger says one reason he chose a 10-year time frame for the transformation is to give time for people to adjust to the change, and for a constant revaluation and adjustment of the plan.
“There is no question in my mind that whatever we envision for 2030 won’t look like that in 2030. Not the least of which is because we have a pacing threat, and they’re gonna make changes along the way too. So are we,” Berger said last month. “This is something every year, all the time, you’re going to have to war-game, iterate, make adjustments along the way, because the threat, the adversary, is not static.”
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
