Commandant Stresses Marine Corps Must Change to Meet Peer Threats
The return to an era of ‘great power competition’ and the
emergence of peer military threats “demands in no uncertain terms that the
services need to change to meet the challenges of the new world.” For the
Marine Corps, that change means redesigning the Corps into a naval integrated
force, the commandant of the Marine Corps said Oct. 3.
Although the details of what the future Marine Corps must
become will be developed through a period of experimentation, wargaming and
testing, “in broader terms, it is an integrated naval force. To be competitive
in the Indo-Pacific region and in the Mediterranean and elsewhere around the
world requires a truly integrated naval force,” Gen. David H. Berger said at a
Heritage Foundation forum.
“We have not focused on that aspect for 20 years. We have to
get creative” and examine “what can the Marine Corps … do to help a naval
commander fight his fleet. How does that contribute to a joint fight?”
Berger described Marines seizing land within the enemy’s
“weapons engagement zone” and using long-range precision fires — or putting
Marine weapons on Navy ships — to help the naval commander fight for sea
control.
Redesigning the Corps is his primary focus, Berger said, and
the process will be to look at the threat in 2030 and plan back from there to
determine how the Corps must change.
“The strategic realities will cause us to think differently.
The realities of the world cause us to throw out old assumptions and start
afresh. We cannot assume that today’s equipment, the way that we’re organized,
how we train, how we select leaders, all of our warfighting concepts, we cannot
assume they will remain relevant in the future. My assumption is they will
not,” the commandant said.
Based on his observation and that of others, Berger said the
current Marine Corps “is not optimized for great power competition. It is not
optimized to support a naval campaign. It is not optimized to support the fleet
through missions like sea denial. And it is not optimized to deter a pacing
threat.”
Because the fiscal 2021 defense budget has been submitted to
the White House, any major changes will not show up until the following year or
later, he said. And his assumption is that those future budgets “will be flat
or declining, not rising.”
In his sweepingly provocative planning guidance released
shortly after he took over as commandant, Berger said he was willing, if
needed, to cut the size of the Corps to have money for the modernization of
equipment that will be needed to counter a peer threat.
In his speech and answers to questions, he repeated his
focus on shifting from reliance on the few, large, relatively expensive amphibious
warships, which he said would be vulnerable to interdiction by Chinese
long-range precision weapons, to a large number of smaller, less expensive
manned ships and a wide range of unmanned surface, subsurface and aerial
systems.
“Mass will have a quality all its own. … And low
cost doesn’t mean cheap,” Berger said.