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Twenty years ago, the author questioned the future of the Marine Corps; today, he thinks it looks pretty bright.
ically precluded the employment of significant U.S. ground combat forces in Third World conflicts for the near future, and that America’s military attention would refocus on Western Europe’s defense against a threatened Soviet invasion, a largely Army and Air Force mission for which the Corps was doctrinally and structurally ill-suited.
We addressed Marine aviation, questioning the Corps’ continuing heavy investment in missions other than close air support—notably air superiority and deep interdiction— that the Navy could provide, and whose cost severely slowed the long-overdue ground force modernization.
We concluded that the Corps’ first priority was to end its manpower crisis; no other issue could be effectively addressed in an environment of violence, racial tension, personnel turbulence, and inability to attract quality recruits. We recommended reducing Marine Corps end- strength to permit more selective recruiting, and using educational levels rather than test scores as the prime indicator of recruit potential.
We proposed retaining only one and one-third Marine Amphibious Forces (as Marine Expeditionary Forces were then known) structured for the amphibious assault mission. Options for the remaining one and two-thirds MAFs included disbandment, displacement of U.S. Army forces in Asia (permitting the Army to focus almost exclusively on NATO defense), and assumption of the Army’s airborne mission (concentrating in one service all U.S. forcible-entry capabilities).
We also recommended a sharp reduction in the Corps’ investment in tactical aviation with the aim of encouraging an exclusive focus on close air support.
As the study was released, the Corps had embarked upon an impressive road to recovery. Under bold and intelligent leadership beginning with Commandants Louis Wilson and Robert Barrow, it accepted significant cuts in end-strength, targeted educational background as the key recruiting indicator, and engineered a long-overdue revolution in the drill instructor-recruit relationship. These measures, coupled with an expeditious discharge program, major increases in pay and benefits, and the restoration of the military’s social standing under President Ronald Reagan, were successful: by the end of the 1980s, the Corps boasted the highest manpower quality and lowest rates of indiscipline in its history.
These changes were accompanied by across-the-board modernization, doctrinal reform, and dramatic increases in readiness, though naval support capabilities essential to the amphibious assault mission—the Corps’ distinctive capability, which ensured its independence from the Army— remained static or declined.
Indeed, the opportunity to demonstrate the utility of that mission continued to elude the Corps. Today, almost half a century separates the Corps from the Inchon landing. Though an option in the planning of Operation Desert Storm, an amphibious assault was ultimately and correctly rejected; reasons included the presence ashore of far more attractive options for routing Iraqi forces in Kuwait, and the U.S. Navy’s inadequate counter-mine warfare capabilities. To be sure, the threat of a landing was skillfully paraded to convince the Iraqis that an amphibious assault was inevitable. A landing, however, almost certainly would have entailed significantly higher U.S. military and Kuwaiti civilian casualties than did U.S. Army and Marine operations inland.
Operation Desert Storm also revealed the superiority of Army armored and mechanized forces and land-based Air Force aviation as instruments for rapidly defeating major, Soviet-model conventional military challenges in a more or less set-piece fashion—and such contingencies now form the baseline for U.S. force planning. The sheer size and heaviness of the Iraqi Army and the nation’s military- industrial complex required the dispatch of major Army and Air Force units. The sea services contributed substantially, but the other services of necessity took center stage; although Marine Corps forces ashore performed very well, it was deemed prudent to loan the Marines a U.S. Army armored brigade.
Four years later, the Marine Corps and the other services are grappling with the consequences of the Cold War’s demise. Unlike the other services, however, the Corps has managed to retain a high percentage of its Cold War force structure, in large measure because continuing major cuts in Army and Air Force deployments overseas have placed a premium on forces trained and equipped for expeditionary operations. The sea services, however—especially the Navy—have had to shift their focus from global warfare on both land and the high seas, to littoral warfare and operations short of war at the regional level.
For much of the Cold War, many in the Navy regarded the Corps as an obstreperous cousin of marginal value in any campaign to defeat the Soviet Navy. Today’s emphasis on littoral warfare, long the Corps’ forte, promises more of a genuine partnership. The Navy has responded to the challenge by creating Naval Expeditionary Forces designed exclusively to project combat power ashore.
The Naval Service’s White Paper, . . From the Sea,” correctly identified the world’s littoral regions, especially those fronting the Mediterranean and Red Seas, the Persian Gulf, and the Western Pacific, as the most likely loci of future challenges to the security of the United States and its allies. (This does not mean that one should accept the White Paper’s definition of littorals as everything up to 650 nautical miles inland from the coast— a definition that encompasses Kansas and Utah, along with almost all of the rest of the earth’s inhabited lands.) “. . . From the Sea” does exhibit a keen appreciation of the difficulties in operating in areas “frequently characterized by confined and congested water and air space occupied by friends, adversaries, and neutrals.”
The new Naval Doctrine Command faces stiff challenges, as do those responsible for acquiring critical albeit costly systems such as the MV-22 tiltrotor and the Advanced Amphibious Assault Vehicle. Along with the Landing Craft Air-Cushioned, these are critical to the concept of operational maneuver from the sea, which aims to reduce the difficulties traditionally posed by landings on defended shores. Long seen as formidable natural barriers severely limiting maneuver, the world’s beaches have become much more susceptible to assault.
Once again, as in the late 1940s and mid-1970s, the Corps faces a roles-and-missions challenge. The congressionally mandated Roles and Missions Commission, whose report is due this month, is examining areas of possible redundancy between the Marine Corps and the Army, in-
eluding forcible entry, afloat prepositioning, and sustained land combat; and between the Corps and the Air Force, including that perennial favorite, close air support.
The Corps’s existence as a major component of U.S. military power is not at stake, as it was in the late 1940s, but the Marines cannot ignore the implications of the Army’s attempted march to the sea. Army ashore and afloat prepositioning initiatives in East and Southwest Asia compete with the Corps’ Maritime Prepositioning Force, and the Army’s new Contingency Corps, as a continental United States-based power projection force, is aimed directly at the long-established Marine air-ground task force mission. The spectacle of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN-69) ferrying Army helicopters to Haiti, and the relegation of Marine Corps forces to Cap Hai- tien cannot be heartening to the Corps’ leadership.
Whither the Corps?
Nevertheless, I believe the Marine Corps has a healthy future, and that its relative contribution to our national security may well increase as we move farther into the post-Cold War world. The two most distinctive—and elsewhere unparalleled—features of the U.S. military establishment since the beginning of World War II remain its air and amphibious power (broadly defined), and the Soviet Union’s disintegration has not diminished the importance to the United States of these capabilities.
These judgments are, however, accompanied by several observations. First, the Corps must continue to recruit and retain high-quality manpower. Quality never should be taken for granted. The Corps learned much from the debacle of the 1970s, but it must rely upon an increasingly Parsimonious Congress to maintain pay and benefits comparability with the civilian sector. Recently, there have been indications of serious quality-of-life problems in all of the services, and it is far easier to lose quality than to regain it.
A related observation has to do with Congress, long the Corps’ chief patron and protector against other service and executive branch attempts to diminish Marine Corps missions and force structure. For decades, the congressional love affair with the Corps was reinforced by spectacular—and highly publicized—Marine performance in the Pacific War and later in Korea, and by the presence 'n Congress of a disproportionate number of former Marines, many of whom lobbied fiercely and effectively pn behalf of their service. This cozy environment is chang- ’ug. For most Americans, memories of Tarawa, Iwo Jima,
Inchon, and Chosin have long since faded, and the number of service veterans, including Marines, on Capitol Hill is dropping steadily by virtue of the passing away of the World War II veterans, the abandonment of conscription more than 20 years ago, and the relatively small size of the All-Volunteer Force.
The Corps must accommodate what will probably be a less receptive Congress while not confusing the past with the future; another Iwo Jima or Inchon is doubtful. Amphibious assault is an act of last resort, not undertaken if alternatives are available—as they have been since 1950. Even if a case could be made for its continued utility, the United States may not be able to launch
such operations because of the Navy’s insufficient investment in support, above all counter-mine warfare. In addition, the Corps’ heightened doctrinal emphasis on landing “where the enemy ain’t” or at least “ain’t in strength” argues against the need for an excessive investment in the costly accoutrements of amphibious assault.
The size and usefulness of the Marine Corps no longer hinge, if they ever did, on the survival of the amphibious assault— which is but one component of the far larger amphibious mission. Unfortunately, the common association of the Corps with the assault mission, and memories of attempts in the late 1940s to emasculate the Corps on the basis of the mission’s presumed obsolescence (which elevated Inchon’s significance far beyond Korea), have led many to assume a permanent codependency between the two. General Alfred M. Gray, when Commandant, wisely restored the term “expeditionary” to Fleet Marine Force nomenclature (in place of “amphibious”), because the Corps is first and foremost an expeditionary body, and its forcible-entry capabilities are part of a much broader array of capabilities. That it has thrived for almost half a century without being called upon to conduct a major amphibious assault is testimony to the need for any nation that seeks genuine global power and influence to maintain a ready expeditionary force.
The most important reason why the Marine Corps should prosper in the post-Cold War world is, however, the unfolding nature of that world. The Gulf War of 1991 and the continuing threat of major conflict on the Korean Peninsula should not obscure mounting evidence that we are entering an era of small wars, many of them intrastate, and of operations other than war—an era for which the Marine Corps is by experience, doctrine, organization, and force structure better prepared than the other services.
Attack helicopters have come of age. Their inherent tactical mobility, combined with night-vision devices and precision- guided weapons, has made them one of the deadliest weapons on the battlefield. They are particularly suited to maneuver warfare and operations in built-up areas.
The disintegration of the Soviet Union, Russia’s own potential decomposition, the expansion of Islamic extremism, unfinished American business in the Persian Gulf, and the emergence of more and more failed states in the Third World all have bred a host of small wars and humanitarian disasters eliciting some form of U.S. military intervention. Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Haiti are but examples of the Corps’ suitability for such “operations other than war.”
U.S. preoccupation with the demands of two nearly simultaneous and thoroughly conventional regional conflicts reflects a preference for the familiar and comfortable over the likely and more difficult. It is most unlikely, for example, that the United States will confront two nearly simultaneous major regional wars. If it were, it would have to decide where to put its main effort, as it did between the European and Pacific theaters during World War II. It also is unlikely that the Pentagon will be granted the resources to meet postulated requirements. Remember that the Vietnam War was, in the force-planning nomenclature of the day, a “half-war.”
More to the point, our enemies have without exception refused to take advantage of our involvement in one big war to start another one—not during the three years of the Korean War, nor the ten years of the Vietnam War, nor the eight months of the Persian Gulf crisis of 1990-91. The main reason is that states almost always go to war for specific reasons independent of whether an adversary is already at war. This is especially true for states contemplating war with the world’s only remaining superpower; indeed, in none of three major wars we have fought since 1945 did our enemies, when contemplating aggression, believe that it would prompt war with the United States.
By all means, we should retain the capacity to fight another Korean War or Gulf War. In the post-Cold War world, however, these conflicts are likely to be the exception, whereas small wars, often semi- or unconventional, and operations other than war, are likely to predominate. The Marine Corps literally wrote the book on small wars, and as the smallest, least bureaucratic, most small-war experienced, and most special-operations friendly of the services, is the logical choice for such conflicts. Even in Vietnam, Marine Corps operations prior to the 1968 Tet Offensive exhibited a keen understanding of the critical political dimensions of the war in the countryside that seemed to elude the Army and the other services.
Jointness has its virtues. But jointness for its own sake—using aircraft carriers as ferries for Army helicopters—can lead to unnecessarily complex and costly combat operations that could be performed better by Naval Expeditionary Forces.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to justify the existence of Marine aviation for missions other than close air support. Air combat and other missions are as well or better performed by the Air Force and Navy, and all Marine Corps aircraft compete with Navy aircraft for scarce resources. Moreover, the importance of the CAS mission itself may diminish substantially.
The issue is not whether ground forces should have fire support, but rather whether that fire support should be provided from the air, especially by fixed-wing aircraft. The Marines’ principal rationale for a heavy investment in CAS is that it best offsets fire-support deficiencies on the ground, especially during amphibious assaults. This argument loses much of its force, however, as the utility of the amphibious assault mission fades, and as the Corps’ new doctrine-encouraged technologies open more—and for the most part, poorly defended—coastlines to operational maneuver from the sea. The argument also ignores the explosion of fire-support technologies that at some point may render fixed-wing CAS superfluous. Advanced attack helicopters along with gun and rocket artillery may some day provide Marine commanders a preferred and sufficient substitute.
The combination of a declining demand for CAS and increasing alternatives to its fixed-wing variety portends a smaller Marine Corps aviation component restricted to rotary-wing aircraft and those fixed-wing aircraft dedicated to CAS. So distinctive a force, capped by the V-22 Osprey and a Harrier follow-on, may in fact be the only form in which Marine aviation can survive.
For more than two centuries, the Marine Corps has focused almost exclusively on operations in regions that during the Cold War became known as the Third World— which today includes much of the former Soviet Union. The Corps continued this focus, even though Europe’s defense against totalitarian threats commanded the primary military attention of the United States. Accordingly, the Corps has had to make the least professional adjustment to a post-Cold War era in which the Nation’s military attention has shifted, dealing with a larger number of lesser threats to its national-security interests, most of them located in the Third World. The Corps, moreover, enters this era as a tested, high-quality, all-volunteer force, and with technologies in hand or within close reach that will revolutionize littoral warfare to the great strategic benefit of the United States.
The contrast with the Marine Corps of 1975 could not be greater.
Mr. Record is an Atlanta-based defense writer and consultant. A former professional staff member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he has written widely on national security matters. His most recent book is Hollow Victory, A Contrary View of the Gulf War.
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