When Gen. David H. Berger, commandant of the Marine Corps, announced a radical new plan in 2019 to remake his service, many Marines figuratively rolled their eyes. For a combat force proud of its traditions, change can sometimes seem like the enemy.
Two and a half years later, Berger actually appears to have pulled much of it off. The Marine Corps is smaller and more agile, it has disposed of all of its tanks and many of its artillery pieces, and it looks like a force of the future, not the past. The era of counterinsurgency wars, along with the doctrine and equipment to support them, is over for the Marines.
Resistance to change was “less than I thought it would be,” Berger told me in an interview last month at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, Calif. The key, he said, has been to take the money and people freed up by discarding old systems and invest in new capabilities that can combat a modern, high-tech rival such as China.
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“We cannot afford to retain outdated policies, doctrine, organizations, or force development strategies,” Berger wrote in his 2019 “Commandant’s Planning Guidance.” The heroic tradition of Marines storming faraway beaches from a few big amphibious assault ships was “illogical,” Berger wrote, “given the growth of adversary precision strike capabilities.”
Follow this authorDavid Ignatius's opinionsFor a Pentagon that has been agonizingly slow to shed legacy weapons systems — such as aircraft carrier task forces and fighter jet wings — Berger’s rethink of the Marine Corps has been encouraging. It’s one thing to demand change but quite another to make it happen over inevitable objections from Congress, defense contractors and the military’s own implacable bureaucracy.
To assess what Berger’s makeover looks like in practice, I talked with some of his senior commanders. They tell a similar story — of getting rid of venerable old systems to make way for newer ones that are small, elusive and sometimes unmanned.
Maj. Gen. Francis L. Donovan, the commander of the 2nd Marine Division, illustrates the transition. His division fought in the bloody amphibious assaults across the Pacific in World War II, at Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Tinian and Okinawa. They were in the first wave of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and fought in the bitter battle of Fallujah. The division motto is “Follow Me,” right out of a John Wayne war movie.
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So, what does change look like for this fabled division, based at the legendary Camp Lejeune in North Carolina? First, the division shrank, from 18,000 Marines to 15,000. It lost two artillery batteries. It shed the heavy bridging and engineering units that had constructed forward operating bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. It gave up a tank battalion, losing 44 M1A1 tanks and the Marines who had made tank warfare their specialty.
“Why would I want a tank, when I can kill a tank with a loitering [drone] munition?” Donovan bluntly asks. The challenge, he says, was providing a “transition with honor” for Marines who had devoted their careers to tank warfare. The division helped them find new jobs, transfer to Army tank units or retire.
How has the Marine Corps rebuilt its combat capabilities using different weapons and doctrine? I talked with Brig. Gen. Benjamin T. Watson, the commander of the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory at Quantico, Va., and a deputy, Brig. Gen. Eric Austin, who is director of capabilities development. (Both were nominated in December by President Biden for a second star.)
Watson described a future Marine Corps with a very different footprint. Rather than sailing toward beachheads in big amphibious assault ships, the Marines of the future will be deployed forward, in smaller, more agile, harder-to-find units. Because China can easily target “stand-off” units stationed far from potential conflict, these will be “stand-in” forces that, says Watson, will be “operating persistently forward.”
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If a conflict seemed imminent with China, say, these future Marines could move quickly from their forward bases to seize maritime choke points. They would operate closely with allies, such as Japan, with which the Marines just staged a big exercise called Resolute Dragon 21, and Australia, where Marines are based in Darwin on the northern coast.
The warfighting lab envisions littoral brigades that can operate quickly and stealthily, with many Marines replaced by unmanned systems — and using electronic-warfare tools that can hide the Marines’ presence and find the adversary. “This is the biggest change in 70 years for the Marine Corps, but we’re still the Marines,” says Austin.
Berger has forced the Marine Corps to learn a new vocabulary, and his best commanders speak the language of change with passion. But truly reinventing a combat force won’t be easy, and some of the new “stand-in” concepts sound to me nearly as vulnerable to a high-tech adversary as the old ones. Still, for a Pentagon where inertia has too often been a way of life, the Marines are showing overdue signs of movement.
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