Non-Combat Attacks on the Marine Corps

No respect for the Marine Corps 

Throughout its 250-year history, the Marine Corps, in the words of 1980s comedian Rodney Dangerfield, “Don’t get no respect.” Dangerfield’s line describes the treatment of the Marine Corps by four presidents, congressmen, the Army, and the Navy. Non-combat battles for Marines took place between the 1780s through the 1950s. Challenges included proposals to move the Marines into the Army, eliminate the Marines, reduce the size of the Marines, and pull Marines from ships.

After only eight years in operation, the United States disbanded the Marine Corps on 3 September 1783. That was the same day that Great Britain formally recognized the independence of the United States by the Treaty of Paris. President George Washington returned the Marines to action in 1789.

A major attack on the Marines came from President Andrew Jackson. On 8 December 1829, Jackson addressed Congress. He recommended merging the Marine Corps into the artillery or infantry, thus “curing the many defects in its organization.” The Marine Corps Commandant, LtCol Archibald Henderson, defended the existence of the Marine Corps. Henderson said, “As the commandant of the Corps, if I thought such a change necessary for the public interests, I should be among the first to recommend it. It is my fixed opinion that no such change will eventuate in the promotion of either economy or utility.” Henderson’s response led to Congress passing legislation placing the Marine Corps under the Secretary of the Navy in 1834. Jackson signed the bill, ending the placement of Marine functions into the Army.1

In 1864, during the Civil War, a resolution came before Congress to transfer the Marine Corps to the Army.  The Marine Corps Commandant, Col Jacob Zeilen, once Henderson’s aide, gathered support from senior Navy officers. That resolution died in a House committee. Three years later, Zeilen faced a new challenge—legislation to abolish the Marine Corps. Again, Zeilen gathered the support of senior naval officers. That legislation failed to get out of committee.2

While the Army and Navy had four-star leaders since 1866, Gen Alexander A. Vandegrift, 18th Commandant of the Marine Corps, became the first Marine to earn a fourth star in 1945. That was 89 years after GEN Ulysses S. Grant and ADM David C. Farragut received their fourth stars.3 

Between 1894 and 1908, the Marines faced a reduction in responsibility when naval officers wanted Marines off ships. Then, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt agreed with those officers. In 1908, President Roosevelt acted by ordering Marines off the Navy’s ships. Roosevelt’s 9 November 1908 order came one day before the Marine Corps’ 133rd birthday. Under Roosevelt, the Marines were landbased only.4 Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, former Secretary of War under Roosevelt, reversed his predecessor’s decision on 26 March 1909.5

While researching generals in the Marine Corps, author Glenn M. Harned said, “Before 1916, the United States Marine Corps did not have a general officers corps. Five Marine officers served as Commandant in the grade of brigadier general or major general, but none of them advanced to the permanent grade above that of colonel.”6

In 1933, ADM William V. Pratt, chief of naval operations, called for “amalgamation of the Marine Corps into the Army.” Pratt explained that Marines were once needed to suppress mutinies by sailors in what was called the “Pratt Memo.” According to Pratt, “As the world became more settled and as colonization settled, the need for small expeditionary forces grew less.” Pratt said other nations abolished or reduced the size of their Marine units, while the United States built “a small Army” within the Navy. Pratt added, “The principal weapons of the larger proportion of the Marine Corps are the rifle, bayonet, and machine gun, exactly the same for the infantry of the Army.” Pratt’s argument suggested that cost savings would result. Pratt said, “Everything except the combat element of the Marine Corps could be eliminated,” adding that administration, training, and supply could be handled by the Army in existing facilities.7

Even during World War II, Gen Vandegrift had to defend the Corps when he spoke to the House Select Committee on Post War Policy on 11 May 1944, 34 days before Marines landed on Saipan. Vandegrift explained the Marine Corps had to fight for its existence throughout its history. Vandegrift reminded committee members of the 1867 proposal to abolish the Marine Corps and assign their responsibilities to the Army. That failed, Vandegrift added.8

Post World War II, the War Department reorganization into the Department of Defense nearly ended the Marine Corps. The 1947 reorganization created the United States Air Force from the Army Air Force. Leaders of the Army, Navy, and Air Force were named full members of the newly created Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). The Marines were not included. Gen Vandegrift battled to keep the Marine Corps a separate Service. On 6 May 1946, Vandegrift spoke before the Senate Naval Affairs Committee during a hearing on bill S. 2044 to place the responsibilities of the Marine Corps under the Army. Proponents of S. 2044 included President Harry S. Truman, War Department leaders, and Army Chief of Staff GEN Dwight D. Eisenhower. Vandegrift made his case to senators in what became known as the “bended knee” speech. Vandegrift spoke about the impact of S. 2044 on the Marine Corps. The general explained that the bill would “spell the extinction of the Marine Corps.” Vandegrift added, “For some time I have been aware that the very existence of the Marine Corps stood as a continued affront to the War Department general staff.” Pointing to the World War II victories in the Pacific, Vandegrift outlined the Marine Corps’ amphibious capabilities. Speaking from a historical point of view, Vandegrift explained the impact of the Marine Corps. The general said the Marine Corps forecasted a pattern of war with Japan in 1921. Vandegrift said:

In conjunction with the Navy, we provided the nation with a doctrine, technique, method, and equipment which became the standard pattern of amphibious warfare adopted not only by our own Army but by the armies and navies of eight United Nations as well. It proved to the key to victory in every major theater of the war.

With a backhand to the Army, Vandegrift described the Marines as a “skilled body of specialists” who received “world-wide professional prestige without benefit of West Point tradition or War Department direction.” Again, referencing the Pacific in World War II, Vandegrift explained the Marines are the nation’s “primary force of readiness.” He added that the operation at Guadalcanal could not have been launched by the Army, as that Service was not trained for an amphibious assault landing. Vandegrift explained the end of the Marine Corps would be offset by “the part-time assignment of Army troops for naval purposes.” He praised the Army’s ability to organize and prepare operations “with care and deliberation.” Vandegrift argued, those abilities did not “make up an effective mobile, amphibious force.” He added, “The Marines have always viewed the landing operations as a specialty—their specialty.” Continuing his case against the Army taking on amphibious operations, Vandegrift pointed to the Army’s Field Service Regulations. It had only eight of 1,084 paragraphs covering amphibious operations. In response to the War Department’s contention that Marines’ amphibious efforts “are an invasion of the Army’s sphere,” Vandegrift said, “The Army is not and never has been in the amphibious field.” The general also reminded the Senate Committee that Army troops who carried out amphibious landings used Marine Corps techniques, and in some cases were trained by Marines. Vandegrift concluded with an emotionally charged statement:

The bended knee is not a tradition of our Corps. If the Marine as a fighting man has not made a case for himself after 170 years of service, he must go. But, I think you will agree with me that he has earned the right to depart with dignity and honor, not by subjugation to the status of uselessness and servility planned for him asked by the War Department.9

Five days after Vandegrift’s Senate presentation, an Associated Press reporter asked GEN Eisenhower his take on Vandegrift’s statement. Eisenhower replied, “No one has paid more tribute to the Marines’ record,” than he (Eisenhower) did.10 Vandegrift’s speech paid off. Despite the War Department’s efforts, the Marine Corps stayed a separate Service. The Marines still did not have a position on the JCS.

With the unification of the Services finalized and the Marines still in business, the fight for the existence of the Corps continued. Alan Rems, writing in a June 2019 article for the magazine Naval History, described the post-World War II intra-Service efforts to minimize the role of the Marine Corps. For example, the Nation’s first Secretary of Defense, James V. Forrestal, held a meeting with the Service chiefs in Key West, FL, in March 1948. Forrestal did not include Gen Clifford B. Cates, Vandegrift’s successor. Truman wanted deeper defense cuts. Louis B. Johnson, Forrestal’s successor, advocated moving the Marines under the Army and placing Marine aviation with the Air Force. Legally, it was pointed out, Johnson could not do that. The battles among the Service chiefs led to hearings before the House Armed Services Committee in October 1949. The JCS Chairman, GEN Omar Bradley, told the committee that amphibious operations of the Navy and Marines would not be needed.11

While Vandegrift’s efforts helped keep the Marine Corps as a separate branch of the military, Pratt’s memo did not die due to retired Army GEN George Van Horn Moseley. Mosely served as GEN Douglas MacArthur’s Army’s vice chief of staff in the 1930s. In a 15 February 1949 letter to Eisenhower, Moseley mentioned Pratt’s memo. Moseley summarized the memo and added his view when he wrote:

The idea that Marines can be landed on the shores of a foreign nation without committing an international breach, is all baloney. It is perfectly absurd and entirely incongruous to maintain two armies. The continental existence of the Marine Corps adds greatly to duplication and expense. Why should the Marine Corps have a separate air force?

Moseley blamed the Marines’ Capitol Hill influence when he said, “This question would have been adjusted years ago.” Moseley took one more shot at the Marine Corps with this comment, “You (Eisenhower) accomplished all of your victories in Europe without a single Marine.” (Moseley’s comment was inaccurate, according the Royal Marines’ history that said, “While few in number and often forgotten, around 700 United States Marines were present on D Day either ashore [Omaha Beach] or as part of ships crews.” In addition, Marines served in London and Iceland. Other Marines were assigned to Navy ships.)12 Finally, Mosely mentioned he sent a copy of the “Pratt Memo” to former President Herbert Hoover, chairman of the Commission on the Organization of the Executive Branch. The former President thanked Moseley for his letter and expressed “appreciation for his views.”13

Letters between Van Horn Mossley and Eisenhower; Pratt Memos calling for amalgamation of Marine Corps with the Army. (Photos provided by author.)

On 19 February 1949, Eisenhower replied to Moseley. While not directly agreeing with Moseley’s view, Eisenhower offered insight into his feelings about the Marine Corps issue with this statement:

The whole trouble with this question of the Marines, the distortion with which it is treated when it is dragged out into the open. It becomes a subject to which is applied a great deal of emotionalism, prejudice and hysteria, but very little logic and good sense.14

Eisenhower’s 8 April 1950 answer to World War II Marine veteran Richard W. Courchaine took a different tone than his response to Moseley. Courchaine wrote Eisenhower in April about a Saturday Evening Post article, “The Marine Corps Fights for Its Life.” Courchaine said, “I was very surprised to find it (the article) that you were for it, such as regulating it (the Marine Corps) to a very small size.” Eisenhower replied that he had not read the Saturday Evening Post story. He said, “I have never in anyway advocated the abolishment of the Marine Corps. I tremendously admire the Marine Corps.”15

Before the Korean War, Secretary Johnson called for a reduction of the Corps to six battalions and six squadrons. The onset of the Korean War stopped Johnson’s plan.16 When the North Koreans crossed the 38th parallel into South Korea in June 1950, the Nation needed the Marine Corps. Cates offered Marine ground and air forces and obtained Truman’s authorization to activate Marine reserves.17

On 29 August 1950, California Republican Congressman Gordon L. McDonough wrote President Truman asking him to place the Commandant of the Marines on the JCS. McDonough stated, “The United States Marine Corps is entitled to full recognition as a major branch of the Armed Services of the U.S., and should have its representative on the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Department of Defense.” President Truman angrily replied in a letter to Congressman McDonough. Truman said:

For your information, the Marine Corps is the navy’s police force and as long as I am President that is what it will remain. They have a propaganda machine that is about equal to Stalin.18

Marines in the field had a response to Truman’s propaganda comment. One example came from retired Marine Col Warren Wiedhan. Wiedhan, a private serving in Korea in 1950 before the Inchon Landing, said that Marines felt this way about Truman’s comment, “The Marine Corps propaganda machine is BETTER than Stalin’s.”19

On 6 September, nine days before the Inchon Landing in Korea, Truman issued a written apology and addressed the Marine Corps League’s national meeting in Washington, DC. Gen Cates told Marine Corps League members, “We in the Marine Corps appreciate courage, especially personal courage.” On the same day, Truman sent Cates a letter. Truman said, “I am profoundly aware of the magnificent history of the United States Marine Corps, and of the many heroic deeds of the Marines since the Corps was established in 1775. I personally learned of the splendid combat spirit of the Marines when the Fourth Marine Brigade of the Second Infantry Division fought in France in 1918.”20 While the president attacked the Marine Corps and then had to walk back his remarks, the Marines received high praise from a surprising source, GEN MacArthur, commander of the United Nations forces during the Korean War. MacArthur said this about the Marines in a statement confirmed by the MacArthur Memorial: “I have just returned from visiting the Marines at the front, and there is no finer fighting force in the world.”21

The Marine Corps hymn includes the words “We fight our country’s battles on air, on land, and sea.” Post-World War II Marines should have added five words to the hymn: in the halls of Congress. The battle to gain a seat on the JCS continued in the early 1950s. In 1951, two Marine veterans serving in Congress battled to add the Commandant to the JCS. Congressman Mike Mansfield, a Montana Democrat, and Illinois Democratic Senator Paul Douglas joined forces with the Marine Corps League. Mansfield served as a Marine Corps private in the early 1920s. Douglas enlisted in the Marine Corps at age 50, earned a commission, and served with the 1st MarDiv in the Pacific, earning the Bronze Star and receiving two Purple Heart Medals. 

Mansfield supported the Douglas-Mansfield Bill H.R. 2034 (S. 677-the Senate version) in his 24 January 1951, House speech. Mansfield said his proposal “would in unequivocal terms establish an organizational structure for the Marine Corps that would not be subject to the whims of the appropriations.” The bill called for establishing four combat divisions and four tactical air wings with a cap on total Marines at 400,000. Mansfield said that the 400,000 limit “is in this bill to emphasize that fact that we are not trying to develop a second army.” Speaking about Marine tactical air, Mansfield listed three reasons to establish four air wings. First, Marine aviation “originated dive bombing.” Second, Marine aviation developed “close air tactical air support. Third, helicopter use “from a tactical standpoint came about from Marine aviation. Referring to the Korean War, Mansfield said, “If this force had been in readiness, ready to move at the outbreak of the Korean incident, the situation might have been drastically altered in our favor.” In addition, Mansfield called for making the Commandant of the Marine Corps a permanent member of the JCS. While acknowledging that the Senate’s version of the bill had been amended to make the Commandant a JCS consultant “on all matters pertaining to the Marine Corps,” Mansfield argued for the House version. He posed this question, “Would not the commandant of the Marine Corps, a man thoroughly trained in ground, sea, and air war, fit into this group as a catalyst?” Mansfield added, “The commandant of the Marine Corps would add great experience and scope to these councils.”22

While Mansfield’s proposal had Congressional support, the JCS opposed adding the Commandant of the Marine Corps as a permanent JCS member. On 12 April 1951, Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall sent a letter to the Committee on Armed Services, Senate Chairman Senator Richard B. Russell, a Georgia Democrat. Marshall said the JCS unanimously opposed the proposal as “unnecessary, undesirable, and impracticable.” Secretary Marshall added that he concurred with the JCS. Marshall also explained,

In addition to the fact that full consideration is now given to the views of the commandant of the Marine Corps, the combat element of the Marine Corps are part of the operating force of the Navy and the headquarters of the Marine Corps is not staffed to consider all of the problems confront the Joint Chiefs of Staff.23

Also on 12 April 1951, Senator Douglas mentioned the letter he sent to his colleagues advocating adding the Commandant of the Marine Corps as a permanent JCS member. Douglas told fellow Senators that adding the Commandant “will place two voices trained in naval and amphibious matters in an organization which is now dominated by services that have little knowledge or interest in the problems of naval warfare.” Douglas highlighted the success of the Marines in the Korean War.24 Douglas pointed to the overwhelming Army influence within the JCS from Chairman, Army GEN Omar Bradley, and Army Chief of Staff GEN Joseph L. Collins. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen Hoyt Vandenberg graduated from West Point.25 Mansfield’s bill wound its way through the legislative sausage grinder. Truman signed the final bill, Public Law 416, on 28 June 1952. The law called for no less than three combat divisions and three air wings in the Marine Corps. Regarding the status of the Commandant of the Marine Corps, the amended Senate version won out. The Commandant “shall indicate to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff any matter scheduled for consideration by the Joint Chiefs of Staff which directly concerns the United States Marine Corps.”26 For the Marine Corps, the new law was a step forward. The Marines remained a separate branch of the military and did get a larger force. The successes of Marines at Inchon, Seoul, and the Chosin Reservoir, along with World War II victories in the Pacific, earned the Marine Corps its new status. In addition, political winds were at the backs of the Marine Corps. Politically speaking, 800 Marine Corps League detachments worked with Douglas and Mansfield, demonstrating Marine influence with Congress. For Truman, then in his final months as a lame duck president, it was quite a change from his 1950 attitude about the Marine Corps. In the end, Truman’s intemperate remarks about the Marine Corps in 1950 likely helped the cause of the Marine Corps more than they hurt. 1952 was an election year and opposing the Douglas-Mansfield bill was not politically helpful. 

In 1958, a new challenge to the existence of the Marine Corps arose. President Eisenhower and Secretary of Defense Neil H. McElroy, the former president of consumer-packaged goods giant Procter and Gamble, called for streamlining the DOD and boosting research efforts. One aspect of the change concerned the Marine Corps. That provision would allow McElroy to order the abolishment or transfer of combat functions. Gen Randolph M. Pate, Commandant of the Marine Corps, blasted the proposal when he said that an official could “rationalize the Marine Corps out of a job.”27 Pate, a veteran of World War II battles on Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, faced a bureaucratic war. House Armed Services Chairman Congressman Carl Vinson argued against giving the defense secretary that power. Vinson’s 51-year career in Congress included 14 years leading the Armed Services Committee. Pushing back against Eisenhower’s reorganization plan, Vinson changed the proposal to allow Services to appeal decisions to Congress. Vinson’s bill included this provision,

However, except as otherwise provided in this subsection, no functions which have been or are hereafter established by law to be performed by the Department of Defense, or any officer or agency thereof, shall be substantially transferred, reassigned, abolished, or consolidated until thirty days after a report to the Congress in regard to all pertinent details in each instance shall have been made by the Secretary of Defense.28

Getting A Permanent Seat at the JCS Table
When World War II Medal of Honor recipient Gen Louis (“Lou”) H. Wilson became the 26th Commandant of the Marine Corps in 1975, he called for Marines to be a full member of the JCS. To avoid giving the impression he wanted that for himself, Wilson waited until late in his term. “I was doing it for the Corps and my successors,” said Wilson. Wilson’s idea called for him to reach out to fellow Mississippian Senator John Stennis, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and a few friends in the House of Representatives. Gen Wilson’s objective was legislation making the Commandant of the Marine Corps a full member of the JCS. An action in May 1978 spurred Wilson to move forward earlier than planned. When a JCS meeting was about to take place with the chairman unavailable, the Army’s vice chief of staff was named acting chairman. Wilson, who outranked that general, was upset and wanted to know why he could not chair the meeting. The answer: no one who is not a member of the JCS could be acting chairman. Wilson said that was the “catalyst” that he needed. “I determined to pursue it (full member of the JCS) vigorously,” Wilson added.29

To start, Wilson contacted the House Armed Services Committee ranking minority leader, California Republican Congressman Bob Wilson. The congressman, no relation to the Commandant, offered this guidance. Congressman Wilson said the authorization bill to fund the DOD had passed the House of Representatives. The congressman suggested getting the Senate to add the clause making the Commandant of the Marine Corps a full member of the JCS. Congressman Wilson said he could get that provision passed in the House. Gen Wilson worked closely with his legislative aide, BGen Albert E. (Al) Brewster. In 2023, Frisco Lakes Lifestyle wrote a cover story about Gen Brewster, who recalled his role in getting the legislation passed. 

General Wilson’s assignment to Al was to implement a change to make the commandant an equal full-time member of the JCS. Leveraging an existing relationship between General Wilson and Senator Stennis that dated back to World War II, Al requested a meeting with the Senator and Frank Sullivan, SASC staff director. That meeting with Stennis set the effort underway. As a result, Stennis instructed Sullivan to draft the changes.30  

After Brewster’s meeting, Wilson contacted Oklahoma Republican Senator Dewey Bartlett to introduce the measure. Bartlett, a World War II Marine pilot in the South Pacific, was, according to Gen Wilson, “delighted to comply.” Bartlett won the support of Georgia Democratic Senator Sam Nunn, who agreed to co-sponsor the provision.31 On the House Armed Services Committee side, New York Democrat Sam Stratton, a World War II veteran and a retired Navy reserve captain, supported the provision. Stennis said he asked Bartlett to speak on behalf of Gen Wilson’s idea. One hitch developed when Gen Wilson realized Stennis appeared to have forgotten about their discussion. Wilson questioned the senator. Gen Wilson told Stennis that “this means very much to me and I would deeply appreciate it if you would do it, and I will be very disappointed if you do not do this.” Stennis said that he would “see about it.” In fact, Stennis did more than see about it when he made this statement on the Senate floor:

I recognize that it may not be germane, but nevertheless this the time to make the commandant a full member. The Marine Corps has not had the opportunity in the past to express themselves and I think this bill should be passed tonight.”32

Bartlett’s remarks supporting the Marine Corps cited recent JCS history when he said, “In the past two years, the commandant of the Marine Corps has participated in every decision made by the Joint Chiefs, and his participation in recent years has averaged over 99%.” Bartlett said the amendment “would simply remove an archaic legal distinction.” According to Bartlett, the Marines were the only Service with air, sea, and ground combat forces. Bartlett added that the Marine Corps Commandant understands soldiers, sailors, and airmen.33

Wilson did not discuss his proposal with anyone in the DOD except Navy Secretary William G. Claytor, Jr., something he did in confidence. After the amendment passed the Senate, Wilson heard from the JCS chairman, Air Force General David Jones. Jones was unhappy that the amendment had not been discussed with him. Wilson told Jones he could call Stennis and express his opposition. Jones told Wilson, “Why, you know I can’t do that. But you used your influence with Senator Stennis to get this through.” Wilson sensed that the Army also did not agree with the amendment. However, ADM Tom Hayward, chief of national operations, supported the effort, according to Wilson.34

This was the second time Wilson tapped into his relationship with Stennis to equalize the Marine Corps with the other Services. Until 1975, the Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps held the rank of lieutenant general. The second-in-command of the other Services held the four-star rank. Both Stennis and Congressman Wilson supported that effort. During Wilson’s first year as Commandant in 1975, LtGen Sam Jaskilka became the Assistant Commandant and received a fourth star.

After the bill passed the Senate, media interest followed. Columnist Robert D. Heinl, Jr., a retired Marine colonel, praised Bartlett’s speech in support of making the Commandant of the Marine Corps a full JCS member when Heinl wrote Bartlett’s speech “represents a final act of loyalty to his old Corps.” Heinl added, “Don’t be surprised, one of these days when some future Marine becomes the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”35 Ted Bell, a reporter for the Sacramento Bee, asked Gen Wilson about an opposition argument to the amendment offered by the Air Force and Army that meant the Navy would get two JCS votes. Wilson replied, “I don’t recognize that the Marine Corps is not a separate service.”36 

The bill went back to the House of Representatives, then to the conference committee, and finally passed both the House and Senate. President Carter vetoed the bill due to the authorization of a nuclear carrier that Carter opposed. Wilson thought that the next bill might give opponents a chance to “dissect the bill.” That did not happen. The amendment remained in the revised bill. On 20 October 1978, President Carter signed the bill with the amendment so important to the Marine Corps. Responding to a question about the Carter administration’s role with that amendment, Gen Brewster said, “They were not involved in any way in the change.”37 Wilson served as a full JCS member until his retirement in 1979.

After the bill was signed into law, the Army found another law that might have kept a Marine off the JCS. That law pointed out that the senior members of the armed forces included only the chiefs of staff of the Army, the Air Force, and the Chief of Naval Operations. The Commandant of the Marine Corps was not listed and therefore could not be the chairman. Wilson asked for a ruling from Secretary of Defense Harold Brown regarding that issue. The Commandant threatened to go to Congress to get that resolved. Secretary Brown ruled in favor of the Marine Corps position. Finally, the Commandant was ruled a full-fledged JCS member.38 Wilson’s Washington success eventually paid short and long-term dividends to the Marine Corps.39 In April 1979, President Jimmy Carter nominated Gen Robert H. Barrow to serve as Commandant of the Marine Corps and the first Marine to serve on the JCS for four years. Two months before Wilson died in 2005, President George W. Bush nominated Gen Peter Pace to become the first Marine to serve as chairman of the JCS. From 2001–2005, Pace held the post of vice-chairman of the JCS. Pace was also the first Marine to serve in that role. President Bush also named Gen James L. Jones to serve as United States European Command and Supreme Allied Commander Europe. As of 2025, Gen Jones is the lone Marine to hold that position. By 1981, veterans of the Army, Navy, and Air Force served as president of the United States.40 No Marine was ever elected president or vice president until the 250th year of the Marine Corps, when Ohio Republican Senator JD Vance became the first Marine to serve as vice president. 

>Mr. Mesches is the author of The Flying Grunt, the Story of Lieutenant General Richard E. Carey, United States Marine Corps, (Ret) and Major General James A. Ulio, How the Adjutant General of the U.S. Army Enabled Allied Victory. An Air Force veteran, he served as a Public Information Officer with the 4th Tactical Fighter Wing, Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, NC, between 1972 and 1975.  He is a graduate of Grove City College and the Defense Information Officers School (now Public Affairs Qualification Course).

Notes

1. R.D. Heinl, “The Cat with More Than Nine Lives,” Proceedings 80, No. 6, (1954), https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1954/june/cat-more-nine-lives.

2. Ibid. 

3. Rhapsodyinbooks, “July 25, 1866–Ulysses S. Grant Becomes the First Four-Star General in U.S. History,” Legal Legecy, July 25, 2017, https://legallegacy.wordpress.com/2017/07/25/july-25-1866-ulysses-s-grant-becomes-the-first-four-star-general-in-u-s-history; and Staff, “David Glasgow Farragut,” Naval History and Heritage Command, n.d., https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/people/historical-figures/david-glasgow-farragut.html. 

4. “The Cat with More Than Nine Lives.”

5. Staff, “President Taft Restores Marines on Board Ships,” Sacramento Daily Union, March 27, 1909.

6. Glenn M. Harned, Marine Corps Generals 1899–1936 (North Charleston: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2024).

7. Moseley Correspondence, DDEPre-l File Box 84, Moseley File.pdf, from the Eisenhower Presidential Library.

8. Staff, “The Marine Corps, An Essential, Integral Element of the Naval Service,’ Statement to the House Select Committee on Postwar Policy,” published in The Marine Corps Gazette 78, No. 6 (1994).

9. Alexander A. Vandegrift, “Bended Knee Speech,” (speech, Washington, DC, May 6, 1946).

10. Associated Press, “‘Ike See U.S. Pacific bases hinging on UN,” The Atlanta Journal, May 11, 1946.

11. Alan Rems, “A Propaganda Machine Like Stalin’s,” U.S. Naval Institute, June 2019, https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2019/june/propaganda-machine-stalins.

12. Si Biggs, “The USMC on D Day,” Royal Marines History, June 4, 2024, https://www.royalmarineshistory.com/post/usmc-on-d-day. 

13. Moseley Correspondence, 31-hhpp-ic-b156-1 partial, pdf, Hoover Presidential Library.

14. Moseley Correspondence, DDEPre-l File Box 84, Moseley File.pdf, from the Eisenhower Presidential Library.

15. Courchaine Correspondence, DDEPre-File Box 19, Coury-Courtn. (Misc.) File. Pdf, Eisenhower Presidential Library.

16. Nathan Parker, “Congress and the Marine, an Enduring Partnership,” MCU Journal 8, No. 2 (2017).

17. “A Propaganda Machine Like Stalin’s.”

18. Staff, “Letters to the Commandant of the Marine Corps League and to the Commandant of the Marine Corps,” Harry S. Truman Library Museum, September 6, 1950, https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/public-papers/235/letters-commandant-marine-corps-league-and-commandant-marine-corps.

19. Email between author and Col Warren Wiedhan on August 17, 2024.

20. “Letters to the Commandant of the Marine Corps League and to the Commandant of the Marine Corps.”

21. Email between author and James Zobel, MacArthur Memorial, on March 5, 2025.

22. Statement of the Honorable Mike Mansfield,” Series 1, Box 11, Folder 3, Mike Mansfield Papers, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana.

23. Marine Corps Personnel Strength Act of 1952: Hearings on S. 677, Days 1, 2, 3, Before the Subcomm. On Armed Services , 82nd Cong. (1951). 

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid. 

26. Marine Corps Personnel Strength Act of 1952, Pub. L. 461, 61 Stat. 502 (1952).

27. John Jarrell, “Ike To Get Less Than He Wants,” Omaha World Telegram, May 4, 1958.

28. Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1958, H.R. 12541, 85th Cong. (1958).

29. Oral History Transcript, General Louis H. Wilson, United States Marine Corps (Ret), History Division, United States Marine Corps, Quantico, VA, 2008.

30. S. Sanderson and M. Yordy, “The Sky is Not the Limit for this Marine,” Frisco Lakes Lifestyle, July 2023.

31. Senator Sam Nunn was the great nephew of Representative Carl Vinson, long-time chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

32. Oral History Transcript, General Louis H. Wilson, United States Marine Corps (Ret), History Division, United States Marine Corps, Quantico, VA, 2008.

33. Speeches, Defense, 1978, Dewey F. Bartlett Collection, CAC_CC_003_4_46_7_0000, Carl Albert Center Congressional and Political Collections, https://arc.ou.edu/repositories/3/archival_objects/5499.

34. Oral History Transcript, General Louis H. Wilson, United States Marine Corps (Ret), by Brigadier General Edwin Simmons, 1975, 1976, 1977, and 1978. History Division, United States Marine Corps, Quantico, VA. Accessed January 19, 2025. 

35. Col Robert D. Heinl, Jr., “Marines March to the Top,” The Arizona Republic, August 11, 1978.

36. Ted Bell “Top Marine Pushes Attack Capability,” by The Sacramento Bee, August 1, 1978.

37. Email from Brigadier General Albert E. Brewster to the author, December 13, 2023.

38. Oral History Transcript, General Louis H. Wilson, United States Marine Corps (Ret), by Brigadier General Edwin Simmons, 1975, 1976, 1977, and 1978. History Division, United States Marine Corps, Quantico, VA. Accessed January 19, 2025.

39. Oral History Transcript, General Louis H. Wilson, United States Marine Corps (Ret), by Brigadier General Edwin Simmons, 1975, 1976, 1977, and 1978. History Division, United States Marine Corps, Quantico, VA. Accessed January 19, 2025. 

40. Presidents by Service: Army—Presidents George Washington, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley,Theodore Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Navy—Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush. Air Force—Ronald W. Reagan served in the Army Air Force, and George W. Bush served in the Air National Guard. These presidents served state militias: Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James K. Polk, Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln, and Chester A. Arthur. Vice Presidents who served in the military and did not become president:  Aaron Burr (Army), George Clinton (militia), Richard M. Johnson (militia), Henry Wilson (Army), Charles G. Dawes (Army), Spiro T. Agnew (Army), Walter Mondale (Army), Dan Quayle (National Guard), Al Gore (Army-only president or vice president to serve in Vietnam).


Forward, Flexible, Formidable, and Relevant

Today’s Amphibious Ready Group/Marine Expeditionary Unit

Since its inception, the MEU has embarked on an Amphibious Ready Group (ARG) and continues to serve as the preeminent example of the contribution of the Navy-Marine Corps Team to national security. An inherently versatile, agile, and persistent formation, the ARG/MEU is the most responsive and flexible expeditionary power projection option the Navy and Marine Corps can provide the Joint Force. As the Nation’s premier forward-deployed crisis response force, ARG/MEUs provide scalable and rapidly responsive modern combat power in competition, crisis, and contingency, all from sovereign, afloat U.S. territory. As great-power competition, rapid technological change, and instability in the global littorals threaten U.S. interests at home and abroad, the ARG/MEU offers the right tool for the Joint Force during highly complex and dangerous times, following in the footsteps of its highly successful predecessors and bridging to future emerging capabilities as the character of war rapidly changes. This article explains how the current ARG/MEU contributes to homeland defense, deters Chinese coercion, and enables effective burden-sharing among our allies and partners. 

The Strategic Environment
Today’s strategic environment poses multiple threats and demands a correspondingly diverse range of solutions for national leaders. Most acutely and for the foreseeable future, China presents a pervasive danger. The Chinese Communist Party’s military modernization, coercive behavior in Southeast Asia, and expansion of overseas military infrastructure threaten U.S., ally, and partner security and prosperity throughout the Indo-Pacific region. China also presents an increasingly global threat. Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative has laid the framework for China to project force not just throughout Asia but across the sea to Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. Such efforts are designed to challenge U.S. interests globally and at multiple levels. For example, China’s vast illegal fishing vessels operate throughout the Indo-Pacific and as far as South America and Africa, including recently engaging in violent confrontation with the Argentinian military. These gray-zone activities are used to influence and control vulnerable nations through coercion and demand a U.S. presence to counter. 

As the United States addresses the Chinese Communist Party’s military ambitions, it cannot ignore other threats to U.S. security. Russia’s continued pursuit of its war of aggression in Ukraine underscores its willingness to recklessly undermine European security, including ignoring international borders and indiscriminately attacking civilians. North Korea remains a persistent threat to allies, partners, and the U.S. homeland. In the Middle East, Iranian support of terrorist organizations and proxy groups endangers freedom of commerce in global maritime chokepoints as well as the safety of our citizens and those of our allies and partners. Meanwhile, terrorist groups—some with the capability and intent to attack the United States—destabilize key terrain in multiple regions. 

The proliferation of advanced weapons systems further complicates these regional threats, lowering the bar for entry into modern lethality. Long-range precision weapons, including unmanned systems, expose easily identifiable landbased facilities to new and frequently asymmetric dangers. Cyber and open-source data collection make it increasingly difficult to conceal forces or strike with impunity. 

Agile, Responsive, and Modern
The MAGTF construct, with the organic maritime mobility and sustainment offered by amphibious warfare ships, and the increased lethality provided to our Marines by Force Design, meaningfully meets the demands of our challenging operating environment. Optimized for rapid operational maneuver, versatile employment, and self-sustainment, ARG/MEUs offer a balanced and scalable combined-arms formation that can easily integrate with or support other joint formations. 

The Marine Corps has a Title 10 responsibility to man, train, and equip its forces to fulfill the requirements of combatant commanders. Consistent among these requirements has been the demand signal for continuous ARG/MEU presence. A 3.0 ARG/MEU—
defined as heel-to-toe deployments from the East and West Coast and regular patrols by forward-deployed Naval forces in Japan—is the first step toward meeting the combatant commanders registered, Joint Staff-validated requirements for a 5.0 presence. 

The three-ship ARG provides the optimal structure for the full MEU mission set needed to meet these demands. Embarked on a three-ship ARG, a MEU is a self-sustaining MAGTF that provides the Joint Force with a formation that can conduct unilateral operations across the full range of military operations. Able to move rapidly to and loiter near theater hot spots, these inherently multi-domain formations offer national leadership a full array of sovereign options, including expeditionary strike, sea denial, seizure of advanced naval bases, raids, embassy reinforcement, and non-combatant evacuations. Unlike landbased or rapid-response formations reliant on strategic air mobility, an ARG/MEU operates with reduced requirements for logistical support and access, basing, and overflight. 

The ARG/MEUs can also serve as a force multiplier or provide additional capacity for missions that have, in recent years, been tasked to special operations forces (SOF), including strikes, raids, and non-combatant evacuation. The ARG/MEUs possess the capability to handle conventional crisis response tasks, reducing the burden on SOF. Additionally, the ARG/MEU employs unique capabilities to enhance SOF operations, including long-range sensing and strike, all from an over-the-horizon platform not reliant on access, basing, and overflight. 

Today’s ARG/MEUs benefit from recent modernization, deploying to the joint and combined battlefield with multi-domain sensing and reconnaissance, fifth-generation aircraft, long-range precision fires, and a range of unmanned and counter-unmanned systems. They enable Joint Force operations through advanced command and control and embedded intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and can conduct strikes into contested environments. A force always on patrol, they are experts at enabling the advanced joint systems and those of our most capable U.S. allies and partners, including nations in NATO, Australia, and East Asia. Such interoperability aligns with current strategic guidance stressing burden-sharing with allies and partners, a framework in which the United States will commit only critical but limited resources to lower-priority regions. 

Most importantly, ARG/MEUs serve as the leading edge of larger MAGTFs. They can reach back to the growing lethality of their parent MEFs or laterally within the MAGTF to the unique capabilities of the Marine Littoral Regiments. So, although ARG/MEUs operate forward, they leverage the full weight of the MEFs as a crisis builds toward conflict. This combination takes a modern and aggressive approach to winning in the littorals. Linking its ship-to-shore capabilities, long-range sensing and fires, and organic aviation with other weapons and sensors designed for denial, the ARG/MEU can impose dilemmas on adversaries seeking to set the theater against the Joint Force or dominate the maritime commons and increase the resolve of allies and partners that can share regional security burdens. The ARG/MEU could enable Joint Force operations against lower-tier threats or steal a march on a peer threat escalating toward conflict and set the theater for larger, more strategic lift-dependent, decisive operations. In economic warfare, this could include controlling key maritime chokepoints, holding at risk adversary forces, and commerce. Overall, only the ARG/MEU can offer the Joint Force this same degree of mobility, sustainment, and range of capabilities.

The ARG/MEU in Action
In recent years, the ARG/MEU has demonstrated the relevance of its inherent advantages and new capabilities, most prominently in the Indo-Pacific. From the 31st MEU’s amphibious operations in the Solomon Islands to the 15th MEU’s use of the Amphibious Combat Vehicle and cooperation with the Australian Army, to the 13th MEU’s integration of sensing from expeditionary advanced bases in the Philippines, the MEU has implemented the logic of Force Design using existing platforms and capabilities. The 13th MEU also projected sensing expeditionary advanced bases on four occasions, demonstrating an enhanced MEU mission, born from Force Design. 

The impact of the ARG/MEU in the Indo-Pacific has gone beyond modernization to include dramatic gains in interoperability with the Joint Force and key allies and partners. The ARG/MEUs in the Indo-Pacific regularly lead efforts to develop MAGTFs into a potent joint and combined enabler, detecting threats and passing targeting data from any sensor to any shooter, all while incorporating the capabilities of our allies and partners. During recent exercises like KAMANDAG, BALIKATAN, TALISMAN SABER, and IRON FIST, ARG/MEUs rehearsed coalition operations, clearly demonstrating the interoperability needed to deter aggression by China. In 2023, the USS America ARG and the 31st MEU participated in TALISMAN SABER, embarking troops from Australia, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, and the UK before rapidly responding to a disaster relief mission after the eruption of Mount Bagana in Papua New Guinea. In 2024, the USS Boxer ARG and the 15th MEU exercised with the Republic of Korea, the Philippines, and Japan, on the doorstep of China’s anti-access/area- denial systems. This ARG/MEU also integrated the USS Miguel Keith Expeditionary Support Base into MEU exercises and assisted in the disaster response following Typhoon Krathon in the Philippines, providing aid to remote locations throughout the archipelago. This year, the 31st MEU is afloat again operating in the Coral Sea. 

The impact of the ARG/MEU expands beyond the Indo-Pacific. During the Gaza and Iran contingencies, the 26th MEU provided crisis response options in the CENTCOM area of responsibility. Earlier, the 24th MEU supported Sixth Fleet maritime operations and was postured for non-combatant evacuation operations during the Israel-Lebanon conflict. In EUCOM, ARG/MEUs provide the fleet commander with a purpose-built capability designed to respond to crises across multiple combatant commands through maritime, multidomain reconnaissance constructs and activities. In 2022, Exercise NORTHERN VIKING integrated Marines and sailors from the USS Kearsarge ARG and 22nd MEU, the 22nd Naval Construction Regiment, and Navy P-8 Poseidon aircraft, with German, Norwegian, and French warships, United Kingdom Royal Marines, and the Icelandic Coast Guard into a coherent and capable unit. Exercises like these enable burden sharing by ensuring interoperability with our most willing and capable security partners. 

The ARG/MEUs also provide key capabilities to the Joint Force during times of crisis. In 2017, the 11th MEU provided its artillery unit to support SOF in Syria during Operation INHERENT RESOLVE, firing more rounds in combat than any other U.S. artillery unit since the Vietnam War. In 2020 and 2021, the 15th MEU and the USS Makin Island ARG executed amphibious withdrawals to reposition U.S. forces around Somalia while maintaining pressure on violent extremists and enabling partnered forces as part of Operation OCTAVE QUARTZ. And as recently as August of this year, the 22nd MEU supported forward homeland defense operations in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility, showing the significant operational flexibility of this formation. The ARG/MEUs afloat also provide multi-domain sensing operations in support of the Joint Force through its intelligence enablers and embarked reconnaissance capabilities which are frequently employed to capacity while underway. These examples not only demonstrate the agility and capability of the ARG/MEU but also its unique value proposition: a flexible forward-deployed force, operationally relevant, with multi-domain capabilities. 

An Effective MEU Needs a Ready ARG
Today, a shortage of ready amphibious warfare ships precludes achieving the needed 3.0 ARG/MEU presence. In response, the Marine Corps has employed Special Purpose MAGTFs to fill the resulting gaps. While better than having no force available, this is a sub-optimal solution: lacking organic mobility and sustainment, and the flexibility of acting from a sovereign naval platform without the need for access, basing, or overflight permissions. This loss of mobility requires the MEU to use other Joint Force options and places additional stress on already limited strategic airlift assets. Finally, to be a true replacement for the MEU, an Special Purpose MAGTF requires additional resources to compensate for the loss of naval command and control systems—resources that are already in short supply and high demand for other military operations. 

Both the Navy and the defense industrial base have struggled in recent years to maintain AWS readiness and capacity. Today, leaders from both the Executive and Legislative branches recognize the national security risk of our dilapidated domestic maritime industrial base. Congress continually recognizes the need for AWS construction, and the President’s Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance Executive Order seeks to address shortfalls in commercial and military shipbuilding. Additionally, the bipartisan SHIPS Act, currently working its way through Congress, seeks to address maritime shipping shortfalls. The issues affecting our Nation’s maritime industrial base and the Navy’s maintenance, repair, and overhaul enterprise will not be fixed overnight. Greater long-term investment in AWS, in terms of both new construction and maintenance, would expand leaders’ options for employing MEUs to advance national interests while providing a reinvigorated energy to the American manufacturing sector.

Ready in Hours—Not Days
An ARG/MEU on patrol around the world is the ultimate expression of the Navy/Marine Corps Team and the global reach of U.S. military power. When disaster strikes or conflict brews, Marines must mobilize within hours—not days. From humanitarian assistance in the Philippines, to contingency response in the Eastern Mediterranean, to homeland defense operations in the Caribbean, the ARG/MEU remains the Joint Force’s premier crisis response force: America’s 911 Force. Whether operating independently or as part of an integrated naval expeditionary force, the MEU provides our national leadership and combatant commanders with scalable, mission-tailored, and combat credible forces that are persistently on-scene and contribute to deterrence, crisis response, power projection, and combat operations.

Amphibious forces are multi-domain by nature. We organize at every level for combined arms, fully integrating capabilities in such a way that if the enemy attempts to counteract one, they leave themselves vulnerable to another. Because of their inherent and unique versatility, flexibility, and speed, wherever amphibious forces go, they introduce uncertainty into the calculus of our adversary. We must continue to invest in amphibious capability to ensure consistent deployment of ARG/MEUs, a time-tested asset vital to national security. In competition and conflict alike, the ARG/MEU on amphibious ships remains first to fight—because when the Nation needs a flexible, lethal force in readiness, there is no substitute.

Decision-Advantage

The case for Marine Corps ISR enterprise transformation

The Marine Corps stands at a pivotal crossroads, a moment of profound transformation that will define its relevance and effectiveness in the 21st century. As the Service reorients to its naval roots, this shift is not driven by nostalgia but by the pressing demands of a changing strategic landscape. The challenge of great-power competition, particularly in the vast and dynamic Indo-Pacific region, necessitates a Marine Corps that is agile, lethal, and capable of thriving in contested environments. Through the foundational concepts of Force Design and Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations, the Marine Corps envisions stand-in forces that are maneuverable, low-signature, and persistently positioned within an adversary’s weapons engagement zone. These forces are not expeditionary in the traditional sense; they are designed to operate as the Nation’s premier crisis response force in the most contested environments on Earth. 

These stand-in forces will serve as the linchpin for the Joint Force, providing a forward-deployed, combat-credible presence that creates opportunities for sea control and sea denial. By imposing dilemmas on adversaries, they will shape the operational environment before conflict begins. However, this ambitious strategy hinges on one essential capability: decision advantage. 

In the fast-paced, information-saturated environment of modern warfare, the ability to out-see, out-think, and out-maneuver an adversary is decisive. To achieve this, the Commandant of the Marine Corps has set a bold vision: the Marine Corps will become the “JTAC [Joint Terminal Attack Controller] of the Joint Force.” This transformation positions the Service as a distributed, all-domain sensor network capable of finding, fixing, and enabling the targeting of enemy forces across vast distances. Imagine a small team of Marines dispersed across a remote island chain, detecting an enemy surface group and relaying targeting data to a submerged Navy Virginia-class submarine, enabling a stealthy, long-range Tomahawk missile strike. Picture another Marine element identifying a critical enemy command and control node, then cueing a cyber operator to conduct a non-kinetic attack. This is the future of combined arms—a seamlessly integrated joint force capable of delivering effects from any domain, at any time, in any place.

Success in this expanded role is not optional; it is essential for the survival of Marine Corps forces and the Joint Force’s ability to prevail. Achieving decision advantage requires a fundamental shift in the Service’s institutional mindset. Intelligence must evolve from a supporting effort to a prioritized warfighting function, driving operations and decisions at every level. The Marine Corps Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Enterprise (MCISRE) must lead this transformation, transitioning from a provider of information to the enabler of decision advantage. This is not merely a call for incremental improvement or bureaucratic reshuffling; it is a mandate for aggressive and decisive change. 

Part I: The Unforgiving Battlefield
The era of uncontested American military dominance is over. For decades, adversaries have studied U.S. methods, identifying vulnerabilities, and designing their forces to exploit them. They aim not to meet the United States head-on in a symmetric fight but to dismantle the American way of war by targeting its reliance on information, extended logistics, and decision-making processes. 

Modern battlefields are global and multi-domain, with no front lines or secure rear areas. Adversaries will wage persistent campaigns to induce paralysis and confusion, achieving their objectives before U.S. combat power can be effectively employed. This strategy, an all-domain ambush, attacks U.S. forces across every vector.

In the space domain, adversaries have demonstrated their ability to disrupt U.S. capabilities. China’s 2007 anti-satellite weapon test highlighted the vulnerability of GPS satellites, which underpin U.S. precision navigation and munitions. Adversaries are developing counter-space capabilities, including directed energy weapons and co-orbital jammers, to blind U.S. forces at critical moments.

In the cyber and electromagnetic domains, adversaries will target networks and infrastructure to disrupt deployments and logistics. The war in Ukraine has underscored the contested nature of the electromagnetic spectrum, with both sides adapting tactics and technologies to survive and operate. Rapidly closing kill chains by fusing intelligence from multiple sources has proven decisive.

In the information environment, adversaries are waging sophisticated disinformation campaigns to manipulate public opinion and undermine political will. These efforts exploit societal divisions, creating friction that can derail operations.

The pacing threat, China, is constructing a military meticulously designed to deny U.S. forces access to the fight and achieve its objectives without resorting to a traditional conflict. Their doctrine of Systems Destruction Warfare is a blueprint for inducing strategic paralysis. The goal is not just to sink a ship; it is to make a U.S. Navy admiral hesitate even to enter a contested sea. This doctrine is backed by a vast and multi-layered anti-access/area-denial network, an arsenal of long-range ballistic and cruise missiles, hypersonic weapons, and sophisticated sensors, all networked to contest and threaten U.S. ships, aircraft, and bases at unprecedented ranges. This military expansion is supercharged by a national strategy of Military-Civil Fusion, which creates a technological development cycle that threatens to outpace America’s innovation cycle. This hard power is coupled with a gray-zone strategy of coercion, using their maritime militia to enforce illegal territorial claims through persistent, aggressive action that stops just short of conventional war. 

Meanwhile, the persistent threat, Russia, continues to refine its playbook of New Generation Warfare, a doctrine for creating chaos and dismantling a state from within. We witnessed its brutal application in the seizure of Crimea and see its continued evolution in the ongoing war in Ukraine. They skillfully combine electronic warfare, cyberattacks, deniable special forces, and political subversion to create a state of perpetual instability. Russia, guided by Chekist principles, considers the United States as the “main enemy” and is determined to undermine American influence globally. Russia has elevated the art of weaponizing confusion, significantly expanding the opaque fog of war. 

Part II: An Honest Self-Assessment
A warfighting organization’s greatest strength lies not in its technology or doctrine, but in its ability to adapt swiftly to the changing character of war. The MCISRE is staffed by dedicated, intelligent, and patriotic Marines who are committed to the mission. However, they are constrained by a structure, culture, and set of processes that were designed for a different era. To achieve decision advantage and maintain operational relevance, the Marine Corps must critically examine itself and address four interconnected challenges with clarity and resolve.

The first challenge is the Marine Corps’ ability to sense in close and mid-range environments. To fulfill their role as the JTAC of the Joint Force, Marines must first understand their targets—their strengths, vulnerabilities, and the environment in which they operate. The current sensor architecture lacks the extended range, resilience, and persistence required for contested environments. The reliance on a limited number of high-demand, low-density ISR platforms has created vulnerabilities, as evidenced by the recently acknowledged “drone gap.” The divestment of organic platforms, such as the RQ-21 Blackjack, has left tactical units with critical ISR shortfalls, forcing them to rely on contractor-operated systems—a dependency that adversaries could exploit during a crisis. Stand-in forces, the centerpiece of the Marine Corps’ future warfighting concept, must be equipped with organic, low-signature tools to sense their environment without becoming electronic beacons for enemy targeting systems.

The second challenge is the MCISRE’s ability to transform data into actionable intelligence. On the modern battlefield, opportunities are fleeting. A mobile missile launcher may only be vulnerable for minutes. If the Processing, Exploitation, and Dissemination cycle takes hours, the opportunity is lost. This is not merely an intelligence shortfall; it is a mission failure for the Joint Force. Currently, analysts are forced to manually sift through vast amounts of data on disconnected, outdated systems, which limits their ability to produce timely insights. The MCISRE must modernize its tools and processes to turn raw data into actionable intelligence at the speed of relevance. Data that does not inform a decision is merely noise, and in combat, noise creates confusion and risks lives. Expanding efforts to integrate intelligence capabilities globally and equipping analysts with tools that can aggregate and correlate disparate data will be essential to producing opportunities for decisive action against adversaries. 

The third challenge is the Marine Corps’ reliance on industrial-age training and manpower practices while trying to prepare for information-age warfare. This persistence reflects some of the Service’s most valued traits—loyalty and resistance to compromise—but also highlights vulnerabilities as the Corps reorients toward great-power competition. The mind of a Marine is the Corps’ greatest weapon. Yet, the deeply ingrained Taylorism of the personnel system impedes the growth and retention of top talent. Intelligence Marines are not interchangeable parts, and a loss of an experienced analyst cannot be offset by a recruit fresh from training. When a tech company offers a brilliant young corporal triple the salary to do the work he loves, the Corps loses not just a Marine but a critical warfighting capability that cannot be easily replaced. The Marine Corps’ Talent Management 2030 initiative acknowledges that the system is overdue for a fundamental redesign. Recognizing the evolving role of technical specialists is vital. In the 21st century, the Marine operating a keyboard to counter enemy networks in cyberspace plays a role as critical to mission success as the Marine on the front lines. Cultivating career paths and talent management processes that reward and retain our intelligence experts will ensure they feel as valued as proven combat leaders. 

The fourth and final challenge is a modernization gap that places Marine forces at risk. The MCISRE has a key role in ensuring that our force development process equips Marines with capabilities required to meet the challenges of future conflicts, rather than focusing solely on incremental improvements to legacy systems. This raises an important question: Is the Marine Corps building the force for the war it will face, or is it polishing a relic of the past? Institutional processes for developing warfighting concepts must be continuously informed by intelligence about adversary capabilities. Without this, the Marine Corps risks designing solutions for yesterday’s problems. Additionally, assumptions about future conflict must be rigorously tested. New systems should be validated against thinking, uncooperative red teams that employ tactics and technologies reflective of real-world adversaries. A reactive approach to modernization, where countermeasures are developed only after adversaries exploit vulnerabilities, locks the Marine Corps in a perpetual cycle of playing catch-up. A force that fails to modernize based on a clear-eyed assessment of the threat is not modernizing at all—it is preparing for defeat.

A Call to Action: Forging a Decision-Centric Culture
The history of the Marine Corps is one of adaptation and triumph in the face of overwhelming odds. From the island-hopping campaigns of World War II to the counterinsurgency operations of the 21st century, the Marine Corps has consistently demonstrated its ability to evolve and overcome. Today, the transformation of the intelligence enterprise is not merely a bureaucratic initiative—it is a strategic imperative that will define the Marine Corps’ ability to prevail in future conflicts. This transformation is not the responsibility of a distant headquarters or a faceless bureaucracy; it is a collective effort that begins now, with every Marine.

To overcome the challenges outlined in this article, the MCISRE must lead the charge with bold and decisive action. Addressing the sensing dilemma requires the development of a resilient, multi-layered architecture of organic and national sensors that stand-in forces can employ with a low signature. These sensors must be capable of operating persistently in contested environments, providing Marines with the situational awareness they need to survive and thrive. This effort will require not only technological innovation but also a cultural shift that prioritizes sensing as a core warfighting capability.

Achieving sense-making at the speed of relevance demands equipping analysts with modern, AI-enabled tools that automate data processing and enable predictive intelligence. These tools must be designed to integrate seamlessly with existing systems, allowing analysts to focus on producing actionable insights rather than wrestling with outdated technology. The Marine Corps must also invest in training programs that prepare intelligence professionals to effectively leverage these tools, ensuring they are equipped to meet the demands of information-age warfare.

Winning the war for talent necessitates a fundamental rethinking of the Marine Corps’ approach to personnel management. Intelligence Marines are not interchangeable parts; their expertise is a critical warfighting capability that must be cultivated and retained. The Marine Corps must establish viable career paths for intelligence professionals, providing them with opportunities for advancement and recognition that reflect the significance of their contributions. This effort must be supported by a broader cultural shift that values technical specialists as integral members of the warfighting team, on par with proven combat leaders.

Closing the modernization gap requires embedding intelligence professionals and a red-teaming mindset at every stage of the force development process. New capabilities must be designed from the start to overmatch the threats Marines will face, rather than being validated against static requirements. This approach will require a willingness to challenge assumptions and embrace innovation, ensuring the Marine Corps remains one step ahead of its adversaries.

The stakes could not be higher. The character of war has changed, and the Marine Corps must adapt more intelligently and aggressively than its adversaries. The race for decision advantage has already begun, and it is a contest the Marine Corps cannot afford to lose. This transformation will not happen overnight, nor will it be easy. But with the dedication, ingenuity, and fighting spirit that have defined the Marine Corps for generations, it is a contest the Marine Corps will win.

>Ms. Schwendeman is an Intelligence Specialist in the Intelligence Integration Branch, Intelligence Division, under the Deputy Commandant for Information at Headquarters Marine Corps. She has supported the Marine Corps since 2010, first as a contractor and now as a civilian Marine. Before joining the Marine Corps, she served as an Intelligence Analyst in the Army from 2003 to 2010, where she supported operations in Iraq. She holds a Master’s Degree in Intelligence Studies.

Sensing in the Shadows

Integrating autonomous and human intelligence for decision superiority in the Pacific

Modernizing Intelligence for Distributed Littoral Operations
In April 2023, in response to former U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s 24-hour visit to Taiwan on 2 August 2022, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) conducted a large multi-domain military exercise near Taiwan, simulating a “joint firepower strike campaign” that integrated long-range rocket artillery, unmanned aerial vehicle reconnaissance, electronic warfare, and space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). Chinese military officials emphasized compressing the sensor-to-shooter timeline to neutralize the enemy’s response before maneuver. The exercise revealed more than strategic signaling; the drills demonstrated a maturing strike architecture designed for contested littoral terrain. Without faster detection, assessment, and action, Marine Corps units operating forward risk being neutralized before engagement.1

To maintain forward presence and decision advantage in such an environment, intelligence professionals must reassess how they support maneuver forces. Force Design 2030 compels Marine Corps intelligence professionals to reconsider operational methods in the Indo-Pacific’s maritime battlespace. The environment—defined by long-range precision fires, persistent ISR coverage, and a rapidly evolving adversary kill chain—has rendered legacy intelligence models obsolete. Decision superiority requires integrating autonomous ISR platforms and human-derived reporting within a low-signature, real-time network optimized for distributed maritime operations.2

Adversary Targeting and the Operational Mandate
China’s PLA has developed a reconnaissance-strike complex rooted in the concept of “informatized warfare,” which prioritizes identifying, fixing, and engaging targets more quickly than adversaries can respond.3 The PLA employs space-based sensors, coastal radar arrays, cyber and electronic warfare units, and unmanned systems across all domains. Each capability reinforces a doctrine designed to paralyze opponents through persistent surveillance and precision engagement, rather than attrition.4

Marine forces operating within the first and second island chains now face a threat that challenges traditional maneuver. Force Design 2030 directs Marines to persist in contested maritime spaces and to sense, assess, and act in real-time while minimizing exposure to detection.5 Intelligence structures that rely on slow processing, hierarchical workflows, or bandwidth-heavy systems no longer provide a responsive or survivable foundation for operational decision-making.

Fusion at the Tactical Edge
Autonomous ISR platforms—such as long-endurance drones, loitering munitions, and seabed sensors—now deliver capabilities once reserved for national-level assets. Many operate with onboard AI, autonomously detecting, classifying, and prioritizing maritime targets. Intelligence Marines at the tactical edge fuse machine-generated data with human-sourced inputs—such as coastal reconnaissance updates or partner force reporting—and augment them with open-source intelligence. Commercial tools like synthetic aperture radar and Automatic Identification System vessel tracking enable Marines to monitor maritime activity without relying on national tasking cycles or bandwidth-intensive systems. Chinese analysts have tracked U.S. Navy surface combatants using free satellite imagery and wake analysis alone.6 Open-source Automatic Identification System feeds have also revealed the Chinese research vessel Zhu Hai Yun operating within 24 nautical miles of Taiwan’s east coast.7 In contested littoral environments where Marines often operate without persistent SATCOM or responsive access to classified systems, fusing autonomous sensors with open-source intelligence allows forward units to build decision-quality situational awareness and act independently within the commander’s intent.

For example, a Marine littoral regiment conducting island-based surveillance in Luzon might integrate commercial satellite imagery, signals intercepts from unmanned surface vessels, and local reporting from partner forces to develop a near-real-time maritime picture. The resulting fused intelligence can cue fires or prompt asset repositioning—all without higher headquarters intervention.

The war in Ukraine provides instructive evidence. Ukrainian forces used commercial drones, open-source tools, and mobile apps to close the sensor-to-shooter loop.8 Improvisation and decentralization enabled responsive targeting against a more heavily resourced opponent. Pre-dating Ukraine, Azerbaijani forces in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict similarly leveraged ISR and loitering munitions to dismantle conventional formations, demonstrating that technological asymmetry, when paired with adaptive operators and mission command, can offset material inferiority. 9

Marine littoral regiments, as envisioned under Force Design 2030, require the fusion of autonomous ISR data with human-derived reporting to generate timely, actionable intelligence at the tactical edge. Tactical survivability and effectiveness in the Indo-Pacific depend on operating as semi-autonomous nodes within an integrated sensing and fires network. Intelligence sections must synthesize inputs from unmanned platforms, signal intercepts, and field observations into immediate tactical insight, independent of higher headquarters. Commanders must train Marines at the lowest echelons to operate as autonomous intelligence cells—fully empowered to support fires and maneuver without delay or dependency.

Signature Management as a Condition of Operations
Detection provides little advantage if it compromises the sensor’s survivability or cannot be acted upon rapidly and securely. A Concept for Stand-In Forces emphasizes that forward elements must extend the Joint Force’s reach while avoiding detection and classification.10 To remain survivable and effective in contested environments, intelligence elements must adopt low-signature sensing, passive collection, burst-transmission protocols, and electronic deception as routine features of the collection cycle.

Intelligence planners must design and employ autonomous systems with electromagnetic discipline. Operational value depends not only on what a platform can detect, but on whether it can do so without emitting a detectable signature or degrading friendly operations. Collection teams must train for communications-denied environments by mastering concealment, terrain masking, route selection, and sensor camouflage. Electromagnetic silence must become the tactical default—not the exception. Intelligence frameworks must abandon assumptions of persistent, high-bandwidth network access and instead prioritize survivability, latency management, and deception.

 

From Innovation to Doctrine
Marine Corps modernization must link technological development with doctrinal reform. While Force Design 2030 and the Stand-In Forces concept both emphasize decentralized execution and forward ISR capability, the current doctrine does not yet fully account for sensor saturation, cognitive overload, or the role of artificial intelligence in shaping battlefield awareness. Marine Corps doctrine affirms that intelligence is inseparable from operations—not subordinate—but functioning as a coequal warfighting function.11 Modernization must redefine intelligence’s role in maneuver and operational decision making—not merely focus on acquiring ISR systems. Intelligence must maneuver—not in isolation but as a fully integrated force enabler capable of shaping tempo, anticipatory action, and lethal fires.

Modernizing intelligence requires pushing ISR capabilities below the battalion level and training Marines across all occupational fields to collect information, conduct basic analysis, and report in support of maneuver. Intelligence responsibilities must become standard battlefield functions rather than duties confined to the intelligence community. Without an updated doctrine that reflects decentralized execution, new ISR platforms and analytic tools risk being misused or sidelined. When operational concepts lag behind available capabilities, tactical units lack the structure for effective employment. Gaining and maintaining advantage in contested maritime environments demands a doctrine that treats ISR as integral to maneuver—a core combat function, not a supporting task.

Conclusion: Intelligence as Maneuver
Marine Corps intelligence modernization must reflect the operational realities of the Pacific theater—prolonged exposure to peer ISR, contested littorals, and degraded communications. Gaining decision advantage requires integrating autonomous platforms with human-derived reporting in ways optimized for speed, dispersion, and electromagnetic discipline. Procuring ISR systems without adjusting doctrine, force structure, or training pipelines will yield technical capacity without tactical consequence. Intelligence overmatch depends on institutional commitment to treating intelligence as maneuver—training Marines to collect, assess, and act at the tactical edge, with the doctrinal authority to do so at the point of need.

>Sgt McCue is an Intelligence Analyst in the Executive Support Section, Information Intelligence Division, Office of the Deputy Commandant for Information. He has supported operations in the CENTCOM and INDOPACOM theaters, including deployments with SPMAGTF-CR-CC 19.2, the 31st MEU, and a Joint Task Force in Iraq. He is currently completing a Bachelor of Science in Legal Studies. 

Notes

1. Kevin Kusumoto, “China Concludes Its Largest Military Drills Near Taiwan,” TRADOC G-2, October 10, 2024, https://oe.tradoc.army.mil/product/china-concludes-its-largest-military-drills-near-taiwan; and James E. Fanell, “China: Growing and Going to Sea,” Proceedings 149, No. 5 (2023), https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/may/china-growing-and-going-sea.

3. Gen. David H. Berger, Force Design 2030 Annual Update (Washington, DC: 2023), https://www.marines.mil/Portals/1/Docs/Force_Design_2030_Annual_Update_June_2023.pdf.

4. Kitsch Liao, “Informatized Wars: How China Thinks About Cyber,” American Enterprise Institute, March 15, 2022, https://www.aei.org/articles/informatized-wars-how-china-thinks-about-cyber/.

5. J. Michael Dahm, China C4ISR and Counter Intervention (Arlington: Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, March 2024), https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/2024-03/J.Michael_Dahm_Testimony.pdf.

6. Force Design 2030 Annual Update.

7. Christopher McFadden, “China Can Track U.S. Navy with Public Satellite Imagery,” Interesting Engineering, July 16, 2024, https://interestingengineering.com/military/china-tracks-us-navy-via-free-satellite-images.

8. Christina Lu, “Chinese research ships increase activity near Taiwan,” Financial Times, August 30, 2023, https://www.ft.com/content/0dfb94d7-e140-4d6c-97b9-18ec410d6a7c.

9. Harry Halem, “Ukraine’s Lessons for Future Combat: Unmanned Aerial Systems and Deep Strike,” Parameters 53, No. 4 (Winter 2023–24), https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss4/4/.

10. Shaan Shaikh and Wes Rumbaugh, “The Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict: Lessons for Future Warfare,” CSIS, December 8, 2020, https://www.csis.org/analysis/air-and-missile-war-nagorno-karabakh-lessons-future-strike-and-defense.

11. Headquarters Marine Corps, A Concept for Stand-In Forces (Washington, DC: 2021), cited in Force Design 2030 Annual Update.

12. Headquarters Marine Corps, MCDP 2, Intelligence (Washington, DC: April 2023). (Foreword by Gen. Charles C. Krulak, USMC (Ret.), dated June 7, 1997).

Mobilizing the Marine Corps

Why the Service is incapable of repeating June 1950

When the Korea People’s Army stormed across the 38th parallel on 25 June 1950, the Republic of Korea Army and the U.S. Far East Command were caught off guard. The Marine Corps’ rapid response in July 1950 and the 15 September 1950 landing at Inchon are the pinnacle of Marine Corps history and lore. However, the tactical and operational victories in late 1950 were the ends of the lesser-known but critically important ways and means of Service-wide mobilization. Today, the Service is consumed by a focus on tactical-level technologies, experimentation, and endless pursuit of operations, activities, and investments while being hamstrung by years-long acquisitions, delays in production, and structure design based on how many things purchased and not the enemy. If the Marine Corps does not plan for total mobilization, the next large-scale, unexpected enemy attack will result in the Corps weathering the initial storm, then looking over its shoulder and finding nothing there to carry on the fight.

Tactical technologies and tactical-level victories are for naught if not woven into operational objectives to achieve strategic ends. The fundamental concept of massing combat power more quickly than the enemy and applying that combat power at a time and place of your choosing is how conflicts are won. When the size of the force in the conflict is insufficient, the force that can rapidly flow and sustain the most combat power seizes the advantage. Throughout the history of warfare, this is done via mobilization, defined today as “the process by which the Armed Forces of the United States, or part of them, are brought to a state of readiness for war or other national emergency.”1 Often mistaken as the simple act of placing a reserve component (RC) Marine into an active-duty status, mobilization is in fact a whole-of-Service task tied to strategic and operational concepts and codified in the requirements of Title 10, U.S.C. §10208: Annual Mobilization Exercise.2 Unfortunately, the Marine Corps has lulled itself into the mistaken belief it is capable of mobilization because it has achieved battlefield successes over the last 85 years of modern conflict.

Marines with Golf Company, 2/24 Mar, 4th MarDiv, Marine Corps Forces Reserve, undergo a safety brief before a live-fire range event at Fort McCoy, WI, 21. (Photo by Cpl Maxwell Cook.)

The reality of the last 85 years is that the United States has delayed entry into every major conflict except one, the Korean War. World War II began in September 1939, with the United States not officially entering until December 1941. The U.S. involvement in Vietnam began in 1950 with advisors, the number expanding in 1962, with major combat actions not occurring until 1965. DESERT STORMsucceeded thanks to DESERT SHIELD, a five-month buildup of combat power that the enemy was kind enough to sit and observe. Finally, Operation IRAQI FREEDOM (OIF), authorized on 16 October 2002 via Congressional Joint Resolution, did not see combat operations commence until 20 March 2003.3 Each of these conflicts provided the Marine Corps with the benefit of time. Time to plan, build, and position forces to assure the successful commencement of combat operations. When the Marine Corps looks around the globe today, time is not a benefit. The United States’ competitors are positioned to strike quickly and with significant combat power. It is for this reason that the initial stages of the Korean War must be the priority case study if the Marine Corps wishes to wake from its mobilization slumber.

An assessment of June 1950 and today reveals many similarities throughout the Corps. The 1946–1950 drawdown saw active component (AC) end strength decrease from 155,592 to 74,279 (52 percent decrease).4 Current AC end strength has also decreased from 183,417 in 2015 to 172,300 (6 percent decrease) in 2024.5 The Marine Corps Organized Reserve (Ground and Air) of 1950 totaled 39,869 personnel, with the 2024 Selected Marine Corps Reserve (SMCR) end strength equaling 32,000 personnel.6 In both eras, military technologies entered a new age of innovation. With Far East Command, the United States positioned itself forward under a unified combatant command to counter Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao Zedong’s China. Today, unified commands around the globe campaign forward with modern technologies to deter competitor aggression, with Marines present in all theaters. Unfortunately, these surface-level similarities mask massive underlying contrasts and a glaring critical vulnerability for the Service.

Two critical factors are missing from today’s Marine Corps that existed in 1950. First, in 1950, there was a base mobilization plan.7 Today, the last signed DOD-level mobilization plan is dated May 1988, and the Service has no single-source plan, policy, or Marine Corps Order addressing how it will pick up the entire force, take it to war, while simultaneously preparing for protracted conflict. Second, as early as November 1947, studies of Reserve availability provided data for use in force flow planning in the immediate days and weeks following the surprise assault by the Korea People’s Army on 25 June 1950.8 When the commanding generals of Marine Barracks, Camp Pendleton, and Camp Lejeune were given the warning order to expect 21,000 and 5,800 reserve Marines, respectively, the extensive surveys of facilities and supplies necessary were conducted. More importantly, the arrival of RC forces was integrated with the arrival of 3,600 AC Marines from 105 varying posts and stations and the movement of 6,800 Marines of 2d MarDiv from Camp Lejeune to Camp Pendleton, who arrived within a 96-hour window. 

The scope, scale, and timeline of execution for this effort are staggering and were made possible only because the Service deliberately planned in time of peace for mobilization in time of war. Following the 26 June 1950 authorization for the employment of military forces in Korea by the President of the United States (POTUS), the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade (Reinforced) set sail from Camp Pendleton on 14 July. On 20 July, 22 RC units were ordered to active duty, with the entire Organized Reserve (138 units in total) ordered to active duty by 4 August. The first Organized Reserve (Ground) Marines arrived at Camp Pendleton on 31 July and reported for active duty through 11 September at a rate of 702 per day, seven days per week. The first of 1,392 Organized Reserve (Aviation) Marines arrived at Marine Corps Air Station El Toro on 1 August alongside the AC Marines of MAG-15 and VMG-212 from Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point to build 1st MAW to wartime strength. When the 15 September landing at Inchon began, seventeen percent of the force was from the RC.9

Cpl Cedrick Chan, of Weapons Company, 2/24 Mar, 4th MarDiv, Marine Forces Reserve, calls in a mortar strike during a fire support coordination exercise at Integrated Training Exercise 4-24, Marine Corps Air-Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms, CA. (Photo by LCpl Aaron TorresLemus.)

When viewed in relation to the two most recent large-scale conflicts, DESERT SHIELD/DESERT STORMand OIF, the gravity of the 1950 mobilization is evident. From 28 October 1990 to 13 January 1991, during Operation DESERT SHIELD, the SMCR activated 22,703 personnel.10 This process took 25 days (48 percent) longer than the actions of 1950 and included 9,411 fewer (-29 percent) personnel. From January to May 2003, in support of OIF, the RC activated approximately 17,000 personnel on top of the roughly 3,000 already activated between November 2001 and December 2002. This four-month spike was the largest during the entire conflict, took 98 days (185 percent) longer than the actions of 1950, and included roughly 15,800 fewer (-48 percent) personnel.11 In both conflicts, fewer RC personnel were activated over longer periods, with the enemy static in both cases. This makes clear that the Marine Corps should not evaluate its ability to mobilize against an actively advancing peer threat using either of these modern conflicts as a case study.

Were the Marine Corps to begin actively planning for the actions accomplished during the early days of the Korean War, detailed above, it would at best only achieve operational relevance within the Joint Force and the eyes of our Nation’s competitors. In the era of competition and campaigns to deter, strategic relevance for the Service is not made through quickly aggregating initial response forces but by demonstrating the ability to rapidly aggregate, grow, and sustain the force in protracted conflict against a peer.

To understand the strategic relevance the Service created during the Korean War, an additional layer of analysis beyond the process for aggregating forces for the 1st MarDiv and 1st MAW must be studied. As the Marines at Camp Pendleton and El Toro fulfilled unit requirements and built the foundational cadre necessary for additional unit creation, such as the 7th Mar, Headquarters Marine Corps actively planned and executed policy and long-term force flow decisions. United States policymakers moved quickly following the POTUS decision to intervene militarily. On 30 June, Congress approved the Selective Service Extension Act of 1950, nullifying the guarantee that RC personnel would not be called to active duty except in time of war or national emergency.12 On 19 July, the day after the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade (Rein) set sail for Korea, POTUS authorized the Secretary of Defense to increase the size of AC end strength and call up RC personnel, and the Commandant, with the Secretary of the Navy’s approval, halted the discharge of RC personnel.13 The same day, the Division of Plans and Policies drafted a delay policy based on the mobilization force flow plan. One day later, those instructions were distributed across the Service. The Marine Corps’ strategic relevance had begun.

The Marine Corps’ strategic planning accelerated even as the operational planning hit the pinnacle of its fervor. As AC and RC forces flowed west within the continental United States (CONUS) from 20 July to 4 August 1950, policy maker decisions continued to unfold. The 25th of July saw the chief of naval operations authorize a 50 percent reduction in Marine security forces within CONUS. On 27 July, Congress passed Public Law 624, giving POTUS the authority to extend enlistments.14 The next day, the CMC directed the extension of one year for all enlistments set to expire before 9 July 1951, and Marine Corps RC members were prevented from joining another reserve or regular component of a sister Service. At the beginning of August, Headquarters Marine Corps established the Board to Consider Requests for Delay, which began meeting daily. These decisions not only supported the sourcing of combat forces over time but also set conditions for a critical next step.

This step came in mid-August 1950 with the decision to begin activation of the Volunteer Reserve and planning for that force to arrive at CONUS screening stations on the heels of the Organized Reserve (Ground and Air). This phase shifted the Marine Corps from operational to strategic-level importance. The Volunteer Reserve, which in today’s Marine Corps is best described as a combination of the Individual Ready Reserve and the Individual Mobilization Augmentee program, held 89,920 Marines on 30 June 1950.15 On 15 August 1950, one day after the first attack transports carrying 1st MarDiv set sail from California and two days before the 7th Mar activated, all E-5 and below Marines of the Volunteer Reserve were ordered to active duty. Only two weeks prior, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had ordered the Marine Corps to bring 2d MarDiv to wartime strength and increase the number of flying squadrons. With Camp Lejeune already depleted of forces now sailing with 1st MarDiv, long-range building of forces was dependent on the RC.

Mobilization history was made on 15 September 1950, with the landing at Inchon, but the true benefits of mobilization planning would not be realized until the night of 27 November, when the Chinese People’s Volunteer Force attacked at the Chosin Reservoir. On 25 October, a month before the attack, the Commandant directed all Volunteer Reservists to be ordered to active duty with a 30-day delay. By 8 November, the Service, believing it was in a “short war,” adjusted those plans to include a four-month delay.16 Following the 6–11 December Chosin breakout, it was clear the short war was now a long war. Although the four-month delay policy was suspended on 6 January 1951, because of enemy action, the previously made mobilization decisions had already enabled a continuous flow of Marine Corps forces as the war took a new direction. 

Confident in its ability to continue combat operations despite an ongoing Chinese People’s Volunteer Force, which would last until April 1951, on 10 January, the Service approved RC enlisted members enrolled in officer candidate programs to continue, enabling long-term officer procurement. On 10 February, RC members with contracts expiring between 28 February and 9 July were not ordered to active duty. By March, the preliminary plan to release reservists from active duty was drafted, and by June, the plan was put into action. A largely RC effort now transitioned to a long-term Selective Service solution thanks to robust and detailed mobilization planning. 

It must be acknowledged that the Marine Corps of 1950 was not like the Marine Corps of 2025. The AC in June 1950 consisted of 74,279 personnel­­—just 43 percent of today’s authorized end strength of 172,300.17 Active component units in June 1950 were reduced in personnel numbers to a peacetime structure, with billets intentionally unfilled unless brought to wartime standing. A Marine division in peacetime had 45 percent fewer Marines and 41 percent fewer sailors than the wartime totals of 20,131 and 997, respectively. In June 1950, actual AC staffing meant that 1st and 2nd MarDiv combined could not produce a full wartime division.18 Today, there is no differentiation between peace and wartime structure. Marine Corps units, both AC and RC, are held to readiness reporting requirements in the areas of personnel, equipment supply and condition, and training.19 Within today’s RC, the SMCR, as previously mentioned, is 80 percent of the 1950 Organized Reserve (Ground and Air). The Individual Ready Reserve and Individual Mobilization Augmentee combination of approximately 57,000 personnel is 63 percent of the 89,920 Volunteer Reserve of 1950. By the numbers, the Marine Corps has reduced the size of its 1950 RC by approximately 40,000 (129,000 to 89,000) while increasing the 1950 AC by approximately 98,000 personnel. The surface-level, and incorrect, conclusion is that this shift of RC to AC manpower over the last 75 years has created a total force more capable of meeting mobilization requirements.

Analysis beyond the simple numerical increase of AC personnel reveals that today’s Marine Corps has less relative combat power than the Marine Corps of 1950. This is evident when comparing the two most powerful arms of the MAGTF, the infantry battalions and fighter squadrons. In 1950, the AC had three infantry regiments (2d, 5th, and 6th) with a wartime structure of three battalions each. The RC had 21 infantry battalions with an additional 16 individual rifle companies.20 Assuming three rifle companies form a battalion, the combined AC and RC infantry battalion strength of the 1950 Marine Corps was approximately 35. Today, the combined AC and RC infantry battalion strength is 28, including 3d Littoral Combat Team, or 80 percent of 1950. Fighter squadrons in 1950 for the AC totaled 15, with another 30 in the RC for a combined total of 45. Today, the combined AC and RC fighter squadron strength is 19, or 42 percent of 1950. In terms of the Corps’ most recognized form of combat power throughout history, the modern Marine Corps is lacking in both when compared to the Corps of 1950.

In addition to the 20 percent fewer infantry and 58 percent fewer fixed-wing strike aircraft than in 1950, the modern Marine Corps risks being out of position when the next conflict begins. Relentlessly pushed outside CONUS in campaigns to deter, repositioning the 45,000+ personnel of I MEF or the 22,000+ personnel of III MEF would be significantly more challenging than the movement of only 800 outside CONUS personnel to complete the 7th Mar upon their arrival in-theater in September 1950. If the enemy chooses to begin the next rapidly evolving peer conflict outside the location where the Marine Corps has hedged its bets, the mobilization planning of 1950 will be dwarfed in complexity by the next iteration as the Service attempts to mobilize and aggregate forces from around the globe.

The modern Marine Corps has further undermined its ability to mobilize by neglecting equipment modernization in the RC. Readiness of the AC and RC in 1950 was instrumental in the successful mobilization of forces. Although at peacetime strength, the material readiness of 1st MarDiv and 1st MAW was 98.3 percent and 95.6 percent, respectively.21 The delta for wartime tables of equipment was made up by using the 30-day replenishment stock, air and ground units arriving from Camp Lejeune bringing their equipment, a long-range policy for resupply with the Army and Air Force, and 30-day incremental resupply by Marine or Navy agencies for Marine-specific equipment.22 Most importantly, during the inter-war period of World War II and Korea, the RC “operated up-to-date equipment”23 when training. When the mobilization plan went into execution, the AC and RC were on a level playing field, enabling seamless integration into forces deploying forward and assignment of AC and RC personnel within CONUS to serve as cadre for newly activated units and training cadre for volunteers and those Marines requiring accession training. Today, the RC is consistently last, if included at all, in the fielding of modern equipment and trains with a training allowance, a lesser amount than a full table of equipment. If the RC were called upon again as it was in 1950, it would not arrive trained on modern equipment, and it would bring insufficient numbers of legacy equipment.

If the Marine Corps wants to be relevant at the operational and strategic levels of war in the next peer conflict, it must learn and apply the lessons from June 1950 and establish a base mobilization plan and a properly equipped RC. Planning must include how the Service will execute seamless transition between initial response, RC call-up, end strength increase, arrival of volunteers and/or Selective Service System inductees, and rotation considerations. More importantly, a total force mobilization plan must identify key policy decisions and be rehearsed and exercised under Title 10 requirements. This sends a message to strategic competitors that the Marine Corps is not a tactical-level force with a handful of exquisite weapons, but a strategic-level consideration capable of rapid expansion and prepared to seamlessly flow combat power in a well-orchestrated symphony of destruction.

“Without the reserves, the Inchon landing on September 15 [1950] would have been impossible.”

—MajGen Oliver P. Smith,
Commanding General,
1st Marine Division

>LtCol Toulotte is currently assigned as the Inspector-Instructor for 3d Civil Affairs Group. He is an Infantry Officer who has served in both the Selected Marine Corps Reserve (SMCR) and Active Reserve (AR). In his previous assignment as an Operational Planner to Marine Forces Reserve (MARFORRES), he represented the command in both Service and Joint-level mobilization planning efforts.

Notes

1. Department of Defense, Department of Defense (DoD) Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (Washington, DC: 2025).

2. Title 10, §10208: Annual Mobilization

Exercise.

3. H.J.Res.114-Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002, 107th Congress (2002). 

4. Headquarters Marine Corps, Mobilization of the Marine Corps Reserve in the Korean Conflict 1950–1951 (Washington, DC: Historical Branch, Headquarters Marine Corps, 1967). 

5. Nicholas Munves, “FY2025 NDAA: Active Component End-Strength 21 Oct 2024,” Congress.gov, October 21, 2024, https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12449.

6. Nicholas Munves, “FY2025 NDAA: Reserve Component End-Strength 21 Oct 2024,” Congress.gov, October 21, 2024, https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12448.

7. Mobilization of the Marine Corps Reserve in the Korean Conflict 1950–1951.

8. Ibid.

9. Staff, “History: Marine Forces Korea,” Marines.mil, n.d., https://www.marfork.marines.mil/About/History.

10. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Desert Shield/Desert Storm Employment of Reserve Component: Extracts of Lessons Learned (Fort Eustis: Joint Deployment Training Ctr, 1998).

11. Department of Defense, RC Support to GFM Operational Requirements (Washington, DC: January 2010).

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid; and “FY2025 NDAA: Active Component End-Strength.”

18. Ibid.

19. Headquarters Marine Corps, MCO 3000.13B, (Washington, DC: July 2020). 

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid. 

22. Lynn Montross and Nicholas Canzona, U.S. Marine Operations in Korea, Volume II (Washington, DC: Historical Branch, Headquarters Marine Corps, 1955). 

23. Ibid.

Mobilization as a Theory of Victory

Deploying all elements of national defense

Vignette
 On 1 August 2027—the 100th anniversary of the People’s Liberation Army—the Chinese Communist Party launches a preplanned invasion of Taiwan. The operation begins with covert special forces infiltrating Taipei, paralyzing communications, and severing Taiwan’s offshore internet cables. Simultaneously, the United States suffers from coordinated cyberattacks on its power grids, financial networks, and transportation systems, resulting in widespread disruptions. As Chinese stealth bombers and nuclear submarines posture for escalation, the United States mobilizes its Pacific forces. However, the United States struggles to project sufficient combat power across the 12,000-kilometer (7,456-mile) expanse of the Pacific amid domestic chaos. The crisis deepens as North Korea joins the fray, launching tactical nuclear strikes that incapacitate U.S.-South Korea command centers, raising the specter of a broader nuclear confrontation. Despite escalating threats, allied coordination falters and diplomatic avenues close under Chinese and Russian vetoes at the UN Security Council.

Facing strategic paralysis, the U.S. president issues involuntary mobilization orders under Title 10, but years of neglect toward large-scale mobilization planning quickly manifest. The U.S. military, particularly the Marine Corps Reserve, finds itself unable to respond with the necessary speed or cohesion in a contested homeland. Communication lines collapse, Reserve service members remain unreachable, and infrastructure buckles under pressure. Mobilization plans, long outdated and designed for permissive environments, falter as civilian contractors and logistical nodes are overwhelmed by chaos. Amid the turmoil, reserve units struggle to assemble beyond the company level or move toward embarkation points, hindered by fragmented staffs and command structures. The lack of deliberate, large-scale rehearsals leaves the force staggered at the outset—dangerously unprepared to project and sustain operations deep into the first island chain.

Marines with 2nd Combat Engineer Battalion, 2nd MarDiv inspect craters made by time-explosive charges during exercise AGILE SPIRIT 23 in Georgia. Exercise AGILE SPIRIT 23 is designed to support theater security cooperation and interoperability among NATO allies and partners to improve joint and multinational readiness, scale, and capabilities by exercising rapid mobility and posture combat credible forces across the European theater to the country of Georgia to bolster their defense efforts and deter aggression in the Black Sea region while exercising the enduring U.S. State Partnership Program with the Georgia Army National Guard. (Photo by Cpl Christopher Doughty.)

Purpose
The critical-case scenario reveals that large-scale mobilization is fundamentally an active component (AC) problem requiring a total force solution that integrates the reserve component (RC), contracted support (CS), and host-nation support. Without a practiced, coordinated mobilization framework, the United States risks being unable to project and sustain combat power in contested theaters. The objective of this article is threefold: first, to clarify key terms to establish a shared vocabulary; second, to highlight historical fallacies, such as the overreliance on peacetime structures or exquisite technologies at the expense of preparedness for mobilization; and third, to recommend conceptual frameworks and analytic approaches that help identify and close capability gaps in the Services’ current force generation models. 

A Marine with Golf Company, 2/24 Mar, 4th MarDiv, Marine Corps Forces Reserve, shouts to another machinegun team during a live-fire range event at Fort McCoy, WI. (Photo by Cpl Maxwell Cook.)

Marine Corps Today
The Marine Corps lacks doctrine, organizational structure, education and training frameworks, policy guidance, and funding to build the depth required for an organized, timely, large-scale mobilization. The present-day AC alone cannot meet the force demands of a sustained conflict against any single peer adversary without immediate augmentation from the Ready Reserve. This is exacerbated by outdated policy and infrastructure that do not allow for the rapid expansion of peacetime components of the Marine Corps to meet the needs of war.1 Should a conflict become protracted, the Services lack a formal plan or policy to generate combat-ready forces from inductees processed through the Selective Service System. Within the Marine Corps, no unified command or logistical support structure currently exists to oversee the mobilization of reserve forces, Selective Service inductees, and CS. If left unaddressed, delays will likely occur in generating combat-capable, follow-on forces at scale. These gaps will severely jeopardize the tempo, momentum, and initiative required to sustain overseas campaigns and maintain the operational advantage in a conflict with a peer adversary. 

Baseline Concepts
Mobilization is a broad, total force effort encompassing far more than the activation of RC personnel.2 It involves assembling, organizing, and deploying all elements of the DOD—active and reserve forces, retirees, civilians, contractors, and host-nation support—to respond to national emergencies or contingencies.3 Activation, by contrast, is a legal and administrative subset of mobilization that places RC members on active duty under specific authorities.4 While activation is necessary, it is insufficient; mobilization integrates logistics, infrastructure, and command and control to generate and sustain combat power.5 Effective mobilization requires deliberate, synchronized employment of the entire total force following Total Force Optimization principles.6 

The Past Is Not a Prologue for the Future
World War II: 8 December 1941–2 September 1945
During World War II, the United States mobilized over sixteen million service members, an unparalleled effort in scale. The attack on Pearl Harbor galvanized bipartisan support and unified public opinion, enabling President Franklin D. Roosevelt to rapidly exercise sweeping war powers.7 The United States leveraged alliances and global outrage against Axis aggression to rally the Allied powers.8 Wartime propaganda and censorship preserved morale while the War Production Board repurposed America’s vast industrial base to produce war materiel at a record pace.9 The Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 established preemptive conscription, laying the groundwork for rapid manpower expansion.10 Strong institutional frameworks, a vast logistics network, including the Merchant Marine and national rail system, and an arsenal of democracy preserved national morale and cohesion.11 

Today, the conditions that enabled the mobilization for World War II have largely eroded. Diplomatically, the cohesion once found among Allied powers has given way to fragmented global alliances and a decline in trust in multilateral institutions. In the information domain, centralized control and narrative discipline have been replaced by media fragmentation and disinformation, making maintaining national morale and cohesion challenging. Economically, the U.S. industrial base no longer possesses the surge capacity of the 1940s. Infrastructure critical to mobilization, such as rail and sealift, has degraded. Militarily, the existing sustainment infrastructure is not optimized for large-scale, rapid deployment. As a result, the foundational elements that once enabled the United States to mobilize at scale are now fractured, posing significant challenges to replicating that success in a modern conflict.12 

Korean War: 27 June 1950–27 July 1953
The Korean War era presented a unique confluence of political, diplomatic, military, and economic conditions that no longer exist today. These conditions enabled swift legislative action to authorize reserve mobilization and extend enlistments.13 Diplomatically, the United Nations (UN) provided legitimacy, allowing the United States to quickly galvanize a coalition—an opportunity shaped by the Soviet Union’s absence from early Security Council votes.14 Today, the fractured state of great-power relations and eroded multilateral trust make such diplomatic cohesion far less plausible. Additionally, the Cold War’s clear ideological framework enabled a decisive narrative for U.S. intervention, whereas modern conflicts suffer from ambiguity.15 

Militarily and economically, the United States retained the industrial strength and manpower depth to remobilize quickly, even after significant post-World War II drawdowns. A large pool of World War II veterans, maintained stockpiles of supplies and equipment, and robust strategic sealift and airlift capacities supported rapid force generation.16 Reserve integration and political willingness to spend “large sums of money” further sustained mobilization despite doctrinal friction and inter-Service rivalry.17

The conditions that enabled rapid mobilization during the Korean War have deteriorated. Diplomatically, deepening great-power competition and weakened trust make coalition-building far less feasible.18 Strategically, the ideological clarity of the Cold War has given way to fragmented narratives, complicating public and international support for intervention.19 Militarily, reduced force structure, lack of practiced large-scale mobilization, and fragile defense supply chains hinder rapid force generation.20 Economically, minimal prepositioned stores, an efficiency-focused industrial base, and supply chain vulnerabilities undermine the Nation’s ability to sustain operations.21 The synergies that enabled successful mobilization in 1950—political unity, narrative clarity, and industrial depth—can no longer be assumed.

The Gulf War: 7 August 1990–28 February 1991
The Gulf War showcased the rapid assembly of nearly a million U.S. and Coalition forces following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, but its success rested on conditions no longer prevalent. Diplomatically, the United States secured a UN mandate, rallied a 35-nation coalition, and received logistical and financial backing from Saudi Arabia, Japan, and others.22 The conflict was presented through a unified media as a just and necessary war, reinforcing public support.23 Economically, the Cold War-era defense structure and coalition burden-sharing offset much of the operation’s cost.24 These advantages—powerful diplomatic legitimacy, unified media narratives, and partner-nation financing—are less accessible in today’s increasingly fragmented global environment. Militarily, the Gulf War benefited from prepositioned stocks, robust host-nation support, and uncontested access to ports and airfields—none guaranteed to be secure during conflict with a peer adversary. Since then, much of the surge capacity, particularly in sealift, airlift, and industrial readiness, has atrophied.25 

Global War on Terror: 11 September 2001–30 August 2021
Mobilizations for Operations IRAQI FREEDOM (OIF) and ENDURING FREEDOM (OEF) were extensive but fundamentally different from those of past great-power wars. Politically, the 9/11 attacks briefly unified bipartisan support, which fractured as the wars dragged on and strategic aims became unclear.26 Diplomatically, the Afghanistan coalition unraveled during the Iraq invasion as key allies publicly opposed U.S. actions.27 In the information domain, prolonged conflict and media fragmentation eroded U.S. narrative control.28 Economically, the wars relied on deficit spending and outsourced logistics rather than large-scale industrial mobilization.29 

The OIF and OEF operations used the Global Force Management (GFM) model. This tiered readiness approach accepted non-mission capable units in the sourcing pool if they could meet operational timelines.30 After the height of OEF in 2011, the Marine Corps disestablished the Marine Corps Mobilization Command (MOBCOM), as part of a force structure realignment following heavy Ready Reserve and Individual Ready Reserve activations under various Title 10 authorities. While adequate for counterinsurgency and stability operations, the current GFM model, lacking a unified mobilization command, will most likely be paralyzed by the speed and scale required for a protracted, large-scale peer conflict, especially in a contested homeland environment. 

The erosion of bipartisan unity after 9/11 created an unstable policy environment that weakened institutional support for national mobilization. Diplomatic fractures isolated the United States, leaving it to shoulder logistics and sustainment largely alone. Militarily, modular rotations and contractor-heavy sustainment models emerged, unsuitable for protracted, high-intensity war. The GFM model, sufficient for counterinsurgency, is dangerously misaligned to the demands of peer conflict, yet persists as a critical strategic fallacy.31 The GWOT featured heavy reliance on the RC and CS, with contractors sometimes outnumbering U.S. troops, rather than rapid, force generation.32 Economically, deficit-financed wars left the defense industrial base untested for surge capacity.33 

Post-9/11 wars have featured smaller peak troop deployments sustained over far more extended periods than earlier conflicts like Vietnam, as shown in Figure 1.34 Unlike Vietnam’s mass-conscription model, which peaked at ~537,000 U.S. troops in 1968, OIF/OEF relied on a lean, all-volunteer force with repeated deployments, heavily supplemented by the RC and contractors (at a near 1:1 ratio, compared to 1:8 in Vietnam).35 These campaigns also saw a decline in Allied participation. The 2003 Iraq invasion was led primarily by the United States and the United Kingdom, unlike the 16 U.N. sending states in Korea or the 32-nation Gulf War coalition.36 Meanwhile, the United States maintained a constant overseas presence with tens of thousands stationed in Germany, South Korea, and Japan.37 

So what? The past is not a prologue. The shift from mass mobilization to prolonged, modular deployments has stressed the force differently. A future peer conflict will likely require rapid expansion of troop strength and industrial capacity exceeding today’s sustained deployment model, and demands renewed focus on preparedness, large-scale force generation, and industrial mobilization for a protracted, high-intensity conflict from a contested homeland.

Impact of Force Modernization on Mobilization Capacity
Since 2019, DOD investments have overwhelmingly favored advanced sensor-to-shooter technologies and high-end combat capabilities designed for a limited-duration, high-intensity fight. While these systems offer an advantage in early engagements, they are insufficient in number, and the Defense Industrial Base cannot sustain long-term campaigns. The winner of the first fight may be the loser as they expend too many resources and will not be able to reconstitute in time to be ready for a counterpunch.38 Marine Corps modernization efforts have emphasized long-range precision fires, small-unit lethality, reconnaissance-strike networks, and expeditionary advanced basing operations. However, these initiatives lack corresponding investments in mobilization infrastructure, large-scale mobilization training exercises, and force generation pipelines. The Marine Corps’ readiness for the opening salvo has improved, but its ability to absorb attrition, scale operations, and transition to strategic depth remains dangerously underdeveloped.

The absence of a deliberate strategy to sufficiently balance modernization with mobilization preparedness has created critical vulnerabilities. The Marine Corps must account for risk in forgoing investments in mobilization planning, deployment infrastructure, and the human capital needed to convert surge capacity into actual combat power. Without such scrutiny, technological overmatch becomes brittle when confronted by an adversary willing and able to contest in time and space over the long term.

Figure 1. U.S. active-duty military presence overseas is at its smallest in decades. (Figure provided by author.)

Conceptual Framework
A coherent conceptual framework must encompass five mutually reinforcing lines of effort to address the Marine Corps’ current mobilization deficiencies. These lines of effort are derived from existing policy gaps, organizational shortcomings, and the imperative to adapt force development for sustained competition and conflict. Collectively, they form the basis of a deliberate Capability-Based Assessment methodology and serve as a foundation for institutionalizing strategic mobilization as a core competency.

First, the Marine Corps must pursue comprehensive policy reform and synchronization. Reform begins with establishing a robust, Service-level, large-scale mobilization policy that reflects contemporary realities and aligns with ongoing doctrinal reforms. Critical to this effort is revising and integrating MCO 3061.1, Total Force Mobilization Deployment Plan, and MCO 1235.1A, Administration and Management of the Individual Ready Reserve to define clear authorities, roles, and responsibilities across Headquarters Marine Corps, the operating forces, and the supporting establishment. All commands must also identify and train to Mobilization Mission Essential Tasks (METs) to standardize and operationalize planning. For example, Schools of Infantry East and West should be assigned METs, such as be prepared to conduct combat refresher training for additional trainees throughout the conflict and be prepared to augment staff with additional instructors and contracted support to sustain increased student throughput. This will result in a coherent family of mobilization plans nested within the DOD and interagency structures.

Second, a modernized command-and-control architecture is essential for generating unity of effort and streamlining wartime force generation. This command should oversee the activation and integration of RC forces, Individual Ready Reserves, inductees, CS, and critical infrastructure. It would unify key mobilization nodes—such as deployment processing centers, regional support programs, and select inspector-instructor sites—under a framework optimized for scale and responsiveness. A general officer with delegated authority from the Commandant should lead this command to coordinate directly with the Joint Staff, Service component commanders, and supporting establishment leadership.

Third, a dedicated officer and enlisted talent structure is required to institutionalize total force integration. This entails creating a new military occupational specialty, the Total Force Integrator (TFI), within the 05XX MAGTF occupational field. The TFI would consolidate mobilization planners responsible for integrating the RC into the AC at all echelons. Officers and senior enlisted with RC experience are ideal candidates, particularly active-reserve officers (all of which hold a Title 10 mandate to organize, administer, recruit, instruct, or train the RC).39 Selection should mirror the foreign area officer experience track board to ensure only high-performing candidates with the requisite attributes are selected. A formal education pipeline, such as at the Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy, would provide doctrinal expertise and joint operational fluency.40 Unlike MOBCOM’s past centralization, TFIs should be organized into cells under the Deputy Commandant for Plans, Policies, and Operations, led by an active reserve O-6 at a Mobilization Plans Branch, with integration into each MEF and MARFOR G-5 Plans section under AR-led TFI cells.41 

Fourth, the Marine Corps must integrate mobilization readiness into its training, education, and wargaming systems. Large-scale mobilization scenarios must be incorporated into Command and Staff College curricula, the Marine Corps War College, and other professional military education venues to build shared understanding across the Total Force. Mobilization METs must also be an inspectable item, reportable to the Commandant at a venue such as the Quarterly Readiness Board. The Marine Corps should conduct regular, large-scale mobilization exercises to validate force generation plans under contested conditions. Supported by a campaign of learning, these efforts will drive informed investment in mobilization requirements and foster a culture fluent in transitioning from crisis response to major combat operations.

Finally, force development and capability investment must be recalibrated to achieve a sustainable balance between initial lethality and strategic depth. While advancing critical high-end capabilities, the Marine Corps’ modernization must be paired with talent management, surge logistics, force generation, and sustainment investments. Iterative Capability-Based Assessment is necessary to identify and prioritize these gaps, aligning operations, activities, and investments across the Future Years Defense Program. Only through this dual-track approach—modernization paired with mobilization preparedness—can the Marine Corps build the resilient, scalable force needed to win a protracted conflict against a peer adversary.

The conceptual framework, Figure 2 (on the following page), is not intended as a prescriptive end-state or a comprehensive operational approach but as a reference model to guide the Marine Corps’ strategic transformation. By adopting these lines of effort in an integrated, sustained manner, the Service can recover its ability to generate and sustain combat power at scale, reinforcing its role as an effective contributor to the Joint Force in high-end conflict.

Figure 2. Conceptual framework diagram. (Figure provided by author.)

Conclusion
The United States Marine Corps stands at a strategic inflection point. The 2027 Taiwan Strait scenario underscores a fundamental vulnerability: the potential inability to execute an organized, large-scale, contested mobilization on pace with a peer competitor. Historical advantages in diplomatic consensus, industrial capacity, and military readiness no longer exist at reliable levels. Force modernization efforts have improved tactical lethality but at the expense of strategic depth.

To remain a credible contributor to Joint Force operations in great-power competition, the Marine Corps must reframe mobilization not as an afterthought but as a theory of victory if deterrence fails. The proposed framework provides a path to institutionalizing mobilization as a core competency of the Service. If implemented with urgency and sustained investment, the Marine Corps will regain its ability to scale, surge, sustain, and prevail in high-intensity, protracted conflict.

>Col Murata is an Active Reserve Infantry Officer currently assigned as the Director of the Office of Marine Corps Reserve within Headquarters Marine Corps. 

>>Maj Ryu is an Active Reserve Logistics Officer currently assigned as a Plans Assessment Officer, focused on the Korea Plans Set, within the War Plans Branch, Headquarters Marine Corps, Policies, Plans, and Operations. 

Notes

1. Title 10, U.S. Code §8063(c).

2. Title 10, U.S. Code §129a, General Policy for Total Force Management. Total Force is the organization, unit, and individual that comprises the DOD resources for implementing the National Security Strategy. It includes DOD active and reserve component military personnel, military retired members, DOD civilian personnel (including foreign national direct-, indirect-hire, and non-appropriated fund employees), contractors, and host-nation support personnel. Total Force recognizes that no single component can generate or sustain combat power alone in protracted, high-end conflict.

3. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Total Force Optimization for Strategic Competition, Memorandum, (Washington, DC: October 2024). Total Force Optimization is the deliberate, synchronized use of all elements of the total force—AC, RC, contracted support, and host-nation support—to ensure maximum effectiveness, readiness, and resilience. This includes aligning human capital, capabilities, and resources to mission requirements over time, while preserving strategic depth and surge capacity.

4. Department of Defense, DOD Instruction 1235.12, (Washington, DC: 2017). Activation is the legal and administrative process by which members of the reserve component are ordered to active duty. Activation authorities encompass voluntary and involuntary mechanisms under various statutes (e.g., Title 10 §§ 12301, 12302, 12304, 12305) and necessitate coordination across multiple levels of command.

5. Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, JP 4-05, Joint Mobilization Planning, (Washington, DC: 2018). Mobilization is the process of assembling, organizing, and deploying personnel, units, and material in response to a national emergency or contingency. Mobilization includes the activation of reserve forces, the coordination of logistics, infrastructure, and command-and-control elements, and may extend to the broader industrial base and national resources. 

6. Total Force Optimization for Strategic Competition.

7. David. M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

8. Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995).

9. Ralph E. Smith, The Army and Economic Mobilization (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, United States Army, 1964). 

10. Kent R. Greenfield, Command Decisions (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 1987).

11. Why the Allies Won; and The Army and Economic Mobilization.

12. Freedom from Fear: The Army and Economic Mobilization; and Command Decisions.

13. Headquarters Marine Corps, Mobilization of the Marine Corps Reserve in the Korean Conflict, 1950–1951 (Washington, DC: Historical Branch, G-3 Division, 1967). 

14. Allan R. Millett, The War for Korea, 1950–1951: They Came from the North (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010).

15. Robert D. Heinl, Victory at High Tide: The Inchon-Seoul Campaign (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1994). 

16. Mobilization of the Marine Corps Reserve in the Korean Conflict, 1950–1951; and The Army and Economic Mobilization.

17. Command Decisions.

18. The War for Korea, 1950–1951.

19. Victory at High Tide.

20. Mobilization of the Marine Corps Reserve in the Korean Conflict, 1950–1951.

21. The Army and Economic Mobilization.

22. Department of Defense, Conduct of the Persian Gulf War: Final Report to Congress (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1992).

23. Anthony H. Cordesman, The Gulf War: Strategy, Air Power, and the Challenge of War (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1994).

24. Rick Atkinson, Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993).

25. Conduct of the Persian Gulf War; and The Gulf War.

26. Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin Press, 2006). 

27. Kate Phillip, Shane Lauth, and Erin Schenck, U.S. Military Operations in Iraq: Planning, Combat, and Occupation (Carlisle: The Strategic Studies Institute, 2006).

28. Stanley McChrystal, My Share of the Task: A Memoir (New York: Penguin Random House, 2013).

29. U.S. Government Accountability Office, Military Operations: High-Level DoD Action Needed to Address Long-Standing Problems with Management and Oversight of Contractors Supporting Deployed Forces (Washington, DC: 2006). 

30. Department of Defense, CJCSM, 3130.03, Adaptive Planning and Execution (APEX) Planning Formats and Guidance (Washington, DC: 2019). 

31. Ibid.

32. T. Christian Miller, “Contractors Outnumber Troops in Iraq,” L.A. Times, July 4, 2007, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-jul-04-na-private4-story.html; and David Isenberg, Shadow Force: Private Security Contractors in Iraq (Westport: Praeger Security International, 2008). 

33. Kristen Bialik, “U.S. Active-Duty Military Presence Overseas Is at Its Smallest in Decades,” Pew Research Center, August 22, 2017, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/08/22/u-s-active-duty-military-presence-overseas-is-at-its-smallest-in-decades.

34. Ibid. 

35. Ibid.; and Congressional Budget Office, Contractors’ Support of U.S. Operations in Iraq (Washington, DC: CBO, August 2008).

36. Ivo H. Daalder, “The Coalition That Isn’t,” Brookings, March 24, 2003, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-coalition-that-isnt.

37. “U.S. Active-Duty Military Presence Overseas Is at Its Smallest in Decades.”

38. Col Kevin H. Hutchison, interview by authors, April 2, 2025.

39. Title 10, U.S. Code §12310 titled “Reserves: Duty with Organization of the Ready Reserve” authorizes members of the reserve components, including the Marine Corps Reserve, to be ordered to active duty to perform duties that contribute to the readiness of their reserve component. Subsection (a) provides that a reservist is activated under this authority to organize, administer, recruit, instruct, or train the reserve component. Subsection (b) provides that reservists activated under this authority are considered to be serving on active duty for all intents and purposes, and their duty may be performed full-time. MCO 1001.52K Management of the Active Reserve Program states that AR Marines are primarily assigned to inspector-instructor staffs, training commands, recruiting support, and mobilization planning billets (italics added).

40. The Eisenhower School, “Mission: Forging a New Generation of Strategic Leaders,” The Eisenhower School, n.d. https://es.ndu.edu/About/Mission. 

41. The Marine Forces Reserve Mobilization Command of the past was tasked to: (1) manage the Individual Ready Reserve accountability and readiness; (2) execute mobilization processing for involuntary and voluntary activations; (3) standardize mobilization procedures under Title 10 authorities; (4) develop and maintain mobilization plans and procedures in coordination with Headquarters Marine Corps and Marine Corps Forces Reserve; (5) provide infrastructure and administrative oversight for mobilization processing centers. Mobilization Command centralized but professionalized mobilization efforts that had previously been handled in a more fragmented or ad hoc manner, streamlining readiness verification and improving the responsiveness of reserve force generation. The key distinguishing feature of the proposed framework is decentralizing mobilization planning from the Service. Ideally, the selected AR total force integrators disperse throughout Marine Corps Forces and the FMF, which are at the forefront of contingency planning in support of combatant commanders, to provide dedicated total force integration subject-matter expertise. 

>The information in this article represents the views and opinions of the authors and does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of Headquarters Marine Corps or the Service. 

Someone to Light the Path

Morals, ethics, and self-assessment

Whom Shall I Send?
“All around our society, you see immoral behavior … lying, cheating, stealing, drug and alcohol abuse, prejudice, and a lack of respect for human dignity and the law. In the not-too distant future, each of you is going to be confronted with situations where you will have to deal straight-up with issues such as these. The question is, what will you do when you are? What action will you take? You will know what to do—the challenge is, will you do what you know is right? It takes moral courage to hold your ideals above yourself. It is the defining aspect. When the test of your character and moral courage comes, regardless of the noise and confusion around you, there will be a moment of inner silence in which you must decide what to do. Your character will be defined by your decision, and it is yours and yours alone to make. I am confident you will each make the right one.”

—Remarks for Pepperdine University Convocation Series, Gen Charles C. Krulak, Commandant of the Marine Corps, 14 October 1998

There is No Superman
Imagine yourself as a unit leader locked in kinetic engagement with a peer enemy force. Your support is too far away and too heavily engaged to provide adequate assistance at this time. Enemy artillery is creeping closer and closer to your position as their troops close in behind it.  It seems that the entire world is beginning to crash down around you. The shockwaves and blast overpressure are rolling over you and taking your breath away. The small-arms fire and machineguns shooting at your position make loud snaps as the bullets pass by you and overhead (it sounds just like when you were pulling pits at the rifle range), and you can hear them ricocheting off metal objects, walls, and other things around you. The entire time, you are being pelted with pieces of dirt, debris, and bullet fragments. The day-to-day cares of normal life—paying bills, eating right, working out, getting to work on time, saving up for retirement—all of these things seem trivial and meaningless in the din of this moment. The thin veneer of civilization is stripped away, and your worries and cares have been reduced to a single primal instinct: to survive. The lives of you and your Marines are teetering on the precipice. You realize that existence beyond this moment is not guaranteed. It is time to make a decision and give your orders.

What kind of leader have you been up to this point, now that your own life and the lives of your Marines are at stake? Have you been a leader who has been hands off in the development of your unit, allowing the lower leadership to make all the decisions on training objectives and readiness, trusting that all will pan out well in the end? Have you been a leader who sought acceptance and popularity by catering to your Marines’ creature comforts, drinking alcohol with them during downtime and being cool, allowing training rosters to be pen-whipped, fitness tests to be inflated, and readiness requirements to be falsified—and now you and your Marines find yourselves significantly unprepared for the situation at hand? Rather, have you been a leader who has continuously led from the front with a strong work ethic, shared the common burden, and relentlessly enforced and adhered to our training standards? Have you held yourself and your Marines to the moral and ethical standards that we have sworn ourselves to, setting the example both on and off duty? Have you done your best to adhere to our code of Honor, Courage, and Commitment? Given the current situation, do you believe in yourself to make a recognition-primed, correct decision? Do you believe in your Marines’ ability to fight out of this situation? Do your Marines believe in you? What sort of leadership is more reliable and trustworthy when the time comes to put ourselves to the test in actual combat? Are you currently empowering those Marines who constantly strive to keep the standards of honor, courage, and commitment, or are you hindering them? Are the voices of reason being drowned out by those voices who prefer the easy road and do not take training seriously? What kind of leader should be calling the shots when everything is at stake? Is it someone like your current leader? More importantly, is it someone like you, or is this a job for Superman?

The central purpose of this article is to provoke the drive for self-assessment and recall the line of thinking that spurred us to join the Service. We should recall the frame of mind that originally put us on this path and, if we have found ourselves straying too far from that original line of thinking, that this piece will prod you to self-correct, readjust, or, if you need to, hit the reset button and start over. I would like us to contemplate the values that prompted us to join, the moral and ethical obligations that our country demands of us, and enforce those same obligations to which each of us has sworn a sacred oath to honor and uphold both within ourselves as well as within our ranks. My aim is to fortify our trust and confidence in each other and to empower and strengthen the dedication, resolve, and bias for action of those voices among us whose honor and character have withstood the furnace, the hammering, and the quenching of the forging process to become the true bearers of our battle standards and the uncompromising stalwarts of Semper Fidelis.

The Ovation from the Depths of Hell Itself
From the time when I was young, I have always felt like I was meant to do something great, like I had a higher purpose in life. I grew up extremely poor. My brother and I made do with a few worn-out toys and three sets of clothes each that we had to wear to school two days in a row every week. That was all we had. My family saw to it that we were educated and had a solid moral foundation, but I never felt as though I had the means to be something more. After high school, I went to college and worked a couple of jobs. I even owned a small construction business, but nothing seemed to satisfy my desire to do something that would truly make a difference in this world. Then 9/11 happened. At the time, I was working for the State of Alabama’s Department of Human Resources, going with our social workers as contracted security doing in-home investigations and mentoring ill-behaved state-custody kids who were attending public school. It was meaningful work, and we made huge differences in the lives of the children we helped—but it was also extremely disturbing at times because of what I found that parents were capable of subjecting their own children to. One day, while sitting in a high school with one of our state-custody kids, the teacher suddenly stopped the class and turned on the TV. We all saw the first tower burning as the second plane hit live on the air. The film crews on scene were shooting live footage of people jumping to their deaths. The high-pitched clapping sounds of average American citizens hitting the pavement at terminal velocity still haunt me to this day. When the President came on television and told us that our Nation had been attacked and that we were going to war, I knew deep down that I had to do something. That day, I quit my job at the Department of Human Resources and found a job at a local gym so I could get myself in shape for military service.

Through this Portal
I am, and have always been, what some would call a true believer. When I joined the Marines, I believed in everything that I read in the pamphlets and saw in the commercials on TV. I believed in everything that my drill instructors shouted at me about integrity, discipline, and the pride that is inherent in being the world’s most elite fighting force. I was grateful for the opportunity to endure the forge that would shape me into a Marine. Then, finally, one hot summer morning after an intense and grueling three months at Parris Island, an Eagle, Globe, and Anchor was placed in my hand. With tears rolling down my face, I was honored to be joining this battle-hardened organization that holds our rich and storied history in high regard and, above all else, holds in high regard the moral and ethical standards that, throughout my entire life, have been imprinted upon my soul. There was no work that I could put my hands to that could ever honor myself and my family more than serving as a Marine. I was hooked for life.

The Horns of a Dilemma
All of us, at one time or another, have been faced with some sort of moral or ethical dilemma while wearing the uniform. To level the playing field and be honest with ourselves, we must ALL acknowledge that none of us is beyond reproach in these matters. Nevertheless, in order to fight entropy, keep good order and discipline within our ranks, and to protect our most precious commodity—special trust and confidence—we must relentlessly strive to uphold and enforce the moral and ethical principles that sustain that trust and confidence. Both up and down the chain of command, mutual trust and confidence are the currency that enables us to execute our missions. Without mutual trust and confidence, we assume enormous amounts of risk and gamble the welfare of our Marines, the accomplishment of the mission, and—most importantly—the love for each other that holds it all together.

Omnia ergo quaecumque vultis ut faciant vobis homines, et vos facite illis.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

—The Golden Rule

This well-known adage has been restated in multiple ways, such as treating others the same as you would like to be treated, not treating others in a way that you would not want to be treated, or providing to others the same dignity, honor, and respect that you expect in return. No matter how you interpret it, all these variations have the same result: reciprocity in how we deal with each other. We all want to be surrounded by people that we can trust, but this trust and confidence is not, and should never be, a one-way transaction. That being said, I am not suggesting that we should ever lie, cheat, or steal from those who do these things to us (as can sometimes be misinterpreted from the Latin translation), but that we stay on the positive end of the spectrum with our morals and ethics and correct, as efficiently and effectively as possible those who treat us and others unjustly. This will preserve our honor and dignity both as individuals and as a force. We must relentlessly seek justice and ensure that the standards that we create and enforce among ourselves apply to everyone equally, regardless of rank or station, even when it means that those who are expected to enforce the standards are the very ones who require correction. There should be no double standards. Everyone should be held equally accountable to the same set of principles. By living by this maxim, we create and sustain an environment where mutual trust and confidence can thrive, we preserve the honor of our Service, and we have the opportunity to guide, mentor, and preserve those certain voices among us from destroying themselves as well as our organization.

Trust and Confidence
Mutual trust and confidence come at a very reasonable price—that you put forward your best effort and treat those around you with the same honor, fairness, and dignity that you expect in return. Lying, cheating, and stealing are all unjust actions that no one wants to have done to them; therefore, you should hold yourself to this basic standard: that you do not impose the injustices upon others that you would not want imposed upon yourself. As Marines, I would venture to say that we should not only use these axioms to guide ourselves individually but that we have all been bound in oath together to enforce these axioms amongst ourselves, and as expeditionary forces in readiness, that we are meant to enforce these axioms against any unjustified and tyrannical entity that has born itself into existence, in whatever clime and place that our attention has been directed.

“Trust is an essential trait among leaders—trust by seniors in the abilities of their subordinates and by juniors in the competence and support of their seniors. Trust must be earned, and actions which undermine trust must meet with strict censure. Trust is a product of confidence and familiarity. Confidence among comrades results from demonstrated professional skill. Familiarity results from shared experience and a common professional philosophy.”

—MCDP 1, Warfighting

“A great man doesn’t seek to lead. He’s called to it, and he answers.”

—Dune, Warner Bros. Entertainment, 2021

Trust, and the confidence that it brings in tow, is the invisible glue that holds all our relationships together. From our brotherhood and esprit de corps to our effectiveness as fighting units, trust in each other is what ties our spirits together, and hence makes us extremely effective as a team. In keeping with this, performance on demand is the standard that must be maintained. It is our intrinsic responsibility to each other to hold the line, enforce the standards, and keep each other sharp and ready for employment at a moment’s notice.

When missions come down, commanders look at what they have available, based on the Defense Readiness Reporting System and then decide which units get tasked to do the job. The Defense Readiness Reporting System report is published by each unit and requires that the leaders within each unit report correct numbers to accurately depict their unit’s readiness to meet our Nation’s requirements. If they fail to do this accurately, units may get tasked with missions that they have not been manned, trained, or equipped to accomplish. Doing so would create unbalanced tasking, which would lead directly to the reckless risking of Marines’ lives, potentially for nothing more than unit leaders selfishly wanting to look good in readiness briefs. It is not fair to the other units that are doing business honestly, nor is it fair to the Marines who are being held to a higher mission standard than what they have been trained to accomplish. Readiness is what commanders assess when war comes, so it must be done accurately and honestly for the sake of the mission and the Marines.

Mission Accomplishment and Troop Welfare
Mission accomplishment and troop welfare are the two principles that guide every unit in the Marine Corps. These two ideals of mutual expectations between leaders and led are built on the foundations of mutual trust and confidence. Without mutual trust and confidence between leaders and the led, neither mission accomplishment nor troop welfare can survive. Leaders must be able to trust that their Marines will pursue mission accomplishment in the most efficient, effective, and honorable way possible, while their Marines must in turn be able to unquestionably trust that their leaders have employed all options available to ensure their safety and troop welfare.

This trust is built over time by the repeated meeting of expectations by both leaders and led. If we want our leaders to trust us, we must prove to them that their priorities are our priorities and line up our objectives, whether in training or combat, to best address them. We must prove time and time again that we are highly capable and can be trusted both on mission and on liberty. We must be frank and honest and find out what concerns them. Then we take action to address and quell those concerns. The end state is a leader who has the utmost trust and confidence in their unit and the peace of mind necessary to employ their Marines with mission-type orders. This focus on the concerns of the leadership should be the ultimate goal of the led.

As leaders, if we want our Marines to trust us, it is simple—we love and care for them as we would our own children. We reward them when they do well, always reinforce their positive behavior, and provide fair and reasonable correction when necessary. We must train and mentor them as a teacher would their students. Above all else, we must share their burdens and never task them to do anything that we are not willing to do ourselves. We must prove to them that we are willing to sacrifice for them as they are for us—that we love them as we love ourselves. This can be proven via the sacrifice of your time, blood, and sweat to endure the same burdens alongside them. Make time to know them. Make time to suffer alongside them. This self-sacrifice shows that you genuinely care about them, proves that you have their troop welfare at heart, and builds unquestionable trust from your Marines. This relationship between leaders and led—mission accomplishment and troop welfare—is the unspoken trade-off that lives within every hierarchy in the Marine Corps. This relationship should be well-maintained and be the ultimate goal of the leaders on behalf of the led. When this relationship is properly cared for, trust flourishes, and the unit performs tremendously. When this relationship is not maintained with mutual trust, confidence, respect, and dignity, the seeds of destruction have been sown.

“Destroy the seed of evil, or it will grow up to your ruin.”

—Aesop

Seeds of Destruction
Every ordered system undergoes entropy. It is a natural part of existence. Things break down when left unmaintained, and, at times, maintenance may not be enough to restore their proper functioning. It may be necessary at times to rebuild the entire system to adequately address new requirements in line with what it was ultimately designed to do. For us as Marines, the functions of our Service and the relationships that control them are that system. For this article, I will avoid discussing big-picture Force Design and attack from the little end—the day-to-day functioning of small units and the individual Marines within them. The bottom line is this: if we do the small things right, the big things will take care of themselves. These small things are simply the basics that you were taught at boot camp and Officer Candidate School. Treat your fellow Marines with respect and dignity. Always be honest. Moral courage and integrity are virtues to be sought after and respected. Calibrate and follow your moral compass. Hone your honor. Muster your courage. Uphold your commitment to stand up for what you know is right.

The author (left), Naim Mohammad (right), and James “Jim” Cathey Jr. (center). Jim’s father was a mentor to the author and was killed by an IED during their 2005 combat deployment to Iraq. (Photo by author.)

So, what causes entropy within our Service? It starts small. It is the everyday things that we let slide when we know they should be done correctly. Maybe we slack on pushups when the squad leader is not looking. Maybe we let someone else do our annual training. Maybe we lie about why we showed up to work late. Maybe my team leader lies for me, so I do not get in trouble. Maybe I inflate my numbers on the crunches during the PFT. Maybe my team leader inflates everyone’s numbers. As entropy goes unchecked, we may begin submitting morning reports without accountability of the Marines, pen whipping training rosters, plagiarizing or stealing credit for someone else’s work, stealing gear and supplies, stealing issued gear from another Marine, stealing ammunition from the range, falsifying unit readiness reports, cheating on your spouse, committing adultery with someone else’s spouse, using your position to get sexual benefits, sexually harassing or assaulting another Marine—the list could go on. The bottom line is that we all have the responsibility to engage and destroy these seeds of destruction as soon as they present themselves, before they grow out of control. It is on each of us to be the sentries of good order and discipline. Never ignore your inner voice. Never accept that standing up for what is right is an obstacle that cannot be overcome.

The Obstacle Is the Way
Think back to when you graduated boot camp or got commissioned. Remember how proud you felt. Remember how proud your family, friends, and loved ones were of you. Imagine them seeing you now and knowing what you know about what kind of Marine you have become. Would they still be proud of you? Compare your mindset then to who you are now. After all this time, are you still proud of yourself? If not, it is time for self-assessment and self-correction. When you fail to do it yourself, it is on us as your fellow Marines to help you assess and correct. By wearing the uniform, you represent us all. You have sworn an oath to our ethical principles, and we have in turn sworn an oath to help keep you sharp and on the path.

You do not have to be a Marine of higher rank to be a moral and ethical leader. All of us are equally capable of guiding our fellow Marines, no matter what their rank or station. All it takes is moral courage. Hold honor and integrity higher than your comfort. Fight all these fights and do your best to win each one. These short-term victories will support long-term resilience and will be realized in the indomitable strength you will gain from overcoming countless obstacles and hardships. Strength is gained by opposing a force. Confidence is gained by overcoming these obstacles. Some might say that the obstacles in your life are exactly what you must seek out. The obstacles are where you find opportunity. That the obstacles are, in fact, the way.

Beyond Corruption
The ultimate point is that we all must first be loyal to the same common standard—something fair and just and beyond corruption. People are human and fallible. They are imperfect. They have lapses in judgment and make mistakes. Loyalty to people will always have the chance of failing or backfiring on you. However, loyalty to a common set of principles will always be incorruptible given that the members of the organization see to it that its commonly agreed upon principles are always kept. Some of us will be strong when others are not and vice versa. Some of us will see the path while others do not and vice versa. Some of us will have the moral courage to stand up for what is right when others do not—and vice versa. We hold each other accountable, and by doing so, we build trust and confidence among us and ensure both mission accomplishment and troop welfare.

Conclusion
My grandfather, having served as an infantry platoon commander and company commander during World War II, taught me that leadership is built on mutual respect and dignity. My father, echoing my grandfather’s teachings, taught me that hard work is good for the soul and that honesty is always the best way forward, even if it seems to be personally harmful in the moment. Above all else, the Golden Rule is the essence of an honorable way of life. Treat others how you want to be treated. Be honest. Work hard. Recognize and honor those who do the same while having the strength and moral courage to hold accountable those who do not. Never be too proud or arrogant to allow yourself to be corrected, sharpened, and guided back to the path. Take the improvement in stride and appreciate your chance to become a stronger Marine—and a better human being—than you were before. Be appreciative and allow the detrimental parts of yourself to be identified and cut away. We all need pruning from time to time.

It is my deep and sincere wish that this article helps us all to identify the areas in which we need to improve ourselves both morally and ethically as Marines. I hope that we can make ourselves better and more honorable human beings than before—to become guides to our leaders, peers, and subordinates. To be flares who light the path of honor, courage, and commitment. This path embodies the principles and promises of all our pamphlets, commercials, and publications. This path ensures that we maintain the tremendous reputation of those who have gone before us and puts us all on the best possible trajectory to being the greatest versions of ourselves and, therefore, the finest Marine Corps that we can possibly be. Instill trust. Radiate confidence. Be loyal to our common ethical principles. Enforce our core values. Hold the line. Do not allow the seeds of destruction to take root. Do not contribute to the darkness. Each and every one of us who holds our common values near and dear—and defends them—is a light to those Marines around us. Do not let them wander in the darkness. Correct them, sharpen them, and most importantly, love them. Be someone to light the path.

>Maj Fountain enlisted in the Marine Corps in 2003 and served three combat tours to Iraq, a MEU to CENTCOM, and two deployments to the Black Sea Rotational Force. At the time that this article was written, he was deployed and serving as the Combined Task Force 61/2 Space and Special Access Programs Operations Officer in support of U.S. Sixth Fleet objectives in EUCOM. He is currently at II EOTG and retiring from the Marine Corps.

Closing the Gap for Integrated Casualty Evacuation

Logistical operations in a contested environment

Operational forces in future wars must be small, agile, and have a low signature to survive the Miniaturized Sensor and Precision Weapons Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). This will have transformational effects on both peer and asymmetric conflicts.1 When combined with the scale and ferocity of peer conflicts, the RMA will generate casualty volumes not seen since World War II and Korea.2 This especially holds true in a maritime conflict between the United States and the People’s Republic of China, where the tyranny of distance and timeframes of protracted conflict impose significant challenges on health service support (HSS) operations. Successful casualty evacuation is a particular vulnerability because a crucial gap exists between ongoing innovation efforts at the tactical level and well-established treatment facilities at the strategic level.

For operations inside the first island chain of the South China Sea, and the INDOPACOM area of operations more broadly, our naval forces have developed a doctrinal architecture for a future fight against China. These concepts include Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO) by our fleets and Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO) by our FMF.3 The two concepts converge with Littoral Operations in a Contested Environment (LOCE), where Navy and FMF medical operations will have to be integrated and synchronized with theater-wide logistical operations to maximize the survivability of the critically wounded. 

The challenge of medically supporting the Marine Corps during contested EABO and LOCE is formidable. The Navy and Marine Corps are redesigning their medical force packages to increase their survivability within the enemy’s weapons engagement zone (WEZ).4 However, the medical concept of operations and requirements for the littorals are underdeveloped and present a particular friction point between the HSS capabilities supporting the naval force with DMO and those supporting the Marine Littoral Regiments executing EABO.5 

Medical forces will need to care for larger casualty volumes during sustained operations while minimizing the targeting risk that HSS operations pose to maneuvering forces. Bridging EABO and DMO requires new medical enablers within the contested littorals who can perform patient staging, and patient holding and coordinate numerous disparate evacuation elements spread over large distances.

EABO HSS Adaptations Lack Operational-Level Integration Component for LOCE
Navy Medicine is adapting to China’s steadily increasing ability to contest the sea domain by investing in smaller, faster next-generation afloat medical capabilities, and smaller ashore expeditionary medical capabilities to support the mass casualties likely to occur at sea and on land.6Within the FMF, it is now widely accepted that traditional Role 1 battalion aid stations lack the holding capability, and traditional Role 2 shock trauma platoons lack the agility and scalability to meet the needs of the modern battlefield such as EABO.7 Marine Corps Combat Development Command has identified these gaps and is developing prolonged casualty care (PCC), damage control resuscitation (DCR), damage control surgery (DCS), and en route care capabilities that can maneuver and support the ground elements during contested EABO.8

Littoral Operations in a Contested Environment describes the “integrated application of Navy and Marine Corps capabilities to overcome emerging threats within littoral areas that are rapidly expanding in operational depth, complexity, and lethality.” The new medical capabilities that will support the Marine Littoral Regiments during contested EABO and the new, smaller afloat surgical capabilities supporting the maritime force all share the same limitations: they cannot hold mass casualties, regulate patient movement, and exercise the medical command and control (C2) necessary to coordinate and stage patients for rapid evacuation through the Theater Aeromedical Evacuation System (TAES)—particularly at logistical nodes used as aerial ports of debarkation (APODs) and seaports of debarkation (SPODs).9

The LOCE medical force—blue naval, and green FMF medical personnel—must collaborate to resolve these limitations and create a unified survival chain that offloads casualties from the maneuvering elements, stabilizes them for transport, integrates them into the TAES, and moves them outside the WEZ and ultimately to military treatment facilities (MTFs). 

Optimal Casualty Care Requires Greater Control over Casualty Flows
Medical operations must be entwined with logistical operations for the contested environment in a future maritime fight, especially for EABO and LOCE. The Navy and Marine Corps have no dedicated fixed or rotary MEDEVAC capabilities and have previously relied upon Army, Air Force, and allied assets for short-range evacuation during an era when air supremacy and overflight clearance were assured.10 The Air Force also provides the long-distance aeromedical evacuation (AE) capabilities which will be necessary in a war in the East and South China Seas, given the time and distance challenges there. 

There is also no indication that the Navy and Marine Corps’ reliance on combined and joint theatre-level evacuation capabilities can be significantly reduced or that an abundance of organic short-range MEDEVAC options can be created in a reasonable timeframe. Military Sealift Command and flattop vessels do offer additional options beyond Air Force AE to evacuate casualties out of theatre; however, their mobility and survivability constraints are significant, and getting casualties aboard them still requires separate short-range MEDEVAC or CASEVAC assets. Therefore, the most likely outcome is the frequent re-tasking of platforms (particularly rotary ones) primarily designed for sustainment operations as lifts of opportunity.

The challenges to ad-hoc CASEVAC include the limited total number of airframes, vehicles, and small boats—all with competing tasking priorities—as well as evasion of an advanced enemy’s kill chain. Whenever CASEVAC can be tasked to patients, the next challenge will be to find a destination. Higher levels of care will likely be out of range, necessitating intermediate holding and staging locations. Intermediate medical units within the WEZ will also be distributed over larger areas and will have to become smaller to maintain mobility and survivability, in turn reducing their patient capacities and placing greater demand on casualty holding at other locations. 

In other words, casualty evacuation at the scale of future conflict will be an extraordinarily complex undertaking with many failure points. We risk thousands of preventable deaths due to casualties not being efficiently stabilized and evacuated outside the WEZ. If bogged down by these casualties, combat arms units will become combat-ineffective.

Historically, the failure to create robust medical C2 frameworks for casualty evacuation has been a consistent feature of post-Vietnam conventional conflicts.11 These failures significantly worsened medical outcomes in conflicts that were very one-sided in the United States’ favor.12 In a true peer conflict, poor medical C2 implementation could cause catastrophic levels of preventable deaths and widespread breakdown of combat effectiveness due to the inability to extract large volumes of casualties engaged in kinetic operations. This would ultimately lead to a cascade of failures from the tactical, to the operational and then strategic levels.13 Our concern must therefore not just be that inefficient casualty management will cause preventable deaths, but that it can cause us to lose the war. 

The silver lining is that there are low-cost, low-footprint opportunities for the Navy and Marine Corps to connect the dots and create a comprehensive operational medical system. These new medical C2 and staging capabilities will mitigate the current casualty evacuation constraints and gaps associated with a contested maritime environment.

A Crucial Air Force Template for Medical C2 and Logistical Integration
To complete the survival chain and decompress maneuvering forces engaged in DMO and EABO while maintaining tight accountability over injured personnel, the Navy and Marine Corps will greatly benefit from adapting Air Force aeromedical evacuation liaison teams (AELTs) to their own purposes.14

Aeromedical evacuation liaison teams are designed to provide on-the-ground AE coordination in the combined, joint environment to steer casualties into the TAES. An AELT is composed of a flight nurse, a Medical Service Corps officer, and a communications expert trained and equipped for critical decisions necessary to
coordinate patient movement requests and build requirements for lifts of opportunity. Operating for up to 30 days without resupply, AELTs do not provide direct patient care. Instead, they embed with tactical units, command centers, or logistical nodes to coordinate patient flows to move patients out of theater. The AELTs decide on the optimal allocation of evacuation assets, balancing clinical conditions versus lift requirements. 

One of their key liaison functions is to enter casualties into the Transportation Command Regulating Command and Control Evacuation System for accountability and tracking of personnel until arrival to military treatment facilities in the United States.15 This complex liaison function also necessitates equipping AELTs with redundant secure and unsecure communications systems through a standardized communications package.16

At present, no Navy or Marine Corps HSS elements possess the necessary structure, training, skillsets, and organic communications equipment of the AELTs. Without a counterpart to AELTs, the medical C2 aspect, initiating and coordinating patient movement on ad-hoc and dedicated medical lifts, will fall on tactical commanders. A Navy and Marine Corps version of AELTs would also need to coordinate afloat and long-range ground evacuation (e.g. via allied nation rolling stock).17 Such a complex regulation and evacuation function cannot be foisted upon combat leaders who are already cognitively saturated by the demands of kinetic operations. Navy and Marine Corps capability modeled on the Air Force AELTs is therefore not a nice-to-have but an absolute requirement to ensure patient accountability and prevent mission failure 

Air Force Model for Patient Holding and Staging Would Enable Rapid Integration with Logistical Operations
Another crucial gap capability for bridging EABO with DMO and medical with sustainment operations in the contested environment is a patient holding and staging system to hold patients behind the forward line of troops for rapid embarkation of wounded service members on lifts of opportunity. Traditional Role 2 enhanced and Role 3 units have the capacity to treat and hold many patients but are too large and static to survive inside the WEZ. The Air Force En Route Patient Staging System (ERPSS) is a model capability to fill this gap. 

The ERPSS can provide modular configurations for staging patients at SPODs and APODs. Teams have a holding capacity between 10 and 250 beds, and a holding time between 6 and 72 hours.18 Each ERPSS “provides patient reception, complex medical/surgical nursing, limited emergent intervention” and, crucially, ensures patients are medically and administratively prepared for extended travel on AE platforms.19 In addition to performing this vital medical regulation function, they create an efficient patient loading environment that minimizes the time that aerial platforms are vulnerable to detection and targeting on the ground.20 

The ERPSS is a modular concept that can be scaled up or down based on operational conditions or lift requirements, both afloat and ashore. The smallest block is the ERPSS-10, so-named because it organically comprises ten patient beds. Its thirteen personnel care for a maximum of 40 patients per 24-hour period, with supplies for a minimum of 72 hours of continuous operations (the associated logistical package provides 7 days of supplies).21 There are no credentialed providers (i.e. physicians/physicians assistants) in the ERPSS-10 configuration. Patients are instead expected to be triaged, resuscitated, and stabilized by DCR and DCS capabilities with the goal of force preservation to keep forces in the fight. 

A Navy and Marine Corps version of the ERPSS-10 could be the foundation piece to address the current patient staging and holding gap. As with the broader responsibilities of Navy and Marine Corps-adapted AELTs, an adapted ERPSS model will also have to package and hand off patients for maritime and ground-based evacuation platforms, which significantly increases mission complexity compared to the Air Force ERPSS. For instance, packaging a patient for high-altitude transport requires different steps than packaging a patient for heavy seas. 

Carrying over the modular ERPSS design would enable setups from 10, 50, to over 100 beds with predictable logistics and favorable conditions. Equivalent modules prepositioned at key APOD/SPOD locations with efficient, compact packaging sets will avoid the need for the Navy and Marine Corps version of ERPSS to co-locate with MTFs and make them self-sufficient. Switching from the fixed capabilities of traditional Role 2 and Role 3 units that previously supported ground operations to a scalable patient staging model based on ERPSS provides the means to rapidly prepare and package injured warfighters for egress based on theater conditions including adversary anti-access/area-denial capabilities, casualty volumes, and specific threat level at SPOD and APOD locations. 

New LOCE Medical Capabilities Will Maximize Warfighting and Patient Care Outcomes
The 37th Commandant, Gen Robert Neller, stated that “[Marines’ and Sailors’] ability to think critically, innovate smartly, and adapt to complex environments and adaptive enemies has always been the key factor we rely on to win in any clime and place.”22 As the Marine Corps makes major organizational changes to enable our combat arms brethren to maximize the use of that ability on the modern battlefield, Navy Medicine must adapt its organization and mindset to give our sailors the ability to maximize casualty survival.

We are already taking steps to enhance the ability of tactical-level providers to provide point-of-injury Tactical Combat Casualty Care and Prolonged Casualty Care in tandem with pushing DCR and DCS capabilities forward. The missing link in the survival chain are operational-level/LOCE adaptations that bridge casualty movement from the tactical EABO/DMO level to definitive care and recovery outside the enemy’s WEZ. By adapting the proven Air Force AELT and ERPSS concepts, the Navy and Marine Corps will empower our sailors to be agile and proactive, creating key nodes in the survival chain that decompress the tactical level, maximize the use of numerous long-distance evacuation modalities, and ultimately maximize our ability to keep casualties alive and maintain combat effectiveness.

The Air Force AELT and ERPSS templates will still have to be tailored to optimally support contested EABO and LOCE. The expectation of PCC within the tactical constraints of DMO and EABO is mirrored at the LOCE level by scarcity of Class VIII supplies and evacuation assets as well as the constant need to lessen vulnerability to enemy sensors and precision fire. We must recognize, though, that even as the enemy’s detection range and WEZ has expanded greatly because of the RMA, the requirements of operational-level medical teams such as Navy and Marine Corps AELT and ERPSS adaptations are distinct and separate from tactical-level medical assets such as DCR/DCS and strategic assets like MTFs. 

Creation of the proposed medical C2 and staging and holding teams to enable LOCE integration can easily occur within the existing force structure. These small new teams will require relatively modest dedicated budgets for training and communications equipment. Experimentation with the initial teams could then lead to a wider rollout of LOCE integration solutions to yield maximal combat effectiveness and casualty survival outcomes that will greatly benefit the Navy and Marine Corps as a whole.

>LCDR Keeney-Bonthrone is a General Medical Officer and the Lead Instructor of 4th MarDiv’s experimental Prolonged Casualty Care team. 

>>CDR Jaiswal is an Intensivist with 4th Medical Battalion. 

>>>CDR Ibikunle is a General Surgeon with 4th Medical Battalion. 

>>>>CAPT Delk is an Emergency Medicine Physician and the current the Commanding Officer of 4th Medical Battalion.

Notes

1. Gen David H. Berger, Force Design 2030, (Washington, DC: 2020); Kristen D. Thompson, “How the Drone War in Ukraine Is Transforming Conflict,” Council on Foreign Relations, January 16, 2024, https://www.cfr.org/article/how-drone-war-ukraine-transforming-conflict; and Caitlin Lee, “Countering China’s Military Strategy in the Indo-Pacific Region,” RAND Corporation, March 2024, https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/testimonies/CTA3200/CTA3273-1/RAND_CTA3273-1.pdf.

2. Mark F. Cancian, Matthew Cancian and Eric Heginbotham, The First Battle of the Next War: Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan, (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic & International Studies, 2023).

3. Headquarters Marine Corps, Tentative Manual for Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations, 2nd Edition (Washington, DC: 2023).

4. Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, Navy Surgeon General Campaign Plan 2028, (Washington, DC: 2023).

5. Headquarters Marine Corps, Littoral Operations in the Contested Environment, (Washington, DC: 2017).

6. Navy Surgeon General Campaign Plan 2028.

7. LCDR Benjamin Chi and ENS Duncan Carlton, “The Role 2 Light Maneuver Element” in Marine Corps Gazette 105, No. 3 (2021).

8. Johannes Schmidt, “Expeditionary Medical Systems: Increasing Warfighter Survivability in Littoral Combat,” MCSC Office of Public Affairs and Communication, Marine Corps Systems Command, December 28, 2023, https://www.navy.mil/Press-Office/News-Stories/Article/3627576/expeditionary-medical-systems-increasing-warfighter-survivability-in-littoral-c. 

9. Littoral Operations in the Contested Environment.

10. Dion Moten, Bryan Teff, Michael Pyle et al., “Joint Integrative Solutions for Combat Casualty Care in a Pacific War at Sea,” Joint Force Quarterly, July 24, 2019, https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article/1913091/joint-integrative-solutions-for-combat-casualty-care-in-a-pacific-war-at-sea.

11. Arthur M. Smith and CAPT Harold R. Bohman, “Medical Command and Control in Sea-Based Operations” in Naval War College Review 59, No. 3 (2006), https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1931&context=nwc-review.

12. Ibid. 

13. Andrew S. Harvey, “The Levels of War as Levels of Analysis,” Military Review, November 2021, https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/November-December-2021/Harvey-Levels-of-War.

14. Secretary of the Air Force, Air Force Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures 3-42.54: Aeromedical Evacuation Liaison Team, (Washington, DC: 2020); and Rachel S. Cohen, “46 Hours: How Airmen Fought to Save Lives After the Abbey Gate Bombing,” Air Force Times, August 30, 2022, https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2022/08/30/46-hours-how-airmen-fought-to-save-lives-after-the-abbey-gate-bombing.

15. Air Force Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures 3-42.54.

16. Ibid. 

17. Stig Walravens, Albina Zharkova, Anja De Weggheleire et al., “Characteristics of Medical Evacuation by Train in Ukraine, 2022” in JAMA Network Open, June 23, 2023, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2806503.

18. Secretary of the Air Force, Air Force Doctrine Publication (AFDP) 4-02: Health Services, (Washington, DC: Department of the Air Force, 2019). 

19. Secretary of the Air Force, Air Force Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures 3-42.57: En Route Patient Staging System, (Washington, DC: 2016).

20. Ibid. 

21. Ibid. 

22. Headquarters Marine Corps, The Marine Corps Operating Concept: How an Expeditionary Force Operates in the 21st Century, (Washington, DC: 2016).

First to the Fight in Acquisition Reform

Equipping Marines better and faster: a proactive approach

The new administration’s call for a revitalized military demands a fresh look at defense acquisition reform. The DOD has wrestled with the complexities of acquiring and fielding advanced military capabilities for decades, generating a mountain of studies, reports, and recommendations in the process. Yet, a crucial question remains: how can we navigate this complex landscape to best equip Marines for the 21st-century battlefield? This question takes on even greater urgency as the character of warfare continues to evolve at an unprecedented pace, driven by technological breakthroughs, the proliferation of advanced weaponry, and the emergence of new domains of conflict, such as cyberspace and space. Our role as the stand-in force within the acquisition weapons engagement zone provides us with a unique perspective on balancing reform needs with crisis response. Every decision we make hinges on one essential question: will it result in sustainable, superior capabilities delivered to Marines faster?

This question drives acquisition professionals at the Program Executive Office, Land Systems (PEO-LS). Tasked with equipping the Marine Corps with the groundbased weapons systems and equipment necessary for success in modern warfare, PEO-LS occupies a critical position within the defense acquisition ecosystem. As the stand-in force in the acquisition world, PEO-LS must constantly balance the need for modernization and innovation with the urgency of delivering capabilities to Marines rapidly and efficiently.

3d Littoral Anti-Air Battalion, 3d Marine Littoral Regiment, 3d MarDiv, fire a Stinger missile from a Marine Air Defense Integrated System (MADIS) at Yuma Proving Ground, AZ. The MADIS Mk1, pictured, and Mk2 form a complementary pair and will be a force multiplier for the low altitude air defense battalions’ ground-based air defense capability. (Photo by Jim Van Meer.)

The PEO-LS recognizes that success in this challenging arena requires strong partnerships across the Marine Corps and the broader DOD. The organization collaborates closely with entities like the Deputy Commandants for Capabilities Development and Integration and Programs and Resources, Marine Corps Systems Command, and fellow program executive offices to ensure aligned efforts and a cohesive approach to acquisition reform. These partnerships are essential for breaking down bureaucratic silos, fostering shared understanding, and promoting unity of effort across the acquisition enterprise.

Evolutionary Versus Revolutionary Reform: Forging the Optimal Path
The debate surrounding defense acquisition reform often hinges on the appropriate balance between evolutionary and revolutionary change. Proposals for reforming the Defense Acquisition System span a broad spectrum, from evolutionary tweaks within existing frameworks to revolutionary overhauls aimed at redefining processes and structures. This debate is not merely academic; it has real-world implications for the ability of the U.S. military to maintain its technological edge and prevail in future conflicts.

Evolutionary reforms target incremental improvements to existing processes and structures within the traditional pillars of requirements, resources, procurement, and sustainment. The 2020 Adaptive Acquisition Framework, with its emphasis on tailored pathways for different types of acquisition programs, exemplifies this approach. However, as highlighted by a recent Government Accountability Office assessment, these efforts have yet to significantly reduce the average delivery time for weapon systems.1 While such reforms can generate positive results, they often fail to keep pace with the rapid technological advancements and evolving character of warfare. Critics argue that evolutionary reforms, while well-intentioned, often amount to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic: they may improve efficiency at the margins, but they fail to address the systemic issues that plague defense acquisition.

Revolutionary reforms demand a fundamental reimagining of the Defense Acquisition System. These proposals advocate for disruptive changes to processes, organizational structures, authorities, and even the underlying culture of defense acquisition. Proponents of revolutionary reform argue that the current system, rooted in a bygone era of industrial-age warfare, is simply not equipped to deal with the complexities and challenges of 21st-century defense acquisition. They call for a fundamental shift in mindset from a culture of risk aversion and bureaucratic inertia to one that embraces innovation, experimentation, and rapid iteration.

Marines with 2d Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Company, II MEF, discuss the events of ISLAND MARAUDER as part of BOLD QUEST ‘24 at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, NC, 30 October 2024. BOLD QUEST ‘24 is a joint staff sponsored, multinational venue designed to enhance and develop interoperability. (Photo by LCpl Weston Q. Lindstrom.)

Three recent efforts are notable. First, the Atlantic Commission report on the Commission on Defense Innovation offered many proposals that adopt the private sector’s rapid innovation best practices.2 The Commission also proposed modernizing acquisition and budgeting processes to foster increased collaboration with nontraditional companies to get advanced technology to warfighters sooner. Second, the NDAA FY 2022 Sec. 1004 Commission on Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) Reform final report recommended that the DOD should adopt a new resourcing system.3 The proposed Defense Resourcing System, in the commission’s view, would preserve the strengths of the current PPBE process while also better aligning strategy with resource allocation and allowing the DOD to respond more effectively to emerging threats and technological advances. Finally, a recent Bloomberg Strategic Edge study, chaired by the former Commandant, Gen Berger, highlighted the urgency of rebuilding the industrial base, using non-traditional innovators, and unlocking private capital to accelerate the fielding of emerging technologies.4 Differing from the other studies, this report recommended the DOD carry out these acceleration efforts by divesting fifteen percent of its budget for some of its aging legacy systems to fund a new parallel track for fielding high-technology capability quickly and at scale. 

These diverse yet interconnected proposals share common threads: a focus on accelerating innovation, streamlining resource allocation, embracing organizational agility, and fostering closer collaboration with the private sector. The challenge lies in determining which specific reforms, and to what degree, will deliver the greatest benefit for the Marine Corps and the broader defense enterprise. This requires careful analysis, a willingness to experiment, and a commitment to continuous learning and improvement.

PEO-LS: A Dual Approach to Driving Transformation
The PEO-LS recognizes that successful reform requires both strategic vision and tactical execution. The organization actively implements strategic revolutionary changes while simultaneously driving tactical innovations within the existing framework. This dual approach enables PEO-LS to pursue both incremental improvements and more transformative changes, maximizing its impact on the defense acquisition process.

Strategic Reorganization and Process Optimization
The PEO-LS has undertaken a series of organizational realignments designed to enhance efficiency and better align its internal structure with the evolving needs of the Marine Corps. For example, we have reorganized program offices to enhance alignment and efficiency, merging key capability areas to better support Force Design aims. Notable examples include:

  • MAGTF Command and Control (C2): By combining ground and aviation command and control programs, we are developing an integrated, scalable MAGTF Command and Control solution. This initiative ensures interoperability across naval, joint, and coalition forces.
  • Intelligence and Cyber Operations: We have merged intelligence and cyber programs to use their unique network warfare capabilities, enhancing our ability to address emerging threats.

These integrated capability areas streamline decision-making processes, reduce redundancies, and foster greater synergy between related programs. This approach recognizes that the nature of warfare is increasingly interconnected, requiring a more integrated and holistic approach to capability development.

These examples show how we are continuously implementing acquisition reform while working within the bounds of the current process. We are stretching those bounds by adapting strategic-level changes, such as assigning several of our program managers to also act as capability acquisition managers, looking beyond their specific programs to see how they can improve key capability areas supporting Force Design outcomes, including integrated C2, counter unmanned systems, and integrated air and missile defense.

Recognizing that overly bureaucratic processes can stifle innovation and slow down acquisition timelines, PEO-LS has implemented a range of process improvements aimed at reducing administrative burdens and streamlining procurement activities. These efforts include eliminating redundant tasks, automating workflows, and delegating responsibilities to the lowest appropriate level. The PEO-LS has placed a particular focus on reducing procurement administrative lead time, particularly within the contracting process, where delays can significantly impact program schedules. This focus on streamlining processes is essential for enabling the rapid acquisition of emerging technologies, which often have shorter lifecycles and require a more agile approach.

Marines with 2nd Assault Amphibian Battalion, II MEF, test out the Amphibious Combat Vehicle (ACV) Driver Training System (ACV DTS) at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, NC. The ACV DTS replicates the ACV’s driver’s station, complete with more than 50 unique functions, to include a driver’s display panel with realistic and accurate vehicle and engine performance displays. The simulation also creates a first-in-the-field complex and realistic surf zone with multiple wave types, variable wave heights, littoral currents, randomized wave periods, and directions all controlled by a physics-based simulation engine. (Photo by David Jordan.)
Marines with 2nd Assault Amphibian Battalion, II MEF, test out the Amphibious Combat Vehicle (ACV) Driver Training System (ACV DTS) at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, NC. The ACV DTS replicates the ACV’s driver’s station, complete with more than 50 unique functions, to include a driver’s display panel with realistic and accurate vehicle and engine performance displays. The simulation also creates a first-in-the-field complex and realistic surf zone with multiple wave types, variable wave heights, littoral currents, randomized wave periods, and directions all controlled by a physics-based simulation engine. (Photo by David Jordan.)

Tactical Success: Rapidly Fielding Advanced Counter-Unmanned Aerial Systems (CUAS) Capabilities
Blending strategic-level revolutionary changes (such as the FoRGED Act or Gen Berger’s “Blueprint for Defense Innovation”) to the tactical changes, the Marine Corps acquisition professionals have and will continue to spearhead improved capability delivery. The results are impressive across several portfolios, but none more so than CUAS. Just five years ago, the only CUAS capability any Marine formation had was a Stinger missile and a Mark 1 Mod 0 eyeball for detection. This year, PEO-LS’s Ground-Based Air Defense Program will complete the development or fielding of five programs of record and one urgent capability acquisition: MADIS, L-MADIS (replacing a Joint Universal Needs capability), installation defense of small CUAS (replacing a Joint Urgent Operational Need system), Medium Range Intercept Capability, and organic CUAS for dismounted formations.5 

These successes highlight the importance of close collaboration between PEO-LS and key partners such as the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab and the Deputy Commandant for Capabilities Development and Integration. By working together, these organizations have successfully begun to better bridge the valley of death that often hinders the transition of promising technologies and capabilities from development to deployment, ensuring that Marines receive the tools they need without delay. This collaborative approach is essential for overcoming the stovepipe nature of traditional defense acquisition and fostering a more integrated and responsive approach to capability development.

The Road Ahead: Embracing Continuous Improvement and Empowering the Workforce
While PEO-LS has made significant strides in advancing acquisition reform, the journey continues. The organization recognizes that reform is not a destination, but rather a continuous process of adaptation, innovation, and improvement. In a rapidly changing security environment, the defense acquisition system must be able to adapt and evolve to meet new challenges and seize new opportunities.

To guide its ongoing efforts, PEO-LS must continuously ask critical questions and challenge the status quo:

  • How can we better integrate emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence and directed energy, into existing and future acquisition programs? The PEO-LS must be proactive in identifying and evaluating emerging technologies, and in developing innovative acquisition strategies that enable the rapid fielding of these game-changing capabilities.
  • How can we foster deeper and more impactful collaboration with the private sector, particularly with non-traditional defense companies that bring new ideas and innovative solutions to the table? The PEO-LS must be proactive in engaging with these nontraditional players, leveraging their expertise and innovation to deliver cutting-edge capabilities to the warfighter.
  • How can we strike the right balance between the need for speed in acquisition, particularly in response to rapidly evolving threats, with the imperative for accountability and responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars?

The PEO-LS must continue to refine its processes and procedures to ensure that it can acquire capabilities rapidly while maintaining the highest standards of fiscal responsibility and accountability to the American taxpayer.

By continuously asking these questions and engaging in a robust dialogue with stakeholders across the defense acquisition community, PEO-LS ensures that its reform efforts remain relevant, effective, and responsive to the evolving needs of the Marine Corps. This requires a commitment to continuous learning, a willingness to experiment, and a relentless focus on delivering results for the warfighter. 

Conclusion: An Unwavering Commitment to Delivering Capabilities and Equipping Marines for the Future Fight
While the journey toward acquisition reform is fraught with challenges, it also presents significant opportunities. Recent workforce reductions will align to process improvements reducing non-value-added tasks. Our optimized workforce remains our greatest asset The PEO-LS acquisition professionals bring unparalleled ability and dedication to the mission, making them well-equipped to implement both strategic and tactical reforms.

At PEO-LS, acquisition reform is not simply an abstract concept or a box to be checked. It represents a fundamental commitment to delivering the best possible capabilities to Marines as quickly and efficiently as possible. As the stand-in force within the acquisition weapons engagement zone, Marine Corps acquisition professionals are best positioned to lead the way in evolutionary and revolutionary acquisition reform efforts. Ultimately, the true measure of success will be our ability to deliver sustainable, superior capabilities to Marines faster. By keeping a steadfast focus on this goal, we can lead the charge in acquisition reform, ensuring the Marine Corps stays at the forefront of innovation and readiness. By staying true to our mission and embracing a culture of continuous improvement, we can ensure that the Marine Corps stays ready and capable in an ever-changing world.

>SES Bowdren is the Program Executive Officer Land Systems, Marine Corps Systems Command.

Notes

1. Government Accountability Office, DOD Acquisition Reform (Washington, DC: December 2024). 

2. Whitney M. McNamara, Peter Modigliani, Matthew MacGregor, and Eric Lofgren, “Atlantic Council Commission on Defense Innovation Adoption,” Atlantic Council, January 16, 2024, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/report/atlantic-council-commission-on-defense-innovation-adoption. 

3. Commission on Planning, Budgeting, and Executive Reform, Defense Resourcing for the Future (Washington, DC: March 2024). 

4. David H. Berger, Kirsten Bartok, Yisroel Brumer, Nathan Diller, Matt George, and Clint Hinote, Strategic Edge (Washington, DC: January 2025). 

5. Morgan Blackstock, “PEO Land Systems Fields Advanced Air Defense System to 3D LAAAB,” Marines.mil, December 13, 2024, https://www.peols.marines.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/4000903/peo-land-systems-fields-advanced-air-defense-system-to-3d-laab; and David Jordan, “MRIC Complete Quick Reaction Assessment,” Marines.mil, October 24, 2024, https://www.peols.marines.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3947926/mric-completes-quick-reaction-assessment.

PPBE Reform

Legislative action to speed innovation

Under constraints in current programming and budgeting processes, the Marine Corps cannot match adversaries’ speed of innovation in today’s rapidly changing, technologically advancing environment. Many complain that the biggest problem with the Corps’ budget is it is too small. A bigger problem is that legislative requirements prevent us from properly allocating funding to new, emerging technology that advances capabilities. The Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) Process is how the Marine Corps plans for, requests, allocates, and spends the funding received from Congress. The Marine Corps must seek legislative reform in the programming and budgeting process to facilitate more timely acquisition of emerging technologies to remain competitive with adversaries. Many service members and civilians in the DOD recognize problems in this process. After a recent commission on PPBE reform, some in Congress now recognize the problem, too. It is a long, drawn-out process full of inefficiencies and restraints that create waste. Our Nation’s adversaries do not face these same bureaucratic hurdles in resource allocation and subsequent acquisition of goods. They have governments that try to facilitate the building of more lethal forces with modern technology. Because they have governments who try to streamline these processes instead of inadvertently hampering them, their military forces will be technologically superior to ours if we do not move to effect change now.

There are steps the Marine Corps can take with Congress to enact changes that facilitate innovation and allow the Corps to allocate resources more appropriately. Change like this requires transparency with Congress and continued good stewardship of taxpayer dollars, but the payoff will provide flexibility in resource allocation and a dramatic reduction in wasted funding.

The Marine Corps and DOD allocate resources against requirements through the PPBE process. The Marine Corps uses the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, Execution, and Assessment (PPBEA) Process. Because this article draws heavily from DOD policy and discussions at the congressional level, it will refer to the process as the PPBE Process. 

The full PPBE Process is typically a three-year cycle that begins with the Deputy Commandant for Combat Development and Integration (DC CD&I) conducting strategic and capabilities planning based on authoritative strategies at the national, departmental, and Service levels as well as the Commandant’s guidance. This is followed by the programming and budgeting phases, where funds are more specifically tied to requirements that support necessary capabilities. The process, for this article, ends in the execution phase when we spend congressionally appropriated funds against the requirements we began planning for years ago.1

The current process allows for civilian oversight of DOD spending through congressional control over the defense budget. It has permitted Congress to look at DOD needs as a whole and align resources to best support national security. At least, it has best supported national security in this manner up until the technological revolution we’re experiencing. A significant problem in this process is that to conform to this process the Marine Corps must begin identifying requirements three years before the year of execution. By the time the year of execution arrives, the technology looks completely different than it did during the planning process, and we have insufficient flexibility in realigning funds toward emergent requirements that did not exist during the planning phase. Thankfully, many of the shortfalls in the current process have already been identified.

The National Defense Authorization Act of Fiscal Year 2022 called for the creation of a commission to evaluate the PPBE Process. The commission identified many issues with the current process that prevent it from supporting the DOD and national security in the current, ever-changing environment. Some of the issues identified are that it takes too long to distribute funds, it is challenging to make modifications or upgrades to current assets, the process makes Services slow to react to new threats, new starts are prohibited under a continuing resolution (CR), and the speed of innovation is slowed.2 During the planning portion of PPBE, DC CD&I aligns strategies and guidance to capabilities that will support this guidance.3 However, “the budgets presented to Congress and what is appropriated cannot be tied easily to the overall defense strategy since the budgets are presented to Congress in terms of appropriation title and agency … rather than by capability areas.”4 There is a misalignment between how the Marine Corps plans and how Congress resources those plans. This misalignment, and many other issues identified in the commission’s final report, cannot be remedied without widespread legislative and procedural change. However, there are more minor modifications to the current process that the Corps can work with Congress to change while we wait for more far-reaching action. Before looking at these less sweeping changes, it is worthwhile to look at how our adversaries approach resourcing their military forces to get the full picture of the problems we face. 

Our adversaries do not face the same bureaucratic hurdles as our own. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) intentionally creates competition for the benefit of the People’s Liberation Army and increases its bargaining power with corporations in the defense industry.5 The CCP has split and merged defense industry corporations several times in the past to better foster innovation in technology and try to overcome its very different set of hurdles regarding military procurement.6 Based on U.S. values, the CCP’s example does not provide a model worth emulating. China’s government does not have the checks and balances in place that the United States does to prevent this kind of abuse of power. 

It is also worth mentioning that the system the CCP is implementing has not yet been effective in producing the desired results. None of the widespread reforms the CCP implemented have yet to get to the root of the procurement problems faced by their military, and the more current military-civil fusion it is implementing is focused more on research and development and less on procurement.7 For that reason, this brief comparison is not intended to be alarmist in nature. It is intended to show the sharp contrast to that of the U.S. Government, whose multi-year budgeting process and strict restrictions on funds availability drastically slow down military innovation. 

On 20 March 2024, the Commission on PPBE Reform presented its findings and recommendations to the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Service. While some committee members viewed the findings favorably and realized the need for reformation in the PPBE process, there was also strong pushback and harsh criticism. The DOD was criticized for overspending, failing to track where its money went, and never having passed an audit. However, it was noted in the hearing that the Marine Corps is the only branch of the DOD to receive an unmodified audit opinion.8 Due to the size of the DOD’s budget and other governmental departments that also feel like they desperately need additional funding, it is no surprise that the DOD’s inability to account for taxpayer dollars is preventing Congress from giving its military more flexibility to seek innovative solutions to modern problems in preparation for a peer-to-peer conflict. 

Based on the feedback received from the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Marine Corps should seek legislative change allowing branches within the DOD that have passed the audit to receive benefit from some of the recommendations in the committee’s final report. This allowance requires transparency and open communication between the Marine Corps and Congress. The Marine Corps’ clean audit opinion goes a long way toward displaying transparency and building trust with Congress. We have proven that we can account for taxpayer dollars while adhering to applicable laws and regulations. 

The committee’s final report contained 28 recommendations to Congress, many of which would streamline acquisition, reduce waste, and permit innovation. Many of these recommendations need to be implemented in the entire DOD or they are simply not feasible. These changes will likely take years to come to fruition, assuming they do at all. The Marine Corps may already find itself engaged in the next conflict by this time and will have missed out on years’ worth of opportunities waiting for Congress to effect change to the PPBE Process. However, some recommendations could realistically be applied to only portions of the DOD and could be contingent upon a clean audit opinion. Congress can grant branches that receive an unmodified audit opinion greater flexibility in managing financial resources provided they can maintain their unmodified opinion. 

The Marine Corps receives funding through appropriations, which provides funds for a specified time based on the length of appropriation. Military Personnel (MILPERS) and Operations and Maintenance (O&M) funds are single-year appropriations, which means they must be completely used by the end of the current fiscal year and are no longer available for use after 30 September of each fiscal year. Many Marines are likely familiar with the end-of-year funds dump, in which all the funding that was set aside at various levels for emergent requirements or additional budget cuts during the year of execution is hastily spent on whatever requirements can still be executed at the end of the year, regardless of the priority or capability provided. While it is necessary to ensure funds are available for emergent requirements, it goes without saying that this is an inefficient use of funding and a waste of taxpayer dollars. The commission recommended that the DOD should be allowed to carry over five percent of its Military Personnel and O&M funding each year. This would enable branches to maintain a reserve for unexpected end-of-year bills, short-notice permanent change of station orders, and overseas medical evacuation needs without potentially wasting that money at the end of each fiscal year.9 Instead, those funds could be carried over and applied to needs that more directly contributed to supporting warfighters and enhancing capabilities. This is the first recommendation from the commission that Marine Corps leadership should ask for Congress to implement immediately based on a clean audit opinion. Because the Corps has proven it is a good steward of taxpayer dollars, let us further stretch those dollars by carrying over five percent of these single-year appropriations. 

Below-threshold reprogramming (BTR) allows the Marine Corps “to realign, within prescribed limits, congressionally approved funding” without congressional approval.10 The BTRs are important since the year of execution in the PPBE cycle happens years after planning for that year began. Undoubtedly, unexpected requirements will arise that were not resourced by Congress. The committee’s final report made several recommendations regarding BTRs, one of which is to increase BTR thresholds.11 This is a relatively minor adjustment for Congress to implement, but when coupled with other recommendations in the committee’s final report, it will probably take years to implement. The Marine Corps should ask Congress to immediately permit BTRs up to the threshold recommended in the commission’s report. 

Continuing resolutions have become a painful and standard part of every fiscal year. Annual appropriations bills, which provide our funding for the new fiscal year, are supposed to be signed into law by 1 October of that year. The CRs were created as a safeguard to provide temporary funding until the new year’s budget can be signed, but they have turned into an expected norm for every year. Unfortunately, expecting them does not do anything to mitigate the consequences of them. “Standard CR prohibitions on new starts and increased production quantities delay the start of innovative new programs and the acquisition of essential capabilities.”12 Based on some of the comments in the hearing on the commission’s final report, it is unlikely Congress will be quick to remove all the restrictions in CRs, but some allowances can be made. Congress should allow new starts and increased production quantities during a CR for military branches that have and maintain an unmodified audit opinion. 

These changes would not only help the Marine Corps foster innovation but also allow us the flexibility to more properly align taxpayer dollars to higher priority requirements. They would also incentivize a clean audit opinion in other branches of the military and the DOD, which benefits Congress and all taxpayers. These changes will not solve all the Marine Corps’ problems in the PPBE Process as it relates to acquisition and proper resource allocation, but they will help. They are also realistic. Congress has acknowledged these problems exist. Because the Marine Corps has set itself apart from the rest of the DOD by proving it can pass an audit, it should seek Congressional relief from these known, documented problems.

The current PPBE process is too slow-moving to support the war‑
fighter in today’s rapidly evolving environment. Current policy is allowing technological advances to outpace the DOD while our adversaries are actively trying to capitalize on these advances. The DOD has not received a clean audit opinion and that is hurting us. This is understandable because the DOD, as the largest piece of the government’s budget pie, owes it to the people we serve to be good stewards of their dollars. The Marine Corps must lily pad off our unmodified audit opinion and work with Congress to seek relief from bureaucratic constraints in the PPBE process, or we will be outpaced by technology and our adversaries.

>The author’s bio was not available at the time of publication.

Notes

1. Commandant of the Marine Corps, MCO 7000.1, Marine Corps Planning, Programming, Budgeting, Execution, and Assessment Process, (Washington, DC: August 2022).

2. Commission on Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution Reform, Defense Resourcing for the Future (Arlington, VA: 2024).

3. Marine Corps PPBEA Process.

4. Defense Resourcing for the Future.

5. Yoram Evron, “China’s Military-Civil Fusion and Military Procurement,” Asia Policy 16, No. 1 (2022).

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Hearing to Receive Testimony on the Final Report of the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution Reform Commission: Hearing before the Senate Committee on Armed Services, 111th Congress, (2009), https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/hearings/to-receive-testimony-on-the-final-report-of-the-planning-programming-budgeting-and-execution-reform-commission.

9. Defense Resourcing for the Future.

10. Department of Defense, Financial Management Regulation, Volume 3: Budget Execution–Availability and Use of Budgetary Resources, Chapter 6: Reprogramming of DoD Appropriated Funds (Washington, DC: 2000).

11. Defense Resourcing for the Future.

12. Ibid.

2025 Aviation Plan Executive Summary

Balancing crisis response and modernization

The Deputy Commandant for Aviation’s (DC A) 2025 Aviation Plan (AVPLAN) was signed and released this past January. The AVPLAN intends to communicate to the FMFs, our industry partners, and Congress, the DC A’s priorities and direction over the next five years, guided by the 39th Commandant’s Planning Guidance and his priorities. Notably, the Commandant’s priority of “Balancing Crisis Response and Modernization” lies at the forefront of this AVPLAN and has guided Marine Aviation’s strategy to maintain a ready and lethal force.

Project EAGLE outlines DC A’s strategy to modernize Marine Aviation across multiple future year defense programs. The Project EAGLE initiative focuses on expanding interoperability with the Joint Force and allies, evolving the Marine Air Command and Control Systems, and incorporating new functional concepts such as Distributed Aviation Operations and Decision-Centric Aviation Operations. We will transform Marine Aviation to meet future operational needs by focusing on unmanned platforms, logistics, digital interoperability, and manned-unmanned teaming, ensuring a competitive advantage in future conflicts and supporting both the naval and Joint Forces across all domains.

To accomplish this, Marine Aviation must be ready. Therefore, operational readiness is the DC A’s number one priority. The challenge is to maintain a high level of readiness and remain lethal to respond to crises while also modernizing aviation capabilities. As we maintain this balance between crisis response and modernization, the DC A will ensure Marine Aviation remains lethal, naval at its core, and ready to respond to crises with the warfighting edge necessary to support our Marines, sailors, and the Joint Force.

Marine Aviation will also pursue a demand-based sustainment strategy, improving fleet readiness through better collaboration and efficient resource delivery. Efforts are being made to reduce variability in aircraft readiness through optimized maintenance, tooling, and logistics. Sustainment solutions will focus on three lines of effort: improving fleet readiness, enhancing sustainment for distributed aviation operations, and reducing equipment variability. This includes modernizing aviation supply packages, enhancing logistics information systems, and developing a replacement for aging aviation logistics vessels. This comprehensive approach ensures Marine Aviation can effectively support the MAGTF throughout the full range of military operations.

Qualified Marines also remain the key to our ability to meet operational requirements. While each type, model, and series of aircraft is in a different phase of lifecycle and inventory management, Marine Aviation will remain focused on managing aircrew and maintainer inventories by building properly-sized populations in grade, qualifications, and experience levels. To realize these goals, Marine Aviation will first reestablish a manpower management branch within Marine Aviation.

Marine Aviation Capabilities and Commodities
Marine Aviation aims to maintain a powerful and responsive air combat element for the MAGTF. This includes transitioning to an all-5th generation tactical air (TACAIR) fleet and modernizing the air combat element to be ready for combat today and tomorrow. The DC A’s intent is to maintain the current F-35 and CH-53K transition plans while also ensuring each community employs the most ready, safe, and lethal aircraft. 

First, the F-35 B/C provides advanced sensors, air-to-air missiles, and air-to-surface strike weapons, which are crucial for the MAGTF and Joint Force mission globally. By 2025, the Marine Corps will have received 183 F-35B and 52 F-35C aircraft. The F-35 program aims to support 12 F-35B squadrons and 8 F-35C squadrons, with a total of 420 F-35 aircraft. Fleet squadrons will be increased to 12 primary aircraft authorization by fiscal year (FY) 2030. The F-35B/C modernization includes Technical Refresh-3 upgrades, APG-85 radar upgrades, advanced countermeasures, and electronic warfare improvements. The program is focused on Block 4 capabilities, weapons integration, and site activations.

The F/A-18 Hornet provides vital maritime strike and air interdiction capabilities, with ongoing modernization ensuring its effectiveness in the Marine Corps’ TACAIR Transition Plan and global operations. The Marine Corps operates 161 F/A-18 aircraft, transitioning squadrons annually until FY29, with aircrew training now conducted by the Fleet Replacement Detachment at VMFA-323. The Hornet’s increased lethality with the AN/APG-79(v)4 radar and AESA technology, alongside upgrades in electronic warfare, extended-range weapons, and communications. Funding priorities focus on integrating advanced weapons, improving beyond-line-of-sight capabilities, enhancing electronic warfare systems, and supporting precision approach capabilities.

The AV-8B Harrier provides critical Vertical/Short Take-Off and Landing capabilities for the MAGTF, offering precision strike, escort, and rapid deployment for MEUs with advanced targeting and missile systems. The Marine Corps operates 39 AV-8B aircraft across two VMAs, with plans for VMA-231 and VMA-223 to transition to F-35B. The AV-8B will continue supporting training and combat operations for forward air controllers and joint tactical air controllers, providing flexible deterrence and combat capabilities to combatant commanders. Funding will focus on T402 engine readiness, full LINK-16 integration, fleet replacement squadron support, and weapons upgrades.

The KC-130J is a vital enabler for MAGTF success, providing global mobility, logistical support, and aerial refueling across multiple regions with increased capacity in the Indo-Pacific. Four Marine aerial refueler transport squadrons operate 75 KC-130J aircraft with the full transition expected by 2027, which includes a program of record of 95 aircraft. The aerial refueler transport team is working to integrate more effectively with the MAGTF and joint forces by enhancing capabilities like realtime data transmission and adjusting training devices to support expanded training needs. Funding will focus on hardware and software upgrades, integrating MAGTF Agile Network Gateway Link, procuring infrared countermeasure kits, and expanding backup aircraft inventory to maintain operational capacity.

The MV-22 Osprey provides critical medium-lift assault support with unmatched speed, range, and payload, ensuring rapid response for global crisis and humanitarian missions. The Marine Corps has a program of record for 360 MV-22Bs, organized across 16 active squadrons, 2 reserve squadrons, and several test and executive transport detachments, with VMM-264 reactivating in FY26. Ongoing efforts focus on improving configuration management, increasing fleet sustainability, modernizing flight control systems for degraded visual environments, and enhancing interoperability with the MAGTF Agile Network. Funding focuses on safety instrumentation for predictive maintenance, technology replacements to mitigate obsolescence, improved nacelle reliability, and new flight control systems to increase aircraft capability and safety.

The CH-53K King Stallion offers three times the range and payload capacity of the CH-53E Super Stallion. It can transport heavy equipment, troops, and supplies over long distances, ensuring forces remain agile and supported. Operating from both land and sea bases, including austere sites and amphibious shipping, it provides essential flexibility to the MAGTF. The Marine Corps plans to procure 200 CH-53Ks, equipping six active squadrons, one reserve squadron, and various test and fleet replacement detachments, with the full transition expected to be completed by FY32. Key efforts for the CH-53K include focusing on aircraft inventory, sustainment, and capability, with the first MEU detachment expected to deploy by FY27. Funding priorities for the CH-53E include sustainment, safety, and interoperability upgrades, while the CH-53K focuses on supply chain capacity, testing, sustainment, and warfighting capability expansion.

The H-1s are essential to the MAGTF, providing multi-role attack and utility capabilities that enhance lethal and non-lethal options, bridging gaps in low-altitude attack and strike operations. The H-1 Program consists of 349 aircraft, with a total active inventory of 301 aircraft across five squadrons and a planned increase to 314 by FY31. The H-1 modernization plan focuses on improving digital interoperability, survivability, lethality, and electrical power capacity, ensuring the fleet remains versatile and capable of future conflicts. The program’s key funding priorities include digital interoperability, power upgrades, survivability, sensor optimization, and aircrew systems enhancements.

The Marine Unmanned Expeditionary Medium Altitude Long Endurance unmanned aerial systems provide critical capabilities such as airborne early warning, maritime domain awareness, and electronic warfare support. The Marine Corps currently operates 10 MQ-9A Block 5-20 aircraft and plans to field a total of 20 Block 5-25 aircraft with ongoing efforts to establish additional unmanned aircraft squadrons. The MQ-9A program focuses on sustaining operations through contract logistics support and the activation of Unmanned Aerial System Maintenance Squadron 1 (UASMS-1) by FY26 to manage maintenance and sustainment for MQ-9A Reapers. Key funding priorities include Marine Unmanned Expeditionary Medium Altitude Long Endurance unmanned aerial systems procurement, capability spirals, UASMS-1 establishment, and improvements in lethality, survivability, and expeditionary deployability.

The F-5 N/F provides essential adversary training for TACAIR, assault support, groundbased air defenses, and Marine air control squadrons, enhancing combat readiness for Marine aviation and ground units. The Marine Corps currently operates F-5s assigned to Marine Fighter/Attack Training Squadron 401 at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma and Marine Fighter/Attack Training Squadron 402 at Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort, with plans to acquire eleven more aircraft over the next four years to meet growing adversary training requirements. The F-5 fleet is undergoing upgrades, including glass cockpits and Red Net integration, while exploring new solutions like LVC capability and commercial air services to address adversary training gaps.

Marine Corps Operations Support Airwing provides critical air transport for high-priority passengers and cargo, ensuring timely logistical support for forward-deployed MAGTFs. The Marine Corps Reserve Operations Support Airwing squadrons, including Marine Transport Squadron 1, Marine Transport Squadron Belle Chasse, and Marine Transport Squadron Andrews, support active-duty Operations Support Airwing operations and lead the management of UC-12W, UC-35D, and C-40A aircraft. The top priority is the recapitalization of non-deployable UC-12F/M and UC-35D aircraft, with plans to procure additional UC-12W aircraft to meet the program of record. The funding priorities include procuring nine UC-12W aircraft and modernizing UC-12W with digital interoperability capabilities.

The HMX-1’s mission includes worldwide transportation for the President and key officials, supporting high-level travel and operational test evaluations for presidential lift aircraft. The HMX-1 began transitioning to the VH-92A in 2022, with the Marine Corps declaring its initial operational capability in December 2021 and having since integrated the aircraft into operational missions. With a total of 23 aircraft in the program of record, the VH-92A is set to fully replace the VH-3D and the VH-60N, with ongoing improvements in performance for high/hot environments and expanded communication capabilities.

Marine Aviation is advancing new weapon systems to address evolving threats, integrating capabilities that enhance fighter and attack aircraft for global operations. The focus is on munitions with greater range, speed, and lethality to dominate both air and surface domains. Recent efforts have concentrated on integrating net-enabled weapons into the F-35B/C and improving long-range maritime strike capabilities. Key developments include the Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile-Extended Range entry into low-rate production, safe separation testing for the GBU-53 SDB II, and the addition of the Long-Range and Maritime Strike to the F-35B/C roadmap.

The AGM-158C Long-Range and Maritime Strike is a long-range, precision-guided anti-ship missile designed for semi-autonomous engagement of maritime targets. Its integration with the F-35B/C enhances Marine Aviation’s strategic maritime capabilities.

The Joint Air-to-Ground Missile program is undergoing operational testing on the AH-1Z. Its dual-mode seeker and multi-purpose warhead provide enhanced strike precision while its countermeasure resistance and fire-and-forget capability improve survivability in diverse conditions.

Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System II, integrated across platforms carrying 2.75” rockets, offers significant improvements over unguided rockets, particularly in precision targeting. The Single Software Variant, fielded in FY22, provides increased range and accuracy, enabling common use across fixed and rotary-wing platforms.

The AIM-9X Block II Sidewinder introduces lock-on-after-launch with data-link for 360-degree engagements, and its Block II+ variant will support F-35B/C in FY19. The AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile, with its ability to engage multiple targets simultaneously, is further enhanced by the AIM-120D variant, featuring GPS, improved data link, software, range, and speed.

The evolving electromagnetic environment necessitates advanced electromagnetic spectrum operations capabilities to ensure the MAGTF maintains superiority and can effectively deny the enemy’s electromagnetic spectrum use while protecting its own. Marine Aviation is integrating the electronic warfare family of systems with a focus on platforms like the UH-1Y, MV-22, and KC-130 while developing capabilities for unmanned systems through collaboration with the Marine Corps Spectrum Integration Lab.

The goal of MAGTF Digital Interoperability/MAGTF Agile Network Gateway Link (DI/MANGL) is to deliver timely, efficient, and secure information across diverse systems to enhance situational awareness, accelerate the kill chain, and improve survivability. The DI/MANGL program is modernizing to align with Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control standards, advanced tactical data links, and zero-trust architecture, with funding efforts planned for FY26. The DI/MANGL integrates sensors, processors, interfaces, and radios to improve interoperability and situational awareness across the MAGTF, joint, and coalition forces while ongoing efforts expand tactical relevance and mobility.

The goal of aircraft survivability equipment (ASE) is to equip all aircraft with advanced systems that enhance survivability and situational awareness to detect, identify, and defeat anti-aircraft threats while integrating into the MAGTF C2 ecosystem. Current ASE systems include various missile warning systems, radar warning receivers, and countermeasure systems, all aimed at improving threat detection, situational awareness, and survivability across multiple aircraft platforms. Future efforts will focus on integrating multi-spectral sensors and evolving. 

The ASE systems, such as the Next Generation Pointer/Tracker, meet emerging threats and enable interoperability with future platforms. Continued science and technology investments will drive the development of ASE capabilities, ensuring seamless integration into digitally connected networks like the MANGL.

Marine Aviation Enablers
The Marine Air Command and Control System is undergoing significant modernization with new equipment like TPS-80 Ground/Air Task-Oriented Radar, Common Aviation Command and Control System (CAC2S), and Marine Air Defense Integrated System to enhance air battle management, integrated air and missile defense, and multi-domain C2 capabilities. The CAC2S processes and integrates data from sensors and aircraft to support Marine, Naval, and joint aviation operations, while the CAC2S Small Form Factor variant and the Theater Battle Management Core System provide scalable, modern capabilities for distributed command and control.

The Marine Corps is expanding its groundbased air defense capabilities through systems like MADIS, Light-MADIS, and the Medium Range Intercept Capability to defend against a range of aerial threats, supported by the growth of the low altitude air defense community and future participation in the Army’s interceptor development efforts.

Aviation ground support ensures Marine Aviation’s expeditionary capability, providing essential services like airfield construction, aircraft recovery, and refueling at austere locations, supporting advanced base operations and distributed aviation.

The AC2GS funding priorities focus on improving air traffic control and aircraft launch and recovery capabilities, including precision landing systems, inter-facility communications, and airfield lighting. Additionally, funding is directed toward sustaining and enhancing green-dollar air C2, air defense programs, and aircraft rescue and firefighting equipment to ensure readiness and interoperability across joint and naval operations.

4th Marine Aircraft Wing
The 4th MAW plays a vital role in enhancing the MAGTF’s global readiness and flexibility by providing a reserve aviation force capable of responding to emerging threats. This force ensures that the Marine Corps maintains operational depth, which is critical for addressing the evolving demands of modern warfare.

The 4th MAW works closely with active components, strengthening aviation readiness through ongoing support and collaboration with 1st, 2nd, and 3rd MAW units. By transitioning to advanced platforms like the F-35C, KC-130J and tiltrotor aircraft, and integrating rotary, unmanned, and expeditionary aviation enablers, the wing ensures a unified and adaptable force structure ready for global missions.

Expeditionary & Maritime Aviation-Advanced Development Team (XMA-ADT)
The XMA-ADT, established in August 2023, accelerates the acquisition of technologies for Force Design by coordinating with stakeholders and employing operational prototypes to address critical capability gaps in Marine Aviation. In 2024, XMA-ADT focused on enhancing capabilities for Marine Aviation, including MUX TACAIR, Airborne Logistics Connector, Precision Attack Strike Missile, and H-1 Next, with key milestones such as UAS Manned-Unmanned Teaming and successful flight demonstrations for each project. In 2025, XMA-ADT will refine capabilities for MUX TACAIR, continue Airborne Logistics Connector demonstrations with plans for Weapons and Tactics Instructor Course 1-26, and further develop the Long-Range Attack Missile toward achieving a maximum range live-fire shot by the end of the year.

In summary, Marine Aviation continues to be forward deployed and operate from expeditionary sites, joint locations, Navy ships, and strategic main operating bases. As we actively campaign, our focus on balancing today’s readiness with tomorrow’s modernization is critical as we continue to compete, assure our allies and partners, and deter our adversaries. This balance cannot be achieved without direct investment in our Marines, sailors, and aircrew. Their training must be relevant, realistic, and accomplished in the best aircraft and equipment available. Marine Aviation stands ready to fight and win today and into the future.