RIP USMC: The Corps is Toast

Force Design 2030 murdered the USMC.

The Marines are struggling to keep more than one Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) forward deployed at a time. Sometimes, two are forward deployed but only for limited periods. Each MEU has about two weeks of sustainment. Unless quickly reinforced, the MEU is out of action. The Navy has reduced the number of Maritime Prepositioning Ships from 20 in three strategic locations in 2018 to seven in two locations today, so rapid reinforcement is also a thing of the past.

Bottom line: the MEU will contribute virtually nothing to major theater war. TLAMs, SM-6s, and PrSMs are useless if you can’t position, reposition, dynamically retask or logistically sustain them inside contested areas, which the Marines can’t, not now nor in the future. And none of these weapons are hypersonic, which the other three services are pursuing. The Marines Corps senior leadership dreams of subsonic, ballistic, and largely ineffective future capabilities without having a plan or the means to logistically support them.

The Marines have transformed from theoo’s premier expeditionary force in readiness to irrelevance. The Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO) is a house of cards. The Marine Littoral Regiment (MLR) has no means to maneuver; no combined arms. It is not survivable against a determined enemy. The small unit Stand-in Forces cannot be repositioned or logistically supported inside contested areas. The maritime connectors don’t ask to go from gator ship to shore. They are duplicative and ineffective to other Services’ capabilities. For example, the “long range missile” is the subsonic, short-range (115 NM) Naval Strike Missile (NSM). After 5+ years, not a single MLR has obtained initial operating capability.

Not one.

Until the Marines can solve the logistics issues ( which they can’t), the MLR will continue to consume resources but nothing else.

I am continually amazed at those who believe that any Service can divest itself of some 25% of its combat power, to include troops, armor, bridging equipment, mine-clearing equipment, cannon artillery, fixed wing and rotary wing aviation assets, and significant logistics capability and claim it is more capable than ever. How can those same people claim it continues as the “premier crisis response force” when it agreed to cut its requirement for amphibious shipping from 38 to 31 ships knowing that the availability rate for amphibious ships today is slightly above 40%? The Marines, not the Navy, cut the requirement for L-class amphibious ships from 38 to 31. The Navy currently has 32 on the active rolls, 1 more than the Marines’ stated requirement. You can’t blame the Navy for not meeting the Marine Corps’ requirement. The Marines have subsequently requested 35 Landing Ship Medium (a slow speed, essentially unarmed connector built to civilian survivability standards we discussed earlier this week) to support the MLR/Stand-in Forces.

None have been built.

None will probably be built.

Why? They are not survivable inside China’s WEZ, an area where the Navy’s Arleigh Burke destroyers will avoid.

If this “new” Marine Corps is so flexible, why couldn’t it respond to the earthquake disaster in Turkey when it was asked for or conduct the Embassy evacuation in Africa? The value of the Marine Corps is being world-wide deployable in near real time, NOT sitting on islands off of China taking pot shots at PLAN ships as they sail by. Obviously any funds that are directed at better sensing, intelligence, and communications is welcome. The same for increased lethality. BUT, how is this Corps going to cross a river or a minefield? Will it “cyber its way”? The Character of War may be changing (as always) but the Nature of War remains…brutal, deadly, chaotic and unforgiving of mistakes. That massive contest between complex adaptive systems clashing in fury and blood-letting.