In the wake of 9/11 and the demise of the Soviet Union, the Navy is looking for a new sense of purpose. It could turn to its former junior partner, the Marine Corps, for guidance.
In a 1999 address to officers in Hawaii, Commandant General Charles C. Krulak stated that he was glad the Marine Corps was returning to its naval roots by focusing on Marine Expeditionary Units (MEUs) and their partnerships with Amphibious Ready Groups (ARGs). He had felt, as a young lieutenant in Vietnam, that the Corps had been misused in Southeast Asia when it departed from its traditional role as naval infantry. It was critical, he warned, to retain its naval character, otherwise, the Marine Corps was in danger of becoming a force whose only apparent distinction from the Army was the way it bloused its boots and rolled its sleeves.
Four years later, Marines were invading a virtually land-locked country, moving 300 miles across the desert from Kuwait to Baghdad. They didn't force their way across a hostile shore-the majority was airlifted directly from the United States. The line of departure for most wasn't a ship in the Persian Gulf, but a huge berm along the Iraqi border. Moreover, their advance was aided by amphibious assault vehicles whose closest encounter with water was driving over the bridges that spanned the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Today. Marines fight side-by-side with Soldiers while most of their Navy brethren languish 400 miles away in the Persian Gulf.
What happened?
Well, 9/11 for one, and the National Security Act of 2002 for another. But one thing remained the same-the U.S. military went where it was told to go. Given that the mission of securing and pacifying the Republic of Iraq is overwhelmingly the responsibility of the Army and Marine Corps, it's no wonder the Navy and Air Force are searching for relevance in the war on terrorism. In a way, this reinforces the notion that wars are ultimately fought and won by the infantry. The successors to the men who fought at Trafalgar, Midway, and in the skies over Britain in 1940 would beg to disagree, as well they should. But the possibility of the Navy complementing Marine Corps missions is startling because not too long ago conventional wisdom ran the other way-the Marine Corps was an arm of the Navy specifically created to carry out naval missions. Today, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is a Marine. Though they are loath to admit it, some of our fellow service members must surely think the lunatics are running the asylum!
If the Navy is becoming more like the Marine Corps, then how should this new force be structured? With General Krulak's words ringing in my head, this question makes me realize how much has changed since I first heard them. The Navy becoming more like the Marine Corps? I assume this means taking on more brown-water missions at the expense of blue-water ones, rather than sailors donning Kevlar flak jackets, carrying M-16s, and mounting ambushes. In fact this transformation has been taking place for some time. The Navy's brown-water role has only intensified since 1991, when the collapse of the Soviet Union robbed the blue-water navy of its main rival.
Glorified Taxi Service?
Retired Rear Admiral W. J. Holland Jr. recently argued that the Navy's philosophy is still rooted in the ideas of Alfred Thayer Mahan-to be "an offensive force to ensure America maintains the maritime dominance we have enjoyed since 1944."1 Yet in Mahan's day Britannia ruled the waves and France, Russia, Germany, Italy, and Japan could all put formidable fleets to sea. There were a lot of big kids on the block back then. Now there's only one.
The Navy is not, as Kiefer Sutherland so glibly put it in A Few Good Men, a glorified taxi service for Marines, shuttling them from hot spot to hot spot. But the Navy and the Air Force have clearly taken a back seat to the ground-pounders in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's natural that the Navy should want a piece of the action in the war on terrorism; it doesn't want to lose funding from its budget and, less cynically, naval officers want to serve their country and shoulder their defense responsibilities as much as anyone else. But outside of fielding more SEAL teams, how does it do this? Even amphibious ships, whose skippers once thought their mission inviolable, are being called into question. Why not use pre-positioned ships for off-loading equipment and airlift capabilities to fly the troops in country instead of relying on expensive gator freighters?
As Admiral Holland points out in the same article, "control of the sea is the first requirement, the sine qua non, for employment of the Navy-Marine Corps team."2 Indeed it is. The Navy's mission has always revolved around controlling the sea lanes of communication, and that remains true today. The two services are similar in that they have both mutually exclusive and complementary missions. The Navy's blue-water and the Marines' land-based missions are exclusive. Where the services meet in the middle, however, in the form of a MEU/ARG team, they complement one another beautifully. This partnership was designed to operate in the littorals on the principle of operational maneuver from the sea. The Marines and the Navy would plan and execute short-term missions close to shore, operating from the convenience of sea-based platforms to avoid having to rely on vulnerable bases ashore.
Reality and Semantics
That concept has all but vanished in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Marines are now shore bound, taking on the role of nation-building with their Army comrades. This mission is the most distasteful of tasks because it runs so contrary to the military ethos, which has traditionally viewed humanitarian assistance and civil affairs as a function of civilian organizations. The Marine Corps, however, recognized earlier than most that stability and support operations (SASO) would be a primary mission for the 21st-century military. General Krulak's three-block war scenario, whereby small unit leaders would need to fight on one block of a city street, provide humanitarian assistance on another, and assist in reconstruction efforts on a third, was clearly ahead of its time. The fact that many military leaders failed to anticipate such operations ("we don't do that") was a textbook example of wishful thinking-if we don't plan for it, they thought, then we won't have to execute it. Now they have to do both. Rather than anchoring itself firmly to its naval character, the Marine Corps finds itself in the same place it did in Vietnam-conducting protracted operations ashore.
It had no choice in the matter. The gaping hole in General Krulak's logic was the belief that Marines, once they accomplished their initial missions ashore, could hand everything over to the Army and return to their ships. This ignored the reality of situations such as in Iraq. With the Army stretched to the limit, Marines can't simply stay locked in their naval role-stuck on boats while Soldiers slug it out with insurgents. Leathernecks were sent into Iraq for the same reason they were sent into Southeast Asia; they know how to fight on dry land. In fact, one can argue that this has been the rule more than the exception. In boot camp, my fellow recruits and I, poring over our Battle Skills Training handbook, learned that the primary mission of Marines was to:
Provide Fleet Marine Forces with combined arms and supporting air components for service with the United States Fleet in the seizure or defense of advanced naval bases and for the conduct of such land operations as may be essential to the prosecution of a naval campaign.3
Was Desert Storm a naval campaign? For that matter, what about Vietnam, Korea, Nicaragua, Haiti, France, the Philippines, or Iraq? The Marine Corps has exceeded its charter far more broadly than the Navy ever did. Perhaps both services should change their mission statements to: "will do whatever the current commander-in-chief wants us to do." Military officers can define their services' roles any way they want, but in the end they still salute the President and say "Aye-aye, sir." After all, when was the last time a flag officer resigned rather than accept the commander-in-chief's directive?
Look No Farther
The Marine Corps is the only force designed to operate on land, sea, and in the air. In its efforts to achieve jointness in its operations, DoD already had a truly joint force in the Marines. As any Marine officer who has served in a joint billet can attest, sooner or later someone will ask why the Marines need their own air wing. My standard response was that future Marine pilots go through six months of carrying M-16s through the mud alongside future Marine infantry officers at The Basic School. In so doing, they build personal and professional relationships that pay huge dividends in the Fleet. If that's not jointness defined, I don't know what is.
This is not to disparage the other services, but to emphasize the point that when new challenges arise, military and civilian leaders speak grandly of paradigm shifts and mission realignments. Entire forests are felled providing paper to develop these ideas, when more often than not the solution is right in front of our noses. Corporals and sergeants in Iraq are shifting paradigms and realigning missions on an almost daily basis out of lethal necessity. They are developing a hard-won doctrine for 21st-century warfare the way Marines always have: by adapting to their conditions. This mental flexibility cannot be overstated, because it is unique to a service that has always had to justify its mission-indeed, its very existence-to the American people.
The Navy has the structure to complement Marine Corps missions through the MEU/ARG team. There are limits to this partnership, however, especially with regards to support in the SASO mission. When it comes to clearing houses in Fallujah there is little the Navy can do outside the traditional (and superb) support it provides through chaplains and hospital corpsmen. A well-intentioned effort to expand this support may only compromise and confuse the main effort. When it comes to the stability, however, there is much the Navy can do and has done in the realm of civil affairs and construction battalions.
If the Navy wants to make a contribution to the Marine Corps mission, however, it can do so by vaulting the mental roadblock that exists in the minds of many naval officers when it comes to operations ashore, i.e.-land bad, water good. There's no reason naval intelligence officers can't be experts in counterinsurgency or surface warfare officers adept at civil affairs. If you expand your mental vision beyond the shoreline you can more easily relate to what Marines are doing there. In his March 2006 article in Proceedings, "Let's Send Our Best to Leavenworth," Commander John Kuehn noted the fact that the careers of naval officers were often adversely affected by their attendance at the Army's Command and General Staff College. Yet such cross-service training is exactly what is needed to create the kind of intellectual framework so essential to a successful joint environment. So too, is the Navy's Foreign Area Officer program, which has not received nearly the same attention as its Marine Corps counterpart.
The 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review makes the case that "Joint maritime forces, including the Coast Guard, will conduct highly distributed operations with a networked fleet that is more capable of projecting power in the 'brown and green waters' of coastal areas."4 With its emphasis on littoral operations, especially the resurrection of its moribund riverine capability, the Navy is certainly starting to resemble the Marine Corps in the missions it adopts. One bone the review threw to the blue-water Navy was acknowledging the fact that "China has the greatest potential to compete militarily with the United States," and thus would provide a blue-water challenge in the coming decades.5 Still, China isn't ready to fill the naval shoes of the former Soviet Union yet, nor will it anytime soon.
The Mission
If, as Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Mike Mullen claims, "all of us need to be thinking more SOF (Special Operations Forces)-like," then understanding what happens ashore makes that much more sense.6 But what exactly does it mean to be SOF-like? Here the Marine Corps' definition of special operations is instructive. The Corps has traditionally viewed special operations not in the elitist sense that the term often implies, with commandoes stalking their prey on super-secret missions. Rather, special is simply defined as the opposite of ordinary combat operations, and includes missions such as gas and oil platform raids, airfield seizures, maritime interdiction operations, and tactical recovery of aircraft and personnel, among others. Any unit can be trained to perform these missions, and everyone from mechanics to mail clerks assists in supporting them. This universal notion of service, based on the ethos that every Marine is a rifleman first, breaks down the walls that often separate those who execute these unique missions from those who support them. If you've ever wondered where the rice-bowl mentality of not accepting responsibility or taking initiative for anything beyond a very narrow interpretation of one's job begins, it's taught in units that keep their expertise to themselves.
The Marine Corps has excelled for so many years precisely because it has been able to take on missions that fall far outside its 1775 charter. If the Corps kept itself restricted to that original commission, Marines would still be serving as sharpshooters on board naval vessels and nothing else. It has survived because it has constantly redefined itself and adapted to the new roles and responsibilities the American people have conferred upon it. No one ever doubted the need for an Army or a Navy, but they have certainly questioned why we need a Marine Corps. A big part of the Marines' esprit is the fact that they accept the toughest missions because nobody else can or will, be it fighting a guerrilla insurgency or helping people vote and build water treatment plants.
As one of the nation's senior services, the Navy may find this mentality hard to digest, since its role has been strictly defined for more than 200 years. Rather than creating some grand new force structure to support yet another paradigm shift, the Navy may save some time if it simply adopts the Marine Corps ethos-do whatever your country needs you to do, and do more of it with less.
1 "The Fleet: Low Profile Today, Vital Tomorrow." W. J. Holland Jr., U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, May 2006, p. 53.
2 Ibid, 56.
3 Battle Skills Training/Essential Subjects Handbook. Marine Corps Institute Order P1500.44C. Arlington, VA, 15 September 1989, p. 2-1.
4 Quadrennial Defense Review. Department of Defense. Washington, DC: Government Priming Office, 2006, p. 47.
5 Ibid, 29.
6 "CNO: QDR 'Vectors' Navy to New Skills and Missions, Focuses Effort on Expeditionary Capabilities." Navy News, 6 February 2006.
Mr. Brauen, a former Marine captain who served as an intelligence officer for eight years, is the founder and owner of America and the World. Inc., an online publishing company. He is co-author of The Last Sentry: The True Story That Inspired The Hunt for Red October (Naval Institute Press, 2005).