Towed Artillery

The M777 155mm Howitzer is a tactically capable system rendered operationally irrelevant in the stand-in environment. Its signature is detectable by People’s Liberation Army ISR assets. The Marine Corps operates approximately 350 M777s across fourteen active batteries, consuming hundreds of millions in annual operations and maintenance funds.⁴ The HIMARS provides longer range, greater precision, and superior survivability through dispersion—and it already exists in the force. Divestiture of all towed artillery is not a reduction in fires capability. It is a rationalization of the fires portfolio around systems that can actually survive.

Light Armored Vehicles

The LAV-25 was designed for reconnaissance and economy-of-force in a joint maneuver context. In the stand-in fight, that context does not exist. The LAV’s reconnaissance function is better performed by unmanned aerial systems at a fraction of the logistical cost.⁵ Its direct fire role is modest and increasingly redundant against a peer adversary with anti-armor assets that outrange the 25mm cannon by orders of magnitude. The Corps should divest the entire inventory.

Amphibious Combat Vehicles

The ACV 1.1 was procured as the replacement for the Amphibious Assault Vehicle—a platform the Corps rightly retired as Force Design 2030 moved away from ship-to-shore assault under fire.⁶ The ACV does not escape the same conceptual trap. A 50 percent procurement reduction—approximately 102 vehicles—preserves residual capability for permissive environments while liberating nearly $900 million for systems the stand-in fight actually demands.

F-35 Procurement Reduction

The F-35 is a maintenance nightmare—and that is not hyperbole. The Director of Operational Test and Evaluation reports the F-35 carries an average of more than 800 open deficiencies per aircraft, with mission-capable rates that have chronically lagged program targets.⁷ Sustainment costs rank among the most expensive in the joint inventory.⁸ The Corps is not buying lethality with every additional airframe. It is buying complexity, maintenance debt, and readiness drag. One hundred fewer airframes, at approximately $135 million per jet, redirected into UAVs and ISR platforms, produce the unmanned ecosystem the stand-in fight demands at a fraction of the sustainment cost.⁹

CH-53E Retirement

The CH-53E is not operationally mature—it is old. At an operating cost exceeding $17,000 per flight hour, its maintenance burden is substantial.¹⁰ Its retirement is an engineering inevitability. The policy choice is whether to manage that retirement deliberately—tied to CH-53K fielding—or wait until readiness rates force the issue.

Unmanned ground vehicles and loitering munitions extend the Corps’ logistics, reconnaissance, and direct fire capacity without adding to the human signature that distributed forces must manage. They are cheaper per effect than manned aviation, harder to target than traditional artillery, and scalable in a way that large platforms are not. The Corps that masters distributed precision fires through unmanned systems will hold a decisive operational advantage. The Corps that does not will struggle to survive the first 72 hours of a contested maritime fight.

Vertical lift is the connective tissue of the stand-in force. The CH-53K King Stallion nearly triples the external lift capacity of the CH-53E, with a digital architecture that dramatically reduces the maintenance burden.¹² The MV-22 Osprey remains the stand-in force’s primary medium lift solution, and its ability to rapidly reposition Marines across vast maritime distances is without peer. Investing in both is not a hedge. It is the direct enabler of distributed operations.

The Cost of Doing Nothing

Force Design 2030 identified the direction. It did not mandate the velocity. In the absence of structural divestiture, legacy systems will continue to consume operations and maintenance funding, aviation enterprise bandwidth, and the institutional attention that should be focused on the stand-in fight. The Corps will arrive at the next conflict partially transformed—capable enough in the old ways to generate activity, but not capable enough in the new ways to generate decision. The People’s Liberation Army does not share this problem. It is building the force it intends to fight with, not the force it is comfortable sustaining.