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In crafting its doctrine and force sti future, the Marine Corps may need Operational fads and short-term ga sway the Corps from its first princi expeditionary amphibious forces, de depth as integrated air-ground task
ucture to meet an uncertain to find the courage not to change, ns should not be allowed to pie: organization and training of ployed intact and employed in forces.
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The periods after wars always have been difficult for the Marine Corps. Defense spending declines, the President and Congress grapple to shape the role of the United States in a new world order, and the Marine Corps struggles to avoid marginalization or absorption by hungry sister services.
To survive the recent victory of the grand strategy of containment, the Marine Corps must again revalidate its usefulness and, where necessary, reinvent itself. There is ample precedent for this. The amphibious mission evolved after the end of World War I.
The idea of an expeditionary force-in-readi- f| ness followed World War II demobilization, and a general top-to-bottom revitalization and refocus was undertaken after the Vietnam War and the provocative Brookings Institution paper, “Where Does the Marine Corps Go From Here?”
These are clear examples of the Marine Corps’ ability to redefine itself with respect to the demands of the age, and all of them share a common thread: They required the enlightened preparation of doctrine and forces 1 in the present to meet an uncertain future. The challenge is no less today.
Successful anticipation of future requirements is key to maintaining a potent Marine Corps that will survive this interregnum and I ■? live into the next century. Wise choices must 3 * be made in today’s fiscally constrained en-§
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^"rine Corps is defined by two concepts:
First, the Marine Corps is an expeditionary force with 5 "aval character—maneuvering from the sea to operate ^ ’he land.
f Second, Marine operations are conducted within the Dtnework of an integrated air-ground team.
ironment—to create, sustain, and refine doctrine and force T’ructure poised against tomorrow’s potential foes. Animation of who tomorrow’s Marines will fight and what hey will be required to do demands discriminating vision ’"d the moral courage to change—or not to change, if ’'ore appropriate.
These choices will be expressed in the ways the Ma- "ne Corps fulfills its service responsibilities of equipping, Gaining, organizing, and supporting forces for the war- hghting commanders-in-chief. In the post-Goldwater- ^ichols world, the war fighters enjoy enormous power. It ls these commanders—through their integrated priority ''sts, congressional testimony, and their access to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—who can control the mis- S|ons of service components in their fiefdoms.
In balancing the commanders-in-chief’s requirements 4"d internal imperatives, the Marine Corps operates within a triangular framework. Its three sides are doctrine, force s’ntcture, and training. Sound decision making is based 0,1 understanding and controlling the dynamic, causal relationship between current and future doctrine and force structure. Forces built and trained without workable, cogent doctrine are doomed to failure. Doctrine written Without reference to the future is equally worthless.
°ctrine: Now and in the Future
Operational maneuver from the sea is the soul of the Marine Corps. It is the Marine expression of the white paper’s broader naval focus, with seabasing its fundamental tenet. It provides for the rapid deployment and subsequent employment of naval expeditionary forces with all the advantages—both tactical and strategic—granted by control of the seas. This doctrine recognizes the relative unlikeliness of a traditional amphibious assault, and much attention is devoted to the myriad of other activities that can be conducted in littoral areas, including war and circumstances short of war. Humanitarian operations such as those in Somalia and Bangladesh represent the low end of this continuum, while Desert Storm and Korean contingencies stand at the high end.
Both amphibious and sustained operations ashore are united by the Marine Corps’ air-ground team. This doctrine calls for the synchronized application of aviation and ground combat power, which gives the Marine air- ground task force (MAGTF) commander the flexibility to strike both deep and close areas with a powerful aviation component. The aviation combat element as a coequal component of the MAGTF is critical, because the ground combat element is traditionally lighter, hence “poorer” in towed and self-propelled artillery than comparable army formations.
Institutionally, the Marine Corps is recovering from a decades-long doctrinal trough, in which it reduced its combined-arms doctrine, born in Korea, from potent elegance to empty dogma. While chanting the air-ground team mantra, Marine leaders let the ground combat element of the MAGTF assume primacy in planning, while the other two elements (the air combat element and the combat service support element) supported the ground concept of operations. This planning syllogism now has changed as part of the maneuver warfare revolution of the 1980s. A painful renaissance of the MAGTF command element is virtually complete. The swiftness and virtuosity of the MAGTF, composed of equal air, ground, and service support elements, is the glue of Marine Corps doctrine. It permeates every aspect of Marine Corps tactical thinking.
Force Structure
Doctrine drives force structure. Since Korea, this has produced three functionally different types of MAGTFs: amphibious forces, prepositioned forces, and special- purpose forces.4 In looking at the future, it seems likely that variations of these three models will remain the basis for the Marine Corps’ forward-deployed structure.
Amphibious Forces: The Marine expeditionary force (MEF) is the largest amphibious force, and would be employed only in a major regional contingency.5 Other forces that might be deployed include amphibious ready forces and airlift alert forces. All of these forces are constrained by time. They either are not immediately available, or they are employable rapidly only outside a traditional MAGTF task organization. Until the recent rise of the special purpose MAGTF (SPMAGTF), the only force that has been readily available is the Marine expeditionary unit (MEU).
The MEU—composed of an infantry battalion, a heli-
copter squadron, logistics support, and a command element—epitomizes Marine Corps amphibious forces. MEUs in some form have been employed for more than 30 years in forward-presence missions. Based on board three to five amphibious platforms, a MEU is task-organized with the amphibious squadron with which it has trained. Together they form a Marine amphibious ready group. This force possesses great operational depth and flexibility, manifested principally in its ability to conduct operations simultaneously and on extremely short notice. In response to the commanders-in-chief requirements, the Marine Corps maintains a MEU in the Mediterranean, the Pacific, and in the Persian Gulf.
MEUs operate in the realm of deterrence, diplomatic resolve, and missions short of sustained combat. The MEU is diplomatically “cheap.” It requires no basing rights or overflight agreements. It can be postured rapidly and with veiled intent. These forward-presence forces can enter forcefully—alone or in concert with airborne or other joint elements. Once through the front door, they enable either heavier combat or humanitarian assistance forces to follow rapidly. Innate flexibility, joint interoperability, rapid response, and the escalation control unique to seabased organizations are the hallmarks of Marine forward-deployed forces.
Today and tomorrow the greatest threat to forward presence lies in well-meaning attempts to retain capabilities while reducing the strain on ships, personnel, and equipment. The U.S. Central Command’s deployment of a scaled-down MEU in 1992-1993 as an amphibious task unit is a classic example. 15th MEU was not “whole;” it did not possess all of its equipment or personnel on boa[1] its amphibious ships. Instead, in a curious Rube Gold berg artifice, a single prepositioned ship was tagged join up with the MEU, meeting a fly-in-echelon of troop from the United States. While saving personnel temp1 days, this scheme gutted the MEU of all its tradition advantages, significantly reducing its flexibility and cofl1 bat power.
Maritime Prepositioning Forces (MPFs): MPFs wrf born in the mid-1980s, when the Marine Corps played global war scenarios against the Soviet Union. Thr£i squadrons of ships, each preloaded with combat equip ment and sustainment for a Marine expeditionary brigade were positioned in selected forward ports. The plan W*1' to marry up this equipment with Marines flown in to $ adjacent airfield.
In the 1980s, there were powerful advantages to su a scheme. It provided a fairly rapid buildup of comb3: power in excess of a comparable light Army division the same period, and it reduced the commitment of strata gic lift at the start of a general war.
The prepositioning decision looks even better now th3*1 it did at conception. In a global war against the Soviet the slow-steaming maritime prepositioning squadron1 would have had little chance of survival against the S0' viet gauntlet of submarines and long-range naval aviation Today, with the steady weakening of the sea-denial thren1' these squadrons can reach almost any region witho1*1 fear of strategic interdiction. The successful employing of maritime prepositioning ships in Desert Shield an1 Desert Storm stands as a strong lesson in the powerfn utility of these ships.
Maritime prepositioning forces are the critical link b6' tween tripwire and sustained conflict. But unlike arf phibious forces, they have significant political limitation They are not diplomatically “free,” because they requi^ a host nation that will allow the entry of the squadron air the arrival of the flown-in Marines. The introduction 0 additional combat forces into an area of potential confl'c!
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Can be escalatory. The prepositioning forces thus beanie a strong signal of resolve on both our part and, in- e'uctably, on the part of the host nation. Many nations "'*11 shrink from such a stand.
Maritime prepositioning forces and amphibious forces are fundamentally different and irreconcilable, unless they are employed in accordance with their capabilities. Amphibious forces enter and secure, forcibly or otherwise, ^positioning forces add combat power, depth, and sustainment, but in sequence, not simultaneously.
Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Forces: As Psrt of the search for ways to create forward-deployed forces “on the cheap,” in 1992 the U.S. Atlantic Command proposed the establishment of a company-sized Ma- One force on board a carrier. Austere aviation and combat service support elements were colocated with the c°rnpany, along with a small command element.
The carrier-based SPMAGTF, the current adaptive joint- force paradigm, possesses none of the operational depth of a MEU. Once ashore, the company has no mobility, lit- l*e firepower, and only the carrier air wing for support.
can be inserted only by helicopter, which requires the carrier battle group to move dangerously close to a po- Mitially hostile shore. This mismatch of operating en- Vfilopes either forces the carrier battle group to operate °titside its element, or, most likely, forces the SPMAGTF l° conduct operations at extreme helicopter range, with 110 backup. Every operation thus has the potential for disaster that attends extremely long-range helicopter operations. Additionally, the carrier’s antiair capability is 'Veakened by making room for the Marine helicopters.
There are advantages to adaptive force packaging, and fhere is certainly a role for its current naval manifestation, ti>e SPMAGTF. The advantages are in the fiscal and per- s°nnel arenas, however, not in operational capabilities. To sUrvive, the SPMAGTF must be linked directly to precise c,rcumstances, circumscribed in time and space, carefully Vibrated to the nuances and specifics of a particular sit- ^tion. To attempt to employ these forces as MEU sur-
-in a fixed deploy-
Crafting doctrine and force structure requires foresight, to balance conflicting visions of the future. It requires courage, to defend the product of foresight. Finally, it requires persistence and integrity, to articulate and hold to a vision over the long run. This means rejecting the lure of short-term compromises that promise transient advantages but deviate from the basic values of the institution.
War is waged most effectively from first principles, and the first principle of the Marine Corps is the continued organization and training of expeditionary amphibious forces, deployed intact and employed in depth as integrated air-ground task forces. These forces, using our doctrine, possess the flexibility, combat power, and simultaneity that will be critical in future regional wars, across the spectrum from low to mid to high intensity. They must remain whole, self-contained, and capable of action without escalatory reinforcement, yet capable of joint interoperability.
Both the Central Command and the Atlantic Command have sponsored initiatives that may alter fundamentally the organization and doctrine of forward-deployed MAGTFs. These ideas are just the bow wave driven by many others, all of which will seek to impose regional, fiscal, or other constraints on Marine Corps general-purpose forces. The Marine Corps must not stand by idly while these changes are implemented. We must be full partners in the dialogue. Where the changes are good, we should support them. Where they clash with our first principle, they must be opposed.
The Marine Corps must retain its singular vision of how to fight; once abrogated, it can never be recovered. The Marine Corps brings unique and compelling options to a commander’s strategic menu. There is no need to rush to change, to modify, or to recast an organization because of operational fads. As General Vandegrift said in his May 1946 testimony before Congress, “the bended knee is not a tradition of our Corps.”6 If we must pass from the stage, let it be because our capabilities are judged no longer needed after hard-headed analysis, not because we changed sound practices capriciously and ill-advisedly in pursuit of the chimera of “operational correctness." 'Mackubin T. Owens, "The U.S. Marine Corps in Review," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, May 1993, p. 131.
:Julie Bird, “Anytime, Anywhere,” Air Force Times, 29 March 1993, pp. 12-17. 'Michael Vlahos, “. . . From the Sea and the Politics of Change,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, February 1993, p. 47.
4As opposed to the traditional three MAGTFs: MEF, MEB, MEU. These three, of course, are all functionally similar, hence the differentiation.
'Under new Marine Corps doctrine, MEFs are defined by their command element rather than by assigned forces.
hG. W. Reiser, The U.S. Marine Corps and Defense Unification 1944-47: The Politics of Survival (Washington: NDU Press, 1982), p. 56.
Major McKenzie is a member of the Commandant’s Staff Group, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps.
The Navy-Marine Corps 1992 white paper, “. . . From Sea,” described a changed role for naval forces in
1*le national military strategy. Shifting from open-ocean, £lobal war to a regional, green-water outlook, the white ^Per emphasized the effects of joint operations from rather "’an on the sea. Conceptually, this littoral focus granted "le Marine Corps a central role in naval operations. Un- "rtunately, the fresh concepts of the white paper did not P£netrate the collective thinking of defense planners.* 1 11
The emphasis on jointness struck many as “operational c°rrectness”—a craven attempt to slice a larger share of a" ever-decreasing budgetary pie, like the Air Force’s hur- "ed attempt to field and (most importantly) advertise their composite 366th Wing as a global power-projection Orce.2 Critics quickly labeled “. . . From the Sea” a po- ’’■cal document, designed against an internal Department Defense foe, that “deflected” rather than confronted the u’ure.3 Ironically, Marine doctrine has not been materi- ?**y changed by “.. . From the Sea.” With this white paper,
[1] ’s the Navy that has moved closer to a war-fighting strat- e2y that showcases the unique capabilities of the Corps— labilities that have been available for more than 40 ^e;trs, but that were overlooked by the Cold War planners ^ ’he Navy as they focused on the Soviets and a possi- e nuclear Midway. y p Operational Maneuver From the Sea and the Air- rd 'w°Und Task Force: The enduring “style” of the modern