In 2008, Marines worldwide continued to display the characteristics of courage, perseverance, flexibility, and adaptability that have traditionally made the U. S. Marine Corps the outstanding expeditionary fighting force that it is. While operational demands in Iraq and Afghanistan were the primary drivers of Marine deployments, units also supported a variety of theater-security cooperation requirements in Africa, Latin America, and the Asia-Pacific region. During 2008, the observation I made in these pages two years ago still holds true, and the performance of U.S. Marines at every level proved that soldierly virtue and uncommon valor continue to characterize the Corps.
A Strategic Concept under Stress
Carl Builder's 1989 book, The Masks of War, demonstrated the importance of the organizational cultures of the various military services. He argued that each service possesses a preferred way of operating, one that is not easily changed.
Although Builder did not specifically refer to the Marine Corps in his book, the Marines have indeed possessed a "mask of war." While the organizational culture of the U.S. Army has been shaped by its emphasis on fighting and winning big wars, the Marine Corps' strategic concept since the end of World War II has concentrated on providing an adaptable and flexible maritime expeditionary capability in response to crises of any kind.
An expeditionary capability is characterized by certain features. First, since an expedition is more than a strike or the diplomatic showing of the flag, an expedition implies the introduction of ground forces. Second, since an expedition is often directed against regions that may be hostile, it implies a forcible entry capability. Third, expeditionary operations are often conducted in cooperation with diplomacy—indeed they may be a form of coercive diplomacy—but they are not the same as diplomacy. Fourth, an examination of the historical record suggests that expeditionary warfare has a strong maritime foundation. These are features that describe the U.S. Marine Corps capabilities.
Former commandant of the Corps, General Carl Mundy, once observed, "'Expeditionary' is not a mission, but a mindset." As Tom Ricks, the intrepid military writer for the Washington Post, wrote in his 1997 book, Making the Corps,
The Marines tend to display a funky joie de vivre, especially in the field. In their own parlance, they know how to "pack their trash," something the Army is learning slowly and painfully as it, too, becomes "expeditionary" in hellholes like Somalia and Haiti.
Over the last several years, the demands of the war on terrorism have placed the Marine Corps strategic concept under extreme stress. The Marines still travel light, but many feel the Corps is in danger of losing its unique naval expeditionary character. For one thing, far fewer Marines have deployed on amphibious ships than in the past.
Throughout 2008, Commandant General James T. Conway lobbied for increasing the Marine presence in Afghanistan. In his public statements he made it clear that in his judgment, the expeditionary character of the Marine Air-Ground Task Force (MAGTF) is of greater value in Afghanistan than in an increasingly stable Iraq.
For instance, during a Pentagon media roundtable in August, Conway said that "the force we needed in the Anbar province in 2005, 2006 to fight the [insurgency] at its height is not the force that we need there now to do nation-building and to try to bring the government and the Sunnis closer together." He suggested that while the Marines were "doing a very good job of this nation-building business," in Iraq, they were better suited to other missions. Citing increased violence in Afghanistan, Conway told reporters that "it is [the view of Marine Corps leadership] that if there is a stiffer fight going someplace else in a much more expeditionary environment where the Marine Air-Ground Task Force really seems to have a true and enduring value, then that's where [the Marines] need to be."
Restructuring the Marine Corps for the Long War
In January 2008, the Marine Corps sought to address the stresses on the Marine Corps' strategic concept by issuing "Send in the Marines: A Marine Corps Operational Concept to Meet an Uncertain Security Environment." Its purpose was to describe a new concept of force employment that enhances the ability of Marine units to build security partnerships abroad while still dealing with both irregular and conventional threats. "Send in the Marines" is based on the assumption that the world is tending toward "violent, transnational extremism," that the majority of operations Marines will conduct will consist of shaping and deterrence activities, and that for the foreseeable future, the operational environment will be characterized by the "return of a more primordial form of warfare in which our enemies employ irregular forces in place of uniformed, conventional military forces."
The Marine Corps so described is a multifaceted force designed to operate in a complex security environment. Conflict within this environment has been called "complex irregular warfare." This concept is a refinement of the 2004 National Defense Strategy's categorization of threats as traditional, irregular, catastrophic, and disruptive, suggesting that adversaries will be hybrid forces employing asymmetric combinations of these methods to achieve their goals.
The operating environment in which Marines are most likely to be used is to be found in those regions of the world that have been have called "shatterbelts," "crush zones," or "zones of turmoil." In his 1900 book, The Problem of Asia, Alfred Thayer Mahan described a geopolitical feature he called the "debated and debatable middle strip," the zone between the 30th and 40th parallels in Asia, running from Turkey to Manchuria. Such regions are distinguished by their fragmented political and economic character.
Redrawing the Map
Thomas Barnett identified the modern version of the zone of conflict or turmoil in a controversial article for the March 2003 issue of Esquire entitled "The Pentagon's New Map." Barnett argued that the emerging geopolitical reality the world's most important fault line was not between the rich and the poor, but between those who accept modernity and those who reject it. The former part of the globe Barnett called the "functioning core," the latter, the "non-integrating gap."
The core, where "globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security," is characterized by "stable governments, rising standards of living, and more deaths by suicide than murder." The gap, where "globalization is thinning or just plain absent" is "plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and—most important—the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists."
In these parts of the world we see the factors that unleash the lethal organized violence that has adversely affected the security of the world for at the least the last decade. The first is ethnic disintegration. The second is economic volatility. The third factor concerns empires in decline: When structures of imperial rule crumble, the usual result is a bloody struggle for political power. It is in such unstable regions that expeditionary operations are most likely to occur for the foreseeable future.
The primary means of meeting the Long War challenge is to create the proper force posture and forward operating concept. An important goal identified by "Send in the Marines" is to reduce the "deployment-to-dwell" rotation cycle from the current unsustainable 1:1 (one year deployed to one year at home) to 1:2 in the midterm and eventually back to the 1:3 rotation cycle that prevailed before 2003.
This force posture and forward-operating concept maintains the deployment of Marine Expeditionary Units (MEUs) as part of the Navy-Marine Corps team. It calls for a return to a balanced mix of permanently forward-based forces in the Western Pacific. It also creates a new organized unit designed to enhance efforts in support of what is called "building partner capacity." This new organization is the regionally-focused Security Cooperation MAGTF (SC MAGTF).
The SC MAGTF is similar to a MEU but is task-organized for security cooperation. A major task of the formation will be to provide training to the militaries of developing states. To maximize the effectiveness of security cooperation efforts, standing SC MAGTFs will support three regions: Africa, Southwest Asia, and Latin America, providing the regional combatant commanders with a flexible, expeditionary capability.
At the end of 2007, the Commandant commissioned a Marine Corps Training and Advisory Group (MCTAG). This enables the Marine Corps to provide advisory support that augments the capabilities of the SC MAGTF.
These organizational changes should help to correct any limitations and inefficiencies arising from the Marines' changing operational environments. Implementing the concept at the heart of "Send in the Marines" will create a Corps better able to help advance U.S. interests in a dangerous world.
Marine Corps Operations in 2008
At the beginning of 2008, the personnel strength of the U.S. armed forces was 1,409,897. Of this total, 186,342 were Marines. This represented an increase in Marine end strength en route to a projected total of 202,000 Marines by fiscal year 2011. At any one time during 2008, up to a third of the force was deployed, including over 24,000 Marines in the Central Command AOR. As noted above, the 1:1 rotation cycle placed a great deal of stress on the Marine Corps in 2008, as it did for similarly deployed Army units.
In January 2008, DoD announced that the 24th MEU would be deployed to Afghanistan, joining 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines in response to increasing violence there. The 3,200 Marines and Sailors of this unit began arriving on 17 March for a seven-month deployment. On 1 June, Marines of the 24th MEU launched an operation in Helmand Province in conjunction with British forces. The Marines pushed into areas previously controlled by the Taliban. At the end of April, the 24th MEU launched the first major U.S. operation in years against the Taliban stronghold of Garmser.
Meanwhile operations continued in Iraq. In January, Regimental Combat Team 5 (RCT-5) assumed operational control of much of western al Anbar Province from replaced RCT-2, which returned to Camp LeJeune after a 13-month deployment. Later that month, elements of the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing (3rd MAW) arrived in country and RCT-1 assumed the AOR of RCT-6. In February 1st Marine Logistics Group (1st MLG) replaced 2nd MLG. These changes were part of a rotation that saw units of I Marine Expeditionary Force (I MEF) replace II MEF in Iraq.
Indicative of an improved security situation in Iraq, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines turned over responsibility for Hit, a town in the Euphrates River Valley, to Iraqi security forces in February while Marines from 3rd Battalion, 23rd Marines and the 3rd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion (3rd LAR) conducted a joint heliborne operation with Iraqi security forces in al Anbar.
But Marines were active in regions aside from Iraq and Afghanistan. In April, Marines of 3rd Low Altitude Air Defense Battalion (3rd LAAD) returned from a seven-month deployment to Djibouti on the horn of Africa. And in June, Marines and Sailors of the 26th MEU provided aid to state and local civil authorities in central Indiana in response to heavy flooding in the region.
Marine Special Operations
In October 2005, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld directed the creation of a Marine component within the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOC), and in February of 2006, Marine Corps Special Operations Command (MARSOC) was activated at Camp LeJeune.
MARSOC got off to a rocky start. In the spring of 2007, the Army general who headed U.S. Special Operations Command-Central Command ordered a Marine special operations company out of Afghanistan after a preliminary investigation suggested that following a car bomb attack, the Marines had indiscriminately fired on civilians, killing or wounding more than 40 individuals.
On 23 May 2008, after reviewing the findings of a special tribunal investigating the incident, Lieutenant General Samuel Helland, commander of Marine Corps Forces Central Command dismissed charges against the officers in command of the Marine company accused in the case.
In July 2008, the outgoing commanding general of MARSOC, Lieutenant General Dennis Hejlik, argued that most of the growing pains had been overcome. Hejlik stated that the perception that there is friction between MARSOC and the Marine Corps at large on the one hand and between MARSOC and USSOC on the other is incorrect. "Cooperation and coordination has never been better, and I can only just see it getting better and better as we go through this." MARSOC units were deployed in 16 countries in 2008, including Afghanistan, where they carried out a number of advisory, foreign internal defense, and direct action mission in conjunction with SEALs and Army special operators.
Aftermath of the 2005 Haditha Incident
In November 2005, the Marine Corps reported that a number of civilians had been killed in Haditha by an IED that also killed Marine Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, and that eight insurgents were killed in the ensuing firefight.
But in March 2006 Time magazine ran a story, "Collateral Damage or Civilian Massacre in Haditha?" which claimed, based on interviews with locals, that the Marines had killed 24 civilians in cold blood in retaliation for Terrazas' death. In May of that year, the Marine Corps charged a number of Marines from Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment with killing the civilians and a number of officers for covering up the alleged killings.
The event became a cause clbre for opponents of the Iraq War, with many comparing it to the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War. Eight Marines were originally charged with offenses ranging from murder to dereliction of duty. In early 2007, charges against the most were dismissed. One defendant was acquitted.
At the end of March 2007, the Marine Corps dropped all charges and granted full immunity to Lance Corporal Stephen Tatum, the third of four initially charged enlisted Marines to have all charges dropped.
In June 2007, First Lieutenant Andrew Grayson, a Marine intelligence officer, was acquitted of contributing to the Haditha "cover up" by having a military photographer erase digital photos of the dead Iraqis. Grayson had turned down a plea deal to face charges on five counts that could have led to a maximum of 20 years in prison. The military judge in the case had previously dismissed an obstruction-of-justice charge against Grayson.
That same month, a military judge had dismissed charges of dereliction of duty against the battalion commander of 3/1 at the time of the incident, Lieutenant Colonel Jeffery Chessani, for failure to investigate the killings. The issue in Chessani's case was undue "command influence." On 2 June, then-Lieutenant General James Mattis testified that he neither requested nor received advice from an assistant whose counsel would have tainted the case against Marines connected to the Haditha incident. The military judge in the case, Colonel Steven Folsom, disagreed, stating that "unlawful command influence is the mortal enemy of military justice."
The remaining Marine under indictment is Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich, who faces nine counts of involuntary manslaughter, charges that were earlier reduced from unpremeditated murder. Wuterich was the squad leader of the unit involved in the Haditha incident. His court martial was postponed at the end of February and has not been rescheduled.
Haditha is more likely a tragedy of war than a war crime. It illustrates the reality that our opponents in Iraq chose to deny us the ability to fight the sort of conventional war we would prefer and forced us to fight the one they want—an insurgency. Insurgents blend with the populace, making it hard to distinguish between combatant and noncombatant. A counterinsurgency always has to negotiate a fine line between too much and too little force. Indeed, it suits the insurgents' goal when too much force is applied indiscriminately.
On the other hand, it is also the case that Haditha represented a failure of tactics and leadership. As Bing West, a former Marine and astute observer the Iraq War has written in The Strongest Tribe, "the tactics at Haditha were a disgrace to the Marine Corps. To any trained infantryman, the conduct was inexcusable." They were completely at odds with an effective counterinsurgency approach.
"Resetting" the Force
Marine Corps equipment has generally performed well under operational conditions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, but the extraordinarily high operational tempo has taken its toll. Although equipment losses in 2008 were substantially lower than they were in 2006, the stress remains. The normal service life of equipment is generally reduced by two-thirds during wartime. This places tremendous pressure on the depots, which nonetheless have done a remarkable job of repairing equipment and returning it to service.
As it has in previous years, meeting warfighting requirements in Iraq and Afghanistan forced the Corps to draw equipment from the maritime pre-positioning force (MPF), pre-positioned stocks in Norway, and home-station pools. This in turn has affected the readiness of deploying units and is likely to disrupt Marine modernization. In early 2008, the Marine Corps estimated its cumulative reset cost to be $15.6 billion, of which Congress had only appropriated $10.9 billion.
Marine Corps Programs
Procurement priorities for the Marines in 2008 remained consistent with those of previous years.
The MV-22 Osprey, an assault transport capable of operating from expeditionary airfields and ships and carrying 24 combat loaded troops, equipment, and supplies, is now operating in the Fleet.
The Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV), is a self-deploying, high-water-speed, armored amphibious vehicle capable of rapidly transporting Marines from over-the-horizon to inland objectives. Its advocates consider the EFV the cornerstone of ship-to-objective maneuvers (STOM). As of 2008, it remains in the system development and demonstration phase of the acquisition process. Many Marines have come to question whether the cost of the EFV is too great, given other programs of importance to the Corps.
Mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle (MRAP) is a program dictated by operational experience in Iraq—the need for a vehicle capable of protecting Marines and Soldiers from attacks by increasingly sophisticated and lethal IEDs. By January 2008, 819 MRAPs had been delivered to the Marine Corps out of 2,023 (down from 3,700) required. Unfortunately, the MRAP is not expeditionary, and while necessary for the environment in Iraq and Afghanistan, it diverts resources from programs more consistent with the Marines' expeditionary role.
The triad of ground fires is another important program. The Marine Corps has traditionally relied more on aviation fire support than on artillery. For a variety of reasons, its organic artillery capability has atrophied over the past few years. The triad of ground fires is designed to remedy this situation. The triad is composed of the M777 lightweight 155mm towed howitzer, which has been replacing the M-198 155mm howitzer since 2005; the high-mobility artillery rocket system for general support of the ground force; and the expeditionary fire-support system, designed to provide indirect fire for the vertical assault element of the STOM force.
The joint strike fighter (JSF) is a multi-role fighter optimized for the air-to-ground mission. The Marine variant of the JSF is the short take-off, vertical landing (STOVL) version. On 11 June 2008, the Marine variant of the aircraft made its first test flight near Fort Worth, Texas.
The heavy lift replacement (HLR) program, also known as the CH-53K program, is intended to provide the increased range and payload necessary for the MAGTF to implement EMW.
The future maritime pre-positioning force MPF(F) will enable the robust capabilities required by the sea-basing concept. MPF(F) accomplishes four things that the current MPF does not: permits at-sea arrival and assembly of units; provides direct support of the assault echelon (AE) of the Marine Expeditionary Brigade (MEB); enables indefinite sea-based sustainment for the landing force; and permits at-sea reconstitution and redeployment of the force.
The LHA replacement program/LHA-6 is necessary to provide an affordable and sustainable amphibious ship development program, ensuring an amphibious fleet for EMW. The LHA-6 will be an integral element of the Sea-basing concept. The LPD-17 will replace four retiring amphibious ship classes.
In 2008, the Marine Corps, for the third time since the end of World War II, began the process of recreating itself in order to adapt to the security environment. It was not a complete reinvention. It has involved recombining various aspects of it past—doctrine, organization, and technology—in order to meet the demands of the future.
2008 highlighted the qualities that Marines like to believe characterize our service: not only the "uncommon valor" that Marines have demonstrated in such places as Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Inchon, the Chosin Reservoir, Hue City, Khe Sanh, and Fallujah, but also adaptability and innovative response to changing circumstances.