The 3rd Marine Division is being converted to three MLRs. The 3rd Marines and 12th Marines have already been redesignated MLRs. The 4th Marines is next up. Said another way, 1 of the 3 active Marine Corps Divisions has been restructured and reorganized into irrelevance. The bill payer for this transformation has been I and II MEF under the misguided concept of “divest to invest.”
The purpose of the MLRs in III MEF are to forward deploy SIFs inside contested areas to sink PLAN ships. Each MLR has one Naval Strike Missile Battery. The NSM is subsonic and short-range (115 NM or thereabouts). The shorter missile range means the SIF must deploy deeper into the Chinese WEZ to even theoretically get off a shot.
But, the Marine Corps has no capability to deploy, redeploy, or logistically support widely dispersed and isolated SIFs inside the WEZ. The current and previous Commandants put all their eggs in the LSM basket - - articulating a requirement for 35. The Navy has reduced the requirement to 18. None have been built to date. Five have some visibility in the budgeting process. The main stumbling block to procurement is survivability. The ships as currently envisioned are simply not survivable, despite Marine Corps pronouncements that they will blend in with commercial shipping and go to ground and hide when the shooting starts.
With or without the LSM, the SIFs cannot be logistically supported. With no SIFs, the MLRs are irrelevant. Without MLRs, Force Design is irrelevant. Alarmist or realist?
Your comment regarding III MEF is disingenuous and misleading. I’ll still refer to the regiments as regiments not MLRs. If we’re talking a full up Marine Division, then there’re 3 infantry regiments, one artillery regiment, one combat engineer battalion, and one HQ battalion.
Let’s start at the top. HQ Battalion is located on Okinawa. 3rd Marines is located in Hawaii. We have parts of another infantry regiment located in Australia and other parts located throughout the Pacific such as on Guam. If I recall correctly 3rd MarDiv has approximately 2 infantry battalions located on Okinawa for direct tasking. And that’s before 3rd MarDiv picks up any MEU taskings. III MEF has no MEB deployable. I don’t even know if they have a standing MEB HQ.
Let’s move to the 12th Marines, the “supposed” artillery regiment. 12th Marines has been designated an MLR regiment! They now have AT BEST 1-2 batteries of tubed artillery, and I’m not sure they even have that. Now I’m a cannon cocker by trade, but my education may be a little dated but I’ll go with what I know. FM 6-20 states that the MINIMUM artillery support is one battalion of tubed artillery to a maneuver brigade, in our case we’ll call a regiment equivalent to a brigade. An artillery battalion is the smallest artillery unit that is assigned a supporting arms mission, except for the unique mission of a dedicated battery.
So now that 12th Marines is an MLR regiment where does the MEF get its artillery support? The uninformed answer is “well they just drop their missiles and fall in on their gun tubes”. Ah not so fast. When the Commandant “divested” the Corps of tubed artillery he went all the way. He didn’t keep them at depot level, he turned all those howitzers over to the Army, who promptly declared them excess and gave them to Ukraine. As of Jan. 2024, the BAE production line was closed. In Jan. BAE agreed to open the line, but major components won’t be delivered until sometime in 2025.
You say so what they have HIMARS. HIMARS are not suitable for direct support missions. They are designed to shape the deep battle. If you think that a HIMARS is suitable for a DS mission I’ll let YOU be the FO to call for the FPF to be fired. Me, I’ll be a click away.
But that’s not the worst of it. Where will the Corps get their 08s from. Just as you don’t magically produce an 03, the same goes for 08s, and that’s ANY 08…0802, 0811, 0844, 0848, etc. Where are they now, not in the Corps I assure you.
Bottom line is the Corps is ill equipped to fight ANY type of battle in the Indo-Pacific, except the “Die In Place” battle.
“Artillery is intermediate range weaponry lacking precision and weighing tons, requiring trucks, fuel, trucks, fuel, trucks. Such a range can be addressed by multiple means (air, drones, missiles) with more precision.”
Actually trucks are not the fuel hogs you state, so let’s address that up front.
You obviously haven’t been keeping up with the strides field artillery has been making since the end of the GWOT. The Army’s M109A7 and the Army/Marine Corps M777 have made huge advances recently. The A7 with conventional HE has a range of 21km, with RAP a range of 30km, and with Excalibur a range of 40km all with the current M284, 39 caliber tube. In March of 2023 the Army’s ERCA, 58 caliber tube achieved a range of 68 mi. with the XM-1155-SC round. In October 2023 the Army tested the XM-1155-SC with the 39 caliber tube but didn’t disclose the range achieved. Experts think they achieved a 55-60 mi range.
The M777 with a 39 caliber gun tube fires the same suite of ammunition as the M109A7, with a 39 caliber tube, and achieves the same range with the same CEPs.
Let’s address the subject of ammunition.
The basic 155mm HE round is the M795 with a CEP of 139 meters at maximum range. With an M1156 PGK fuse the CEP shrinks to 50 meters. It was demonstrated on German DM111 shells in September 2014 fired from a PzH2000 self-propelled howitzer, at a distance of 27 km (17 mi). 90 percent of the PGK-equipped German shells landed within 5 meters of the target.
The RAP HE round M549A1 has a CEP of 267 meters at maximum range.
The M982 Excalibur round with a range of 40km has a CEP of 1.1-3 meters at maximum range. This round was specifically designed to be able to fire within 75 meters of troops safely, and can also be used in a direct fire mode as it has an automatic sensing 3-way fuse. HIMARS and mortars…not so much.
In conclusion tubed artillery can service targets to shape the deep battlefield (General Support or General Support/Reinforcing). In fact if the ERCA is ever revived and deployed, at 68 mile range it out ranges all HIMARS’s rockets except for the ER GMLRS, and the ATACMS. Tubed artillery can easily transition to the intermediate and close in battle (Direct Support or Reinforcing). Artillery systems not only have HE rounds but HC-Smoke, WP, Illumination, and soon the M1180/M1208 DPICM rounds.
So, the Corps leadership has decided to not be able to fight the close in battle except for mortars, and not enough of them, to service all the targets that both tubed artillery and tanks are better suited to service. As I said before this is the perfect Die-In-Place mission.
You obviously have never needed to call for close-in artillery support in a a battalion-size enemy attack. I have on more than one occasion and it was worth its weight in gold, so I am hardly supportive of your arguments. I imagine you are supportive of the so-called Stand-in Force and its missile battery with as much if not more of the support you denigrate in the case of artillery and those missile are useless for the close battle. I'm beginning to think the old "close with and destroy" Marine Corps has disappeared with the false hope of new technologies. We've seen this siren song too many times before to be sucked in again.
Nice try, but no prize. I'm talking about operating forces--from the MEFs.
I wasn't born yesterday; I've read every nonclassified document the Corps put out and the SIFs were intended by Berger to be "shooters" not sensors or any of his other late excuses when the inherent infeasibility of them became obvious.
Also, I see you gave no answer for the counter-factual information about cannon artillery that you offered.
You are sounding more and more like an academic rather than a warfighter; please ensure me otherwise so we can continue to engage.
The 3rd Marine Division is being converted to three MLRs. The 3rd Marines and 12th Marines have already been redesignated MLRs. The 4th Marines is next up. Said another way, 1 of the 3 active Marine Corps Divisions has been restructured and reorganized into irrelevance. The bill payer for this transformation has been I and II MEF under the misguided concept of “divest to invest.”
The purpose of the MLRs in III MEF are to forward deploy SIFs inside contested areas to sink PLAN ships. Each MLR has one Naval Strike Missile Battery. The NSM is subsonic and short-range (115 NM or thereabouts). The shorter missile range means the SIF must deploy deeper into the Chinese WEZ to even theoretically get off a shot.
But, the Marine Corps has no capability to deploy, redeploy, or logistically support widely dispersed and isolated SIFs inside the WEZ. The current and previous Commandants put all their eggs in the LSM basket - - articulating a requirement for 35. The Navy has reduced the requirement to 18. None have been built to date. Five have some visibility in the budgeting process. The main stumbling block to procurement is survivability. The ships as currently envisioned are simply not survivable, despite Marine Corps pronouncements that they will blend in with commercial shipping and go to ground and hide when the shooting starts.
With or without the LSM, the SIFs cannot be logistically supported. With no SIFs, the MLRs are irrelevant. Without MLRs, Force Design is irrelevant. Alarmist or realist?
Again.. .FD2030 is proving to be a colossal disaster for our Corps and its readiness!!!
One small step in the right direction.
This is great news!
Your comment regarding III MEF is disingenuous and misleading. I’ll still refer to the regiments as regiments not MLRs. If we’re talking a full up Marine Division, then there’re 3 infantry regiments, one artillery regiment, one combat engineer battalion, and one HQ battalion.
Let’s start at the top. HQ Battalion is located on Okinawa. 3rd Marines is located in Hawaii. We have parts of another infantry regiment located in Australia and other parts located throughout the Pacific such as on Guam. If I recall correctly 3rd MarDiv has approximately 2 infantry battalions located on Okinawa for direct tasking. And that’s before 3rd MarDiv picks up any MEU taskings. III MEF has no MEB deployable. I don’t even know if they have a standing MEB HQ.
Let’s move to the 12th Marines, the “supposed” artillery regiment. 12th Marines has been designated an MLR regiment! They now have AT BEST 1-2 batteries of tubed artillery, and I’m not sure they even have that. Now I’m a cannon cocker by trade, but my education may be a little dated but I’ll go with what I know. FM 6-20 states that the MINIMUM artillery support is one battalion of tubed artillery to a maneuver brigade, in our case we’ll call a regiment equivalent to a brigade. An artillery battalion is the smallest artillery unit that is assigned a supporting arms mission, except for the unique mission of a dedicated battery.
So now that 12th Marines is an MLR regiment where does the MEF get its artillery support? The uninformed answer is “well they just drop their missiles and fall in on their gun tubes”. Ah not so fast. When the Commandant “divested” the Corps of tubed artillery he went all the way. He didn’t keep them at depot level, he turned all those howitzers over to the Army, who promptly declared them excess and gave them to Ukraine. As of Jan. 2024, the BAE production line was closed. In Jan. BAE agreed to open the line, but major components won’t be delivered until sometime in 2025.
You say so what they have HIMARS. HIMARS are not suitable for direct support missions. They are designed to shape the deep battle. If you think that a HIMARS is suitable for a DS mission I’ll let YOU be the FO to call for the FPF to be fired. Me, I’ll be a click away.
But that’s not the worst of it. Where will the Corps get their 08s from. Just as you don’t magically produce an 03, the same goes for 08s, and that’s ANY 08…0802, 0811, 0844, 0848, etc. Where are they now, not in the Corps I assure you.
Bottom line is the Corps is ill equipped to fight ANY type of battle in the Indo-Pacific, except the “Die In Place” battle.
Do you remember all your schooling from 45 years ago? What’d you have for breakfast last Monday?
“Artillery is intermediate range weaponry lacking precision and weighing tons, requiring trucks, fuel, trucks, fuel, trucks. Such a range can be addressed by multiple means (air, drones, missiles) with more precision.”
Actually trucks are not the fuel hogs you state, so let’s address that up front.
You obviously haven’t been keeping up with the strides field artillery has been making since the end of the GWOT. The Army’s M109A7 and the Army/Marine Corps M777 have made huge advances recently. The A7 with conventional HE has a range of 21km, with RAP a range of 30km, and with Excalibur a range of 40km all with the current M284, 39 caliber tube. In March of 2023 the Army’s ERCA, 58 caliber tube achieved a range of 68 mi. with the XM-1155-SC round. In October 2023 the Army tested the XM-1155-SC with the 39 caliber tube but didn’t disclose the range achieved. Experts think they achieved a 55-60 mi range.
The M777 with a 39 caliber gun tube fires the same suite of ammunition as the M109A7, with a 39 caliber tube, and achieves the same range with the same CEPs.
Let’s address the subject of ammunition.
The basic 155mm HE round is the M795 with a CEP of 139 meters at maximum range. With an M1156 PGK fuse the CEP shrinks to 50 meters. It was demonstrated on German DM111 shells in September 2014 fired from a PzH2000 self-propelled howitzer, at a distance of 27 km (17 mi). 90 percent of the PGK-equipped German shells landed within 5 meters of the target.
The RAP HE round M549A1 has a CEP of 267 meters at maximum range.
The M982 Excalibur round with a range of 40km has a CEP of 1.1-3 meters at maximum range. This round was specifically designed to be able to fire within 75 meters of troops safely, and can also be used in a direct fire mode as it has an automatic sensing 3-way fuse. HIMARS and mortars…not so much.
In conclusion tubed artillery can service targets to shape the deep battlefield (General Support or General Support/Reinforcing). In fact if the ERCA is ever revived and deployed, at 68 mile range it out ranges all HIMARS’s rockets except for the ER GMLRS, and the ATACMS. Tubed artillery can easily transition to the intermediate and close in battle (Direct Support or Reinforcing). Artillery systems not only have HE rounds but HC-Smoke, WP, Illumination, and soon the M1180/M1208 DPICM rounds.
So, the Corps leadership has decided to not be able to fight the close in battle except for mortars, and not enough of them, to service all the targets that both tubed artillery and tanks are better suited to service. As I said before this is the perfect Die-In-Place mission.
You obviously have never needed to call for close-in artillery support in a a battalion-size enemy attack. I have on more than one occasion and it was worth its weight in gold, so I am hardly supportive of your arguments. I imagine you are supportive of the so-called Stand-in Force and its missile battery with as much if not more of the support you denigrate in the case of artillery and those missile are useless for the close battle. I'm beginning to think the old "close with and destroy" Marine Corps has disappeared with the false hope of new technologies. We've seen this siren song too many times before to be sucked in again.
Nice try, but no prize. I'm talking about operating forces--from the MEFs.
I wasn't born yesterday; I've read every nonclassified document the Corps put out and the SIFs were intended by Berger to be "shooters" not sensors or any of his other late excuses when the inherent infeasibility of them became obvious.
Also, I see you gave no answer for the counter-factual information about cannon artillery that you offered.
You are sounding more and more like an academic rather than a warfighter; please ensure me otherwise so we can continue to engage.
I think the concern with the amphib ship buy was that the proposed LSM program
of 18-36 ships would detract from the bigger L Class ships.