Compass Points - Crumbling Pillars?

The new GCE five pillars are unstable

Compass Points - Crumbling Pillars?

The new GCE five pillars are unstable

August 3, 2026

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Time to cart away the five pillars?

A recent report by the Congressional Research Service has put the spotlight on a new Marine Corps publication called, “U.S. Marine Corps Ground Combat Element (GCE) 2040 Initiative.” Compass Points has previously reported on the GCE 2040 Initiative. Instead of focusing relentlessly on beefing up Marine divisions, regiments, and battalions, the new Marine Corps publication is talking about “five interconnected pillars” of the GCE’s transformation:

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1. Human-Centered Warfighting. Emphasize the individual marine as the central focus of GCE 2040 whereby training, education, and ethos will be needed to succeed on a complex, high-tech battlefield.

2. Lethality. Increase the GCE’s ability to deliver kinetic and nonkinetic effects in all domains by enhancing organic fire support, integrating “joint fires,” and expanding sensing capabilities.

3. Endurance. Protect the force through all-domain defense, resilient logistics, tactical deception, and (electromagnetic) signature management to ensure the GCE can sustain combat operations against a technologically capable peer adversary.

4. Decision Advantage. Achieve dominance through Human-Machine Teaming, which comprises employing artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous systems to accelerate the decision-making process and “alleviate Marines from the most dangerous tasks.”

5. Modularity. Develop scalable and adaptable force organizations, centered on the Marine Air-Ground Task Force (MAGTF) that can be tailored to specific missions and threats (see Figure 1).

-- U.S. Marine Corps Ground Combat Element (GCE) 2040 Initiative

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Compass Points readers have been wholly dissatisfied and often disgusted by the GCE five pillars. A selection of the comments and discussion are included below.

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I just don’t know if I should cry or throw up. When I read garbage like the Five Pillars. I know I am dealing with a sophomoric moron.

-- Douglas C. Rapé

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Embarrassing, but not surprising, when the USMC FAILS TO USE A CAPITAL LETTER WHEN WRITING THE WORD M A R I N E!

-- Samuel Whittemore

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What strategic and operational recon capabilities does the MLR (or future the MRB) provide to the Combatant Commanders that they don’t already possess?

-- Polarbear

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The discussion should focus on the Marine Air-Ground Task Force (MAGTF) as an integrated warfighting organization, not on its individual elements in isolation. If we’re going to continue down this path, should we also expect separate concepts for the other elements of the MAGTF? Addressing the GCE without addressing the MAGTF as a whole as only serves to reinforce the fragmentation of what has always been our Corps’ greatest strength—its integrated combined-arms team.

-- Stephen Baird

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HQMC does not heed its own planning. One of the elements of FD is to “sense and make sense.” If they followed their own philosophy, they would realize/sense that the FD Marine Corps lacks organic firepower for the close battle. They would “make sense”/understand that long-range precision weapons are not going to win a war on their own. If that were the case the conflict with Iran would be over now. Germany and Japan were not defeated by strategic bombing alone. You need to occupy enemy ground with infantry backed by armor and artillery.

-- Randy Shetter

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Force Design thinned exactly those formations — armor, artillery, infantry depth, engineers, and the organic capacity that made a Marine division a middleweight crisis-response force. Now the same institution releases a GCE 2040 update that concedes the enduring requirement to seize and hold ground has not changed, while the units that once met that requirement have been deliberately reduced. That is not transformation. It is a gap between stated mission and residual capability.

The point made about the CCDR score is the practical test. When regional commanders build war plans, they do not ask for conceptual pillars. They ask for forces that can arrive, fight, and sustain. If that score has fallen because the available Marine formations no longer match the demand, the problem is not messaging. It is force structure.

An operating concept focused on warfighting is useful. A new publication about the “ground combat element” that sidesteps the weakened condition of the actual divisions and regiments is not. While the country is conducting strikes and facing multiplying global demands, the Marine Corps should be restoring density and combined-arms capacity — not refining the vocabulary of its own reduction.

The requirement did not change. The capability did. That is the deadly serious part. Semper Fi!

-- Cpl Dan

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The things that stand out as glaring deficiencies to me in the new GCE 5 Pillars document are:

1) A lack of coherent strategy for evaluating, validating, and integrating emerging concepts and technologies into the GCE so they can integrate with relevant capabilities, rapidly address capability gaps, and super cede irrelevant capabilities.

2) A lack of coherent strategy for offsetting current and enduring GCE shortfalls through alternate or supplemental means.

3) A lack of coherent strategy for ensuring the GCE is equipped, trained, and resourced for the expected and unexpected. (Use your issued highlighter to highlight “trained”; it will be on the test)

4) A lack of coherent strategy / operational concept in support of resilient operational logistics for the GCE - especially in light of the dangers related to persistent ISR.

5) Continuing use of ‘kill web’, when we are really just using 25+ year old Air Force article terminology inaccurately for Command and Control networks (of which sensor-shooter is a part, but not the whole).

-- Cfrog

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The Five Pillar Word-Salad Needs Less Salad and Better Words

Both current active-duty and former active-duty Marines are commenting on the unfortunate five pillars of the new USMC Ground Combat Element (GCE) 2040 publication. One well-known, freshly retired senior Marne Corps general was so disappointed in the GCE five pillars, he referenced a recent article mentioning Harry G. Frankfurt’s book, “On Bullshit.” A colonel said he was puzzled because he saw pillars as a reflection of stasis and Marines were always known to be moving forward in the offense. Maybe he is on to something with the Marines’ plan to put Stand-in-Forces on the defensive along the First Island Chain.

Military word-salads can be recognized by an abundance of overly ripe adjectives. In years past, Marine poked fun at the Joint community’s “Focused Logistics” and “Dominant Maneuver,” and a host of other empty phrases from that period. Does any unit ever want “Un-Focused Logistics”? Does any unit ever want maneuver that does not gain an advantage?

Unfortunately, the new GCE five pillars hauls in the adjectives. What are we to make of “resilient logistics” in the Endurance Pillar or “scalable, adaptable units” in the Modularity Pillar? Does any Marine want non-resilient logistics? Marine crisis response MAGTFs are inherently scalable and adaptable, is this supposed to be a new idea?

The most egregious of the five pillars is the first pillar, Human-Centered Warfighting. Are Marines to believe such nonsense that humans were not always at the center of warfighting? Yes technology is crucial in war, but Marines have always known that the technologies can only equip and assist Marines, never replace them.

In the Lethality pillar and elsewhere, Marines have been drawn into the nonsense of “kinetic and non-kinetic effects.” If there was ever a misuse of two words, kinetic and effects are the two. Kinetic is a word from physics which means “the energy an object possess due to its motion,” period, end of story. Of course, what the US military’s use of the word is meant to imply is that units are using an explosive force, that is chemistry, not physics.

The term ‘effects’ itself is detritus from the thoroughly discredited 2002-2008-era of effects-based operations or that terrible three-letter acronym EBO, which took on a life of its own despite General Mattis’ determined attempts to kill it. In ordinary English, ‘effects’ are what you achieve, not what you use to achieve a goal or an outcome. Marines should be forthright and simply say, “We are firing a rocket to destroy an enemy bunker” rather than “We are delivering kinetic effects to destroy an enemy bunker.” Why the jargon? Why the adjectives? Why the word salad?

Strong, clear language is important. Argus John Tresidder was a professor at the professional schools at Quantico from 1969 until the mid-1980s. He taught generations of Marines how to write clearly and simply. Dr. Tresidder was a Cornell-educated English professor who served in the US Navy during World War II and later retired from the US State Department as a Foreign Service Officer. Today’s Marines would benefit from reading a few of his articles from the Marine Corps Gazette; they could start with “Tell it as it is” from 1972 or “Tickets to Good Communications” from 1977. If they are truly motivated, they will hunt down a copy of his book, “Watch-Word: A Glossary of Gobbledygook, Cliches, and Solecisms” The book was published by the Marine Corps Association in 1981.

The Merriam Webster dictionary says that the word “gobbledygook” is a real word that means “wordy and generally unintelligible jargon.” The latest example is the Marine Corps Ground Combat Element 2040’s five interconnected pillars. Repeatedly, the text either says nothing that is understandable, or what it does say would be patently obvious if it were explained in clear and simple English.

During the Marine Corps’ post-Vietnam War intellectual renaissance, a common warning often used in the offices, classrooms, and seminars of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command was, “Words are important.” Marines today would be well advised to again heed that warning. In all professional communications, Marines should select their words carefully. While the right words at the right moment can be crucial, word-salads are always poisonous.

-- No more five pillar gobbledygook

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Does the Marine Corps need the five pillars of GCE 2040? Does the Nation?

Not even close.

Compass Points thanks all the Marines and friends of the Corps who are working to build a stronger Marine Corps. There are some encouraging signs, a few sprouts after seven years, of enterprising Marine leaders at many different levels inside the Marine Corps who are successfully repairing the damage to Marine combined arms capabilities. The progress is fitful and much slower than it needs to be, but ‘two steps forward and one step back’ means at least modest progress is being made toward a stronger, combined arms, crisis response Marine Corps. When a great ship is moving in the wrong direction, getting it back on its true course is never quick nor easy, but in the end, persistence prevails.

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CRS - IF13276 - 07/28/2026

U.S. Marine Corps Ground Combat Element (GCE) 2040 Initiative

By Andrew Feickert

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF13276

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