Tearing Apart the Marine Corps
Don't sink, don't shoot. What do you do?
In its zeal to avoid being a redundant second Army, the Marine Corps has done to itself with Force Design what no enemy has been able to achieve—destroyed it as a combat force.
Despite only one Marine division of three being reorganized with the anti-ship Marine Littoral Regiments (MLRs), reforming the Marine Corps away from ground combat to focus on anti-ship capabilities has wrecked Marine ground warfare capabilities:
With or without the LSM, the SIFs cannot be logistically supported. With no SIFs, the MLRs are irrelevant. Without MLRs, Force Design is irrelevant. Without the infantry regiments from 3rd Marine Division, III MEF is not the Corps’ “fight now” MEF, it is, unfortunately, the Corps’ “irrelevant now” MEF.
I heartily concur. I'm horrified. But I concur. I'm not impressed with the LSM (Landing Ship Medium), seeing it as a barge with pretensions back when it was the Light Amphibious Warship (LAW). And I don't see them keeping exposed Marine detachments either supplied or mobile in the face of Chinese opposition.
Yet the only way they can be supplied and moved is if the Chinese navy and air force can't impede that. And the assumption of a very strong Chinese ability to do that is the justification for tearing up III MEF (Marine Expeditionary Force, a ground division with an air wing and other support) to be an anti-ship force.
And I’m not sure what to say about this claim:
The Marine Corps Stand in Force concept gives the Joint Force a lethal, adaptable formation inside the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) weapons engagement zone.
No, the concept hasn’t given us anything. The concept promises us that capability. And I don’t see how it is possible so far.
Is the Marine Corps Expeditionary Advance Base Operations (EABO) concept essentially replicating the Japanese experience from World War II American island hopping operations? Doesn't moving the Marine units or supplying them close to China assume friendly sea control that EABO is trying to achieve?
With so few anti-ship weapons—that are inferior in quantity and quality to what a single destroyer deploys—to make the entire endeavor appear ... suicidal.
Look, at some level Marine help for the Navy is reasonable—and needed because of China's expanding fleet and air power and our shrinking Navy. That's why I wrote this article for Proceedings on creating assault transport ships (APDs) to move company-sized anti-ship and infantry detachments around.
But I had no idea that the Marines would tear up the entire Corps, making it unable to sink ships or engage in significant ground combat! We missed an opportunity to use the Navy Expeditionary Combat Command to provide the anti-ship capabilities that would be supplemented by traditional marine combat forces:
Two retired Marine generals are concerned about the radical changes being pushed through the Marine Corps. I believe their concerns are justified. Why wasn't the Navy Expeditionary Combat Command (NECC) tapped to provide capabilities the Marines are being torn apart to provide?
I'm horrified at what we've done to 3rd Marine Division:
With two infantry regiments and an artillery regiment as the core of 3rd Division, I'd leave the infantry regiments as infantry regiments without turning them into those Marine Littoral Regiments. I'd beef up the artillery regiment so it can retain air defense assets plus 155mm guns to support Marine infantry while adding dual purpose HIMARS--ground support and anti-ship--and dedicated anti-ship missiles.
I won't reopen the tank question. For the Western Pacific anti-ship mission I concede they are excess capability. Just don't get me going about Marines in the rest of the world who could still use tanks.
Instead of ripping apart the infantry regiments, I'd turn to the Naval Expeditionary Combat Command (NECC) for the anti-ship and anti-air mission. Create a number of anti-ship and coastal defense battalions, able to parcel out batteries and sections to the Marines. Perhaps the NECC is too small now to provide the infantry component. Or perhaps it is better to simply let the Marines provide their quality infantry instead of pushing the NECC that far.
If that is the case, the Marine Division's two infantry regiments and artillery regiment would be adapted but kept intact. They would create platoons and companies of mixed infantry, anti-ship, anti-aircraft, and general purpose artillery, drawn from the the infantry regiments, artillery regiment, and NECC.
But instead the Marines charged headlong into the re-organizational friendly fire. And, as that initial author relates, it has crippled its abilities to deploy sufficient battalion-sized Marine Expeditionary Units (MEUs), let alone MEFs able to wage war.
We did what no enemy could do. Destroyed our Marine Corps. Is it too late to stop? I'm just a reservist REMF Army guy. So it would be easy to dismiss my concern. It seems like a number of Marines are reacting to Force Design despite being ordered to salute, shut up, and follow along.
Let's slow down the rush to destruction.
NOTE: The image was made with Bing.