Compass Points – CMC CPG - Sec 4
Reviewing the National Security Strategy
Compass Points – CMC CPG - Sec 4
Reviewing the National Security Strategy
September 16, 2024
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The Commandant recently issued the Commandant’s Planning Guidance (CPG) which provides his personal, broad review of the Marine Corps highlighting issues, challenges, and opportunities.
Nearly at the beginning of the new CPG, the Commandant sets a clear expectation that the CPG is to be read and discussed throughout the Marine Corps, "I expect all Marines to read this Planning Guidance and leaders to discuss its key concepts with their Marines."
It is good to hear the Commandant wants robust discussion about the CPG. In fact, not only does the Commandant call for discussion at the beginning of the CPG, when he reaches the conclusion, he once again calls for robust CPG feedback: "Sergeant Major Ruiz and I look forward to hearing your feedback, and we expect and need your bottom-up refinements to this top-down guidance."
Marines are not shy and already Marines on active duty and veteran Marines are wading into the CPG page by page.
Compass Points has begun receiving detailed, insightful, and often pointed CPG comments and analysis. If the Commandant and the Sergeant Major "look forward to hearing your feedback" they should subscribe to Compass Points and benefit from the wisdom and experience of Compass Points readers.
The CPG is divided into 25 sections from INTENT to CONCLUSION.
Readers are encouraged to read the CPG and provide comments on one or more of the 25 sections. Below are comments and analysis of the CPG Section that discusses the National Security Strategy: Section 4. CURRENT ENVIRONMENT - p 4.
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39th Commandant’s Planning Guidance
Sec 4. CURRENT ENVIRONMENT - Comment & Analysis
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CPG -- The 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS) prioritizes the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as the pacing challenge, and the Marine Corps will continue to modernize to meet it.
Comment & Analysis -
The NDS requires each Service to create and maintain the ability to respond globally and identifies several potential peer-level threats including the PRC, which it identifies as the “pacing threat.” Neither the 2018 nor the 2022 NDSs required the Corps to divest significant amounts of its warfighting equipment and to make the radical structural changes that it did. The Corps’ prioritization and focus on the PRC threat that reduced its capability to remain the nation’s premier global rapid response force was based on a self-imposed requirement, not a requirement of any NDS.
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CPG -- Force Design remains the Marine Corps’ vehicle to create innovative formations, equipment, and concepts and ensures we remain lethal on any battlefield while optimized against the pacing challenge. In practice, our purpose remains the provision of ready forces to meet Combatant Commander and Fleet needs – specifically, through expeditionary Marine Air Ground Task Forces (MAGTFs) capable of combined arms and integration into the Joint Force. Our Service’s measure of effectiveness remains the relevance of our formations against the pacing challenge.
Comment & Analysis -
The leaders of the Corps’ continual claim that its operational forces can operate as combined arms teams is simply untrue! Combined arms are universally recognized as the coordinated employment of infantry, armor, artillery, engineers, and close air support. The Corps no longer has armor, in-stride breaching and bridging equipment; nor does it possess sufficient cannon artillery, and resiliency in close support aircraft to conduct true combined arms operations. Moreover, the Corps cut 21 percent of its infantrymen though they are the centerpiece of combined arms operations. The divestiture of these Marines, weapons, and equipment raises such questions as how will ground forces (1) Breach and clear minefields? (2) Cross gaps and bodies of water? (3) Bring direct fire against enemy positions at extended distances? (4) Provide sufficient direct fire support to units in contact. The effects of cyber, space, and electromagnetic systems can accomplish none of these tasks.
Not only are the assertions in this paragraph untrue, but they also create a measure of cognitive dissonance. The claim that the Corps’ “purpose remains the provision of ready forces to meet Combatant Commander and Fleet needs” conflicts with the claim that the Corps’ “measure of effectiveness remains the relevance of our formations against the pacing challenge.” And this is the heart of the issue; by restructuring rather than task organizing to engage PRC ships along the First Island Chain the Corps has undermined its ability to provide the rapidly deployable and scalable combined arms task forces that have been its strength for three-quarters of a century.
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CPG -- It is important that our Marines share a common understanding of the context in which Force Design is occurring. While Russia is a capable acute threat involved in an illegal war of aggression against another sovereign nation, we must remain focused on our pacing challenge, the PRC, who continues to grow in capability, capacity, and boldness. Every day the PRC practices illegal, coercive, aggressive, and deceptive tactics designed to slowly erode the international rules-based order and advance its own revisionist view of the world. The counter to these tactics requires a whole-of-government approach, in which our expeditionary forces play a critical role through campaigning, deterrence, rapid response to crisis, and contributing to joint and combined combat operations.
Comment & Analysis -
If the PRC seizes terrain anywhere in the Western Pacific the Marine Corps does not have the counterforce required to dislodge that force by the employment of “joint and combined combat operations.” III MEF will consist of three Marine Littoral Regiments each with one Littoral Combat Team, one Logistics Battalion, and one Air-Defense Battalion. The LCT is a reconfigured infantry battalion with an integral missile battery. The MLRs and LCTs do not have the training, equipment, or organization to function as part of a combined arms team or as a regimental combat team. Although I and II MEFs retain the infantry structure on which to build a combined arms MAGTF, they have none of other elements that make up a combined arms team. (Reports that senior leaders are contemplating the 4th MLR would have one or more infantry battalions rather than a Littoral Combat Team is as clear an indication as any that these leaders and their immediate predecessors failed to adequately think through all the implications of Force Design 2030, which, of course, is because they did not use the Corps’ tested combat development process.)
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CPG -- The PRC represents the most challenging competitor in both capability and intent – but every threat, pacing or acute, will continue to learn, adapt, and find new ways to counter the strengths of our Joint Force. Advanced conventional weapons and long-range precision munitions, once only possessed by peer and near-peer militaries, will continue to proliferate in every theater, including their use by non-state actors. By focusing on the most complex and dangerous threat, the Marine Corps will remain ahead of any challenge we face, be it the PRC, Russia, Iran, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or Violent Extremist Organizations.
Comment & Analysis -
This premise that preparing for the most demanding type of combat prepares a force for supposedly lesser forms of combat is demonstrably false and has proven so in the past. III MEF as a force built around missile batteries and without infantry regiments or the other elements of a combined arms force would have little utility in a fight in Europe, the Middle East, or Korea. It certainly could not meet Title 10, USC requirements of the Marine Corps.
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CPG -- Force Design implementation is well underway and continues to benefit from bottom-up refinement across the force.
Comment & Analysis -
Force Design would also benefit from the experience and knowledge of retired and former Marines who have fought in a wide variety of conflicts including against a uniformed enemy operating in company, battalion, and regimental size units employing heavy mortars, artillery, rockets, and on occasion tanks. There are instances where decorated officers with such experience and more have been banned from the Corps’ professional military education programs and denigrated as not having sufficient “expertise.” If the Corps talks only with its current members, it will miss out on the decades of combat experience that former and retired Marines have gained in regular and irregular combat operations.
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CPG -- I am consistently awestruck by the ingenuity and dedication to continual improvement of our concepts and equipment that I see from Marines of all ranks – Marines like Corporal Gage Barbieri, who identified a flaw in the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle’s maintenance program and shared the fix with the entire Corps; or Sergeant Kristopher Hassmer, a Tactical Data Link Maintainer who on his own initiative created a Small Form Factor Air Command and Control system which outpaced industry and was immediately ready for forward employment; or Sergeant Samantha Delgado, who built and tested a “remote kit” for securely operating air search radars thousands of miles away, resulting in an expeditionary command and control (C2) node capable of passing data required for air defense operations. These examples of our Marines’ initiative are what a culture of innovation looks like. We must continue to capitalize on the inherent brilliance of our Marines and implement their innovation at speed.
As we move Force Design forward, we must continually assess where we are, and we must commit our resources in ways that reinforce success. There are no “untouchable” programs – we will assess each program based on its effectiveness and applicability to the future fight. Through our Campaign of Learning we will identify and transition resources away from good ideas that are either ahead of their time or have been proven ineffective after additional experimentation. It is imperative that we continually refine our modernization through experimentation, force-on-force exercises, data, and analysis. Our Campaign of Learning is continuous, and the Service has proven willing to adjust where necessary – including refinements to our quantity of cannon artillery, the size and shape of our infantry battalions, capacity within our Marine Aircraft Wings, composition of our Marine Wing Support Squadrons, and our gap crossing capabilities.
Comment & Analysis -
This paragraph reads like the actions the Marine Corps would undertake before it adopted a new operating concept. They are certainly actions needed prior to divesting significant amounts of weapons and equipment and implementing major changes to organizations as a senior leader did in 2020 and 2021 when he reportedly said he wanted these changes to be irreversible. Why did Marine Corps leaders not use its highly regarded combat development process to avoid conducting what appears to be an “aim after firing” effort?
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Compass Points appreciates all the discussion about the current Commandant’s Planning Guidance and the discussion about the future of the Marine Corps.
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Compass Points – New CMC CPG
Wading into the Guidance
September 10, 2024
https://marinecorpscompasspoints.substack.com/p/compass-points-new-cmc-cpg
What struck me as rather poignant passage from CP analysis is this: “There are instances where decorated officers with such experience and more have been banned from the Corps’ professional military education programs and denigrated as not having sufficient “expertise.” If the Corps talks only with its current members, it will miss out on the decades of combat experience that former and retired Marines have gained in regular and irregular combat operations.”
If the Marine Corps leadership believes that seasoned, combat experienced senior officers and enlisted, have no idea what they are talking about and must be banned from the dialogue, and professional development of/with active duty Marines, should we then tell ALL Marines to stop reading books about combat and strategy, in the tactical, operational, strategic and political realm? Should Marines burn books by Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Frederick the Great, Napoleon and so on.
Marines should fear no one, especially when one is using no weapons but their voice!
In discussion with other Marines, we came to a common conclusion. Our EXSUM? The Commandant signed a document that is empirically provable false. He knows it. I’ve lost “trust and confidence” in his ability to lead the Corps and I’m not alone.
He was surely knowingly aware his false word is widely disseminated and goes to Corps and combatant commander readiness and ultimately national security. Why is he not being called out for it? Because accountability does not exist.