In April 2024, Marine Corps Commandant General Eric M. Smith reiterated his top priorities: “balancing crisis response and modernization,” and ensuring “naval integration and organic mobility.” In Commandant’s Frag-O 01-2024, “Maintain Momentum,” Smith further explained: “Effective naval integration involves naval forces fully prepared to compete, fight, and win with naval force offerings to Combatant Commanders, supported by Naval Doctrine and aligned with the Joint Warfighting Concept.”
The Marine Corps is well positioned to meet these important priorities, but there are many opportunities for improvement.
Times of Deep Uncertainty
The force faces both a strategic inflection point and a period of critical vulnerability stemming from today’s volatile geopolitical environment and the domestic conditions of transition and uncertainty that will prevail well into 2025. Elections always bring change; the coming year will be no different. Aside from welcoming a new Commander in Chief, the nation will turn over thousands of leaders within the executive branch, Congress, and the national security apparatus. This metamorphosis brings with it new strategic guidance, new visions for the nation’s future, and evolved funding decisions. The inevitable change is juxtaposed by inertia as Beltway decision-making processes stall to accommodate the newly elected, appointed, and hired.
Amid the bustle and transformation, some stability and predictability remain. After almost two decades of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States has refocused on China as its most likely adversary—its pacing threat. External forces are driving the modern inflection point that is changing the face of war today. New adaptations are on display across the battlespaces of Ukraine, Gaza, and the Red Sea. For example, Russia has learned to overcome expensive, smart sensors and weapons and forced Ukraine to bring back “dumb ordnance” to counter Russian jamming. The Houthis have used hundreds of inexpensive drone engagements to force the U.S. to expend millions of dollars-worth of high-tech weapons. In the process, they have shaken global trade routes. China’s military has expanded rapidly, and Beijing’s global ambitions extend well beyond their Belt and Road initiatives. Adversaries around the world surely recognize the U.S. period of transition and vulnerability. Washington also must recognize the risks it faces during this period and be ready to respond.
What the Marine Corps Is Getting Right
The Marine Corps must maintain the momentum it generated in recent years with the promulgation, adoption, and evolution of Force Design 2030, Distributed Maritime Operations, Littoral Operations in a Contested Environment, A Concept of Stand-in Forces, similar doctrinal guidance, and an array of updated operations plans. The question is how.
First, there are many things the Marine Corps is doing right: innovation and communication, resourcing, and maintaining an appropriate emphasis on its role as a warfighting organization.
In innovation and communication, the Marine Corps continues to lead the way. While many strategic and operational concepts and documents are years overdue for review and rewrite, the Marine Corps has been prudent in updating and communicating its doctrine and planning concepts. As articulated by others previously, naval doctrine “drives investments, planning, manning, and every facet of tactical operations; it is the canon of operational preparedness.” The Marine Corps is adept at routinely articulating its latest vision. Force Design gets an annual update—the most recent being May 2024’s colorful, graphic-heavy Force Design, A Snapshot—and in July 2024 it published its Artificial Intelligence Strategy, with clear concepts for a complicated topic. In June, it released its latest Training and Education Annual Report, which directed 37 separate Force Design-related actions covering everything from new policies, goals, and standards for Marines’ training and education. This report also highlighted a plan to revise 27 prioritized publications within 24 months.
Regarding resources, the Marine Corps has always been known for “doing more with less” and for being good stewards of the taxpayers’ dollars. In February, the service announced that it had passed its full financial audit with an “unmodified audit opinion” by third-party auditors after an intense two-year review. The review included more than 70 site visits. It accounted for millions of pieces of ammunition and thousands of pieces of equipment and property assets.
On warfighting, evidence of the Marine Corps’ excellence is found in The Heritage Foundation’s 2024 Index of U.S. Military Strength. Based on the three broad categories of capacity, capability, and readiness, Heritage identified the Marine Corps as “strong” and elaborated that of all the services, “the Marine Corps is the only one that has a compelling story for change, has a credible and practical plan for change, and is effectively implementing its plan to change.”
Yet there are several things the Marine Corps can and should do better.
Steps Toward Further Improvement
All Marines should work harder to communicate clearly, in simple terms, and know their audience. The alphabet soup of acronyms, jargon, cliches, and catchphrases that passes for effective communication in the halls of the Pentagon or within the cubicles of combatant commands and Marine Corps headquarters buildings too often comes across as gobbledygook to others. It does not translate as well on Capitol Hill or in the field with young Marines. Explaining a concept on paper in a doctrinal publication is different from laying out a vision for senior civilians or media representatives. Leaders at all levels should communicate up and down the chain with more purpose and clarity. Dmitry Filipoff illustrated some of the naval services’ communication shortfalls when he wrote in July that the distributed maritime operations concept “suffers from a wide variety of interpretations,” “needs more specificity,” and “lacks sufficient coherence and concrete focus.”
On the innovation topic, one dead horse beaten repeatedly, yet without much equine movement, is in the counter-unmanned systems realm. An April 2007 Proceedings article identified the unmanned aerial systems (UAS) threat going back at least to mid-2001 and recommended reallocating some of the billions which, at the time, were pouring into the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization to address the growing unmanned threat. Seventeen years later, the evolved threat is pervasive. There are some positive signs, such as Replicator, a Department of Defense initiative introduced in August 2023 and led by the DOD’s Defense Innovation Unit. The program aims to field thousands of uncrewed systems by August 2025. Nevertheless, insufficient attention and resourcing remain problems, despite the industry’s search for solutions and repeated calls from the ranks to “make every Marine a drone killer.”
Another innovation roadblock is the tendency to remain tethered to existing doctrine, training plans, and assumptions. Between 2010 and 2012, famous senior leaders Mike Mullen, Robert Gates, James Mattis, and H. R. McMaster all commented in various arenas about how, when it comes to predicting the location and nature of the next U.S. military engagements, Washington has a perfect record of never getting it correct. A global warfighting perspective must endure.
Similarly, the Marine Corps should remain cautious about harnessing its littoral mobility plans and strategies to systems and materiel, rather than anchoring them on adaptable capabilities and the expertise of the Marines themselves. An example is the high-risk reliance on the Navy’s medium landing ship (LSM). The Marine Corps says it needs 31 LSMs, yet the Navy’s procurement schedule includes one in fiscal year 2025, another in fiscal year 2026, two more in fiscal year 2027, two more in fiscal year 2029, and 10 or more after—and these projections assume a perfect world of predictable funding, without inevitable maintenance or developmental shipyard delays. Marine riflemen can still train to become low-signature, agile, self-sustaining ship- and missile-killers operating within the enemy’s weapons engagement zones. But, at the same time, the force also should train for difficult and unpredictable urban warfare, Arctic conflict, and other increasingly neglected skills.
Paths to Greater Integration
The Marine Corps also should strive for better integration with the other services, particularly in support of the 2023 Joint Warfighting Concept. A few years ago, “naval integration” as a concept drew high praise. Integration was even set to bring the Coast Guard into the naval fold to a greater degree. While there has been incremental progress in the years since—such as integration at the staff levels, and more liaison officers at various headquarters—naval integration remains primarily a blue-green teaming effort, with still much to be achieved to realize the vision.
Looking beyond the seas, the Marine Corps also should put greater energy into collaboration with the other services. The Army’s “transforming in contact” process encourages experimentation with new technologies and tactics and encourages feedback from troops in the field to build on a culture of “continuous transformation”—a culture the Army undoubtedly has learned to foster based on the Marine Corps. Synchronizing with their “Operations Pathways” program (pairing Army units with partner nations in the West Pacific region, another page gladly shared from the Marine Corps’ playbook) would help to better prepare Marines and soldiers alike, not only for the joint fight of the future, but also for combined action with the service members of allies and partners. Marines also should participate more often in innovative Air Force initiatives. Two Marines recently were selected to participate in the Air Force- and MIT-hosted “Artificial Intelligence Accelerator” project. While this is promising, it needs to be an example of continued integration efforts, rather than a one-off exception.
Marines also should strive to better understand how adversaries operate below the level of conflict. Greater understanding will help the Marine Corps explore opportunities to more effectively counter adversaries within that spectrum.
China’s cultural influence and investments over the past decade-plus are very well documented, and the cultural battlespace continues to evolve. These efforts influence Western audiences’ perspectives not only through success in shaping the content of American-produced movies, but in the distribution of its own movies. One great example of the latter is 2021’s popular The Battle at Lake Changjin, commissioned by the Chinese Communist Party, which dramatizes the Chinese army's actions at the Battle of Chosin Reservoir and is streamed in the United States on several online services.
Relatedly, American sports, entertainment, and business investments in China run in the trillions. Planners should consider the potential effect of reluctance by these entities to support U.S. military actions that might affect their profits. A nonkinetic Chinese takeover of Taiwan—similar to China’s subsuming of Hong Kong—is possible, but not often considered. What role could the Marine Corps play to prevent this from occurring, or to educate people about China’s role in disturbing the global order below the threshold of armed conflict? Marine Corps Warfighting Publication P 8-10, Information in Marine Corps Operations, reminds its readers that “DoD personnel do not intentionally disseminate information to influence U.S. domestic audiences, organizations, or individuals, to include U.S. Service members and their families.” But an appropriate restriction against domestic psychological warfare should not stop creative thinkers from developing ways for the Marine Corps to more effectively counter propaganda from China or elsewhere.
Closer to Home
Along the same line of thought, the Marine Corps should expand its vision for homeland defense. Marines prefer to think of the service as 100 percent expeditionary, fighting on or near foreign soil—the so-called “away team”—and have night sweats under the posse comitatus blanket whenever the question arises of conflicts at, near, or within U.S. borders. Yet the Joint Warfighting Concept states:
The security and effective operations of U.S. critical infrastructure….are essential to mobilize, project, and sustain joint forces. [Joint Forces] integrate and synchronize a broad range of military activities to defend the homeland against aggression and attack. These activities include the defense of the domestic population, the critical infrastructure of the United States and its territories…primary homeland defense actions include active and passive measures to defeat threats already deployed or en route to a target.
The Russians are increasingly sending ships and crews for visits to antagonists such as Cuba and Venezuela. How would Marines execute distributed maritime operations or expeditionary advanced base operations in the Caribbean or South America if so directed? Marine Corps and naval forces have responded domestically in times of crisis such as Hurricane Katrina. What would the response look like if Chinese saboteurs executed elaborate cyber and kinetic attacks against key infrastructure from within U.S. borders—and perhaps killed hundreds of civilians in multiple cities? What role could the Marine Corps be tasked with?
Marines will no doubt remain steadfast throughout this period of transition and vulnerability, maintaining their momentum and leaning forward as updated strategic and operational guidance continues to evolve and the geopolitical environment offers new and unforeseen challenges. With the enduring support of the American people and more robust integration with service partners, the Marine Corps will, as always, remain ready to fight in any clime and place as the nation’s premier force-in-readiness.
