The Marines are a sea based military force that carries everything with it…
THAT is for back in the day…
Conflicts in this era have NOTHING to do with ‘coming off the beach’ to get into the fight…
Army manpower and Special Ops are what is warfare these days…
The Air Force and Army aviation get the troops where they have to be….
The Marine’s have formed a Spec Ops unit to get with the program, something they NEVER said they wanted a part of…
They WILL have to make more changes….
Or?
They will be left on the beach….
There is no question the Corps is in poor shape to handle the security challenges of the near future. Gen. David H. Berger acknowledged this in 2019 when he became Commandant. His predecessor did as well.
Berger warned that the service risked becoming irrelevant if it did not change. He has pushed to shift the Corps’ focus back to what differentiates it from the U.S. Army: amphibious operations and land operations in support of a naval campaign. These functions not only define the Corps, they are required by law.
Yet a small but potentially influential cadre of retired Marine generals don’t want the Corps to move in this direction. They are actively lobbying lawmakers to block or overturn Berger’s initiatives.
War often demands that services do things that are not at the top of their prescribed set of responsibilities. None has been better at adjusting to this reality than the Corps. But its success as a “second land army” came at a severe cost: it lost touch with its seafaring roots.
During 20 years of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, few Marines gained any experience in learning the complexities of amphibious operations. The Corps did, however, gain significant weight and logistical dependency.
The Marines up-armored everything. When units used amphibious ships to land their gear in Iraq, they found they were outweighing the ship before they out-cubed it. It’s never been unusual for units to run out of space for all of their boxes and equipment. But with heavily armored Humvees, blast-resistant vehicles, and even cargo trucks encased in protective glass and armored panels, units were weighing down the ships to the point of instability. This was not a good sign for a force that is supposed to be light, nimble, self-sustaining (at least initially), and able to conduct highly distributed operations in contested littoral waters.
Since the early 1990s, the Corps has recognized that amphibious operations are getting more challenging. The threat from long-range precision guided munitions, especially anti-ship cruise missiles, forces large, conventional amphibious warships to operate farther from shore. As a result, Marine forces must be less dependent on their sea-base for support. They must also be able to move around the battlefield in ways that attract less attention from the enemy…
image…US naval Institute