What Does the Marine Corps Want to Be?

Westhawk, a former Marine Corps officer, notes that some in the Marine Corps believe their future is in preparing for the Long War by becoming experts in security cooperation. They want to become "advisors", perhaps part of the big SysAdmin to which Tom Barnett refers.

Those who have listened to U.S. Marine Corps Commandant General James Conway over the past year or so have heard two messages. First, General Conway has pleaded to have his Marines removed from stultifying garrison duty in Iraq’s now-pacified Anbar Province and redeployed to Afghanistan, where he hopes the Marines can engage in some straight-up conventional combat in the rural countryside. Second, General Conway would like to see the Marine Corps return to its naval traditions, with more Marines becoming re-acquainted with life at sea and with amphibious operations.

It may seem as if General Conway is showing some nostalgia for a pre-9/11 world. But inside his own headquarters, two strategic planning officers have described the Marine Corps’s real future. Writing in two articles in the February 2009 edition of Proceedings (registration required), these two officers show how the Marine Corps is reorganizing itself for a future of persistent irregular warfare.

Their articles have a common theme: the Marine Corps will emphasize the training and advising of foreign security forces, building partnership capacity with the objective of either preventing conflict or enabling allied security forces to meet common security threats. The U.S. Marine Corps will accomplish these tasks by creating Security Cooperation Marine Air-Ground Task Forces (SC MAGTF), which will receive specialized training for the advisory mission. And mimicking the practice of the U.S. Army’s Special Forces Groups, Marine Corps regiments performing the SC MAGTF missions will receive assignments to geographic regions. They will repeatedly deploy to these regions and thus achieve familiarity with that region’s culture, environment, and players.

Meanwhile, other Marine officers visit Yale University to talk about the future security environment.

In order to provide background to ISS, the Marines briefed the Vision and Strategy 2025 document that describes how the Marine Corps’ role and posture in national defense will change in the future global environment. The document considers current patterns and trends throughout the globe such as population growth, energy and water demands, and globalization to determine potential areas instability, ultimately helping the Marine Corps anticipate where and how it will operate.

Director of MCCDC’s Strategic Vision Group, Col. Steve Zotti used a sports metaphor – that seemed to resonate with the group – to illustrate the dynamic security environment within which Marines must be prepared to operate. He said the Marine Corps needs to be “that middle-weight football team” that can quickly reorganize to play soccer, basketball or other sports to compete with the many “games” our adversaries play throughout the spectrum of conflict.

“We’ll also have to play in the stands and the parking lots because that’s where the people are. And our enemy plays that game better than we do right now,” Zotti said.

This is how the Marines fool you, they put on this image of being "jarheads" and dumb grunts when they are very actively involved in the academic review of warfare and in developing where their service needs to go. At the same time, I wonder if they really want to be all things to all people. It seems to me that they lose sight of the specialty that their service provides - that of developing expeditionary forces for low-intensity conflict, something I don't think will fall out of favor too soon. There's a danger, however, in trying to develop people to play all the sports games out there - you don't get to be Tiger Woods by playing basketball and football in addition to golf. I do admire, however, their willingness to explore the problem.

I think my own Chemical Corps suffers this problem of identity crisis as well. It can't decide whether it should focus on high-intensity conflict with WMDs, act as a hazmat team and clean-up crew for industrial chemicals, or an "all-hazards" specialist for homeland defense/civil support missions. As a result, its capabilities have been stretched and dissipated as it tries to be all things to all people. Sometimes you just have to determine what you can be based on the resources available and what makes the most sense. Unfortunately, that logic doesn't appeal to everyone, and it's not as if the Chemical Corps is actively engaged in looking for a solution, as the Marines are.

Comments

[FDChief]

I come away with this with a very different take. IMO this is the USMC letting themselves forget that what is in the Corps' interest is not in the nation's interest. It does the U.S. no good at all to have their largest single over-the-horizon expeditionary force decide to get all Lawrence of Afghania about FID and COIN. The Special Forces were created for that mission (OK, well, they were created for guerilla wars and slid sideways into FID/COIN when we decided that propping up nasty little foreign dictatorships was better business than helping form guerilla armies to unseat them).

But more to the point, the notion that we need to have our maneuver elements fiddling around in nasty, complex little wars in Central Asia, Africa and Central America? We need that case of scabies like we need, what? A drawerful of AIG stock?

The USMC isn't "exploring a problem" so much as it is doing what it always does absent strong leadership at DoD: aggrandizing itself by finding the most popular military buzzwords and shaping them into something that says "Marines". Right now it's COIN and LIC. Perhaps after we've pissed a small republic's worth of coin trying to make the savagely contentious tribal craphole that is Afghanistan into something else and failed we'll be less willing to let service branches define their own missions.

All of this comes from a geopolitical and geostrategic cluelessness at the top. Not brilliance and innovation at the bottom.

[UNRR]

This post has been linked for the HOT5 Daily 3/6/2009, at The Unreligious Right

[J.]

FDChief, you put very plainly what I was thinking but I was trying to be diplomatic about it. I like the fact that the Marines are some of the most active military personnel in academic discussions of military topics. At the same time, they do tend to make bad decisions just like the rest of us, as they try to read the political tea-leaves. Agreed, the Marines should stick to what they do best, small-unit tactics in support of naval/shore combat over short durations of time.

[Matt Morgan]

I think you are right to be skeptical of an approach that attempts to build a Marine Corps that can "be all things to all people." BUT, that is a significant misreading of V&S 2025. J and FDChief are making a few assumptions that are just plain inaccurate, and I would encourage them to check out GEN Conway's vision publications beyond the summary offered in this post. Of course J is right in that the Marine Corps has made bad decisions (getting rid of boat companies in 2005), but the current vision IS wedded to conducting forcible entry from the air and sea--something I think we can all agree the Marine Corps does well. As for FID, the mission the Marine Corps is taking on has actually been designed to fill a gap created by SF mission creep. As more and more shooters join the terrorist hunt, there are fewer out there training foreign militaries. By taking on this mission in a managable scale, the Corps is developing leaders that have a deep understanding of their operating environment--which is good thing for this (and the next) fight.

[sagenz]

I always thought the Marines were more like the front row i rugby team. Always in the depth of the action, tough warriors with faces only a mother would love.

They should focus on warfighting and leave the peacekeeping and peacemaking to a less aggressive infantry army.

Talk of multiskilling & changing sports is just bs.

[JV]

The USMC wants to be a naval based expeditionary fighting force that can serve the nation's interests. What we have learned in the last 8 years is that the cultural, language, and civil affairs issues are keys to making us more effective in those mission. The Security Operations MAGTF concept improves the commander's stuational awareness by tying him into the region and giving him the resources he needs to do so.

As mentioned, despite the Marine Corps strength in combat ops in an expeditionary envireonment, we've been tied down doing SASO/garrison ops in Iraq for the last couple of years. Hopefully that is changing with the MEB headed to A-stan. But, as limited as US ground forces are, we have to recognize that the USMC will often be tasked to do things that do not play to our strengths. Better to plan for that than be caught unprepared.

[FDChief]

"As for FID, the mission the Marine Corps is taking on has actually been designed to fill a gap created by SF mission creep. As more and more shooters join the terrorist hunt, there are fewer out there training foreign militaries."

So there you have it! Since the SF isn't sticking to its lane, preferring to go all Jack Bauer or John Rambo or whatever and run around shooting up G's, rather than DoD require that it pull its green beanie out of its backside and get back to doing its job, we'll just slide the USMC into its job. Presto, problem solved.

Problems for me are that we're assuming that what we're doing right now in A-stan (chasing raggedy-ass tribal insurgents around a pre-Westphalian wasteland) is something we SHOULD be investing U.S. tax dollars on, rather than using U.S. advisors/trainers as force multipliers and Afghan Mike Forces as the grunt labor) is what we SHOULD be doing and will be doing in the future. And this will involve making USMC maneuver elements into faux SF teams?

Good luck with that. As any 16th Century Spaniard would clue you in, wasting your treasury trying to "pacify" unruly foreign fanatics is a good way to spend your treasury and end up with the same number of fanatics in the end.

[FDChief]

"The Security Operations MAGTF concept improves the commander's stuational awareness by tying him into the region and giving him the resources he needs to do so."

Which, again, assumes that the commander and the unit are operationally tied to that region and will be for the forseeable military future.

And we'd want that...why?

The Afghans have been militarily "managed" since Babur's troops left by punitive expedition. I see no evidence that a strategy that insists that placing several tens of thousands of foreigners in a part of the world that has traditionally hated and despised foreigners to transmigrate a tribal wilderness into some vague approximation of a Western "state" has any more chance of succeeding than the older methods, with the added disadvantage that it ties down the Western troops - Western troops that are hellishly expensive and few in number relative to the population of the Western states, making them a rare and valuable commodity - and commits Western prestige and political success to the political success of their fractious and unreliable local allies.

So if this is a temporary expedient to deal with a single unit's deployment, fine. If this is, as the original post implied, a permanent, functional reorganization in how the USMC sees it's wartime mission? Not so much.

[JV]

FDChief,
Perhaps "tying him into the region" gives the wrong impression. Just because you have expertise re: the culture and language of a specific area does not make you useless in others. Can 10th Mountain fight in Iraq? Can the 82nd fight without first falling from the sky? The answer is yes. I just came back from a deployment with an arty bn doing civil affairs. We send people/units to all kinds of specialized training and then are forced to re-task due to contingencies. I don't see how this is any different.

Throughout our history, the Corps has landed in 300+ places, few of which were english speaking or culturally similar to us. The Marine Corps does not choose those places so we can fight who we want to-our elected government chooses based on our national interests. We will continue to perform all the general purpose tasks the USMC has always done, but hopefully will be better prepared to work with (or against) the locals we find on the beach.

SF is doing their own thing, and I can't tell you why they have gotten away from their training mission to become a super SWAT team. Regardless of the reasons, it has led the USMC and US Army to throw a lot of members into various advisory teams, which for the most part have been very successful despite their ad-hoc nature. I think most Marines and soldiers recognize we need to increase our ability train local forces, and SF won't have the size to do it on their own.

As far as the rant on strategy in A-stan, I don't see what that adds to this discussion.

[Gage]

It is just so painful to see the expenditure of resources on so massive a scale for the Navy and Army. They have not the warrior culture and are 'watered down'. The precious special forces efforts that are all the rave induce one the reverse engineer conclusions that resource allocation and appropriation have trumped concepts of comparative advantage and competency. At what point did the Navy get in to the land navigation business and the Marines rid themselves of boat units?

Ship to shore naval and amphibious operations will probably always have a place in the pantheon of military operations and tactics. And yet the amplification of our forces and firepower are driven ever more by the precepts of vertical and horizontal envelopment...and the success of amphibious operations will increasingly require the integration of Marine infantry units into an ever expanding set of core competencies.

To my SEAL counterparts, in the Corps, we do not simply take an M-60 out of the box, conduct live fire operations at a range and then put the 60 up/back in the box. I deeply respect the various missions and DNA of the various 'special units' but it is clear and obvious that ego and unrequited resource allocation has created a culture of arrogance and has obviated the need to rationalize the mission, assets, training and resources of our military.