Compass Points - Difficult Diagnosis

Two investigators uncover serious dangers.

Compass Points - Difficult Diagnosis

Two investigators uncover serious dangers.

October 22, 2024

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How should a doctor relay an extremely serious diagnosis?  Should the doctor be a little more measured, academic, and restrained? Or should the doctor be blunt?

Two well-informed observers have investigated the current state of the Marine Corps' controversial Force Design program. Both authors use their experience, insight, and investigative skill to come to a diagnosis. Both have come to much the same extremely serious diagnosis.

Nearly five years ago, the Marine Corps' started Force Design, a program that significantly changed its institutional focus away from global crisis response and toward a more defensive role using Marine missile units on Pacific islands. The Congressional Research Service recently updated its report on the Marine Corps' controversial initiative and listed a roster of concerns for Congress.

Both authors have some of the same concerns. Research scientist Adam Clemens writing in NDU's Joint Force Quarterly, "The Marine Corps the United States Needs" makes clear that instead of Force Design, the Marine Corps needs to re-imagine its roles and missions. While Clemens writes in the restrained and measured language of an academic researcher, he also makes clear that the Marine Corps seriously overstepped when it told DOD and Congress how and where Marine Corps forces should be used. The Marine Corps does not decide how and where it will be used. The Marine Corps receives orders from higher authorities. Specifically, it is the regional combatant commanders, using authority from the NCA, that tell the Marine Corps how and where Marine units will be used.

Adam Clemens writes:

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The Marine Corps needs a mission or set of missions to ensure its relevance in a 21st-century world in which denied environments will become increasingly common. More important, the Marine Corps cannot simply choose the missions it would like to do and hope that the other Services and Congress accept those choices and that our partners and competitors respond to them in a way that improves the competitive position of the United States. The Marine Corps must instead optimize itself to suit the Nation’s needs given the choices made by other actors.

-- Adam Clemens

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Clemens goes on to make some imaginative speculations about possible Marine Corps roles and missions, but his overall point is that “The Marine Corps the United States Needs" is not the controversial Force Design Marine Corps.

In contrast to the frank but measured diagnosis of research scientist, Adam Clemens, another observer has made an even more blunt diagnosis of the Marine Corps and its Force Design initiative. The author, Gary Anderson, is a retired Marine so perhaps it is not surprising that he is blunt. Marines have never been afraid of a hard task or a hard truth. Even the title of his commentary is blunt, "The Marine Corps Has Gone Off the Rails -- The U.S. Marine Corps’ Force Design 2030 has been a dismal failure." What is Gary Anderson's diagnosis of the current state of the Marine Corps?

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A new Congressional Research Service report brings harsh scrutiny to the Marine Corps’ Force Design 2030, with many in Congress and the Department of Defense reportedly having buyer’s remorse. What they thought was a modernization effort has rapidly become an embarrassment — with the Marine Corps’ preparedness hanging in the balance.

. . . But the recent Congressional Research Service report should jolt both into action because the nation has lost key capabilities that Americans, rightfully, assume the Navy and Marine Corps possess.

They can no longer perform large peacetime sea-based contingencies like the 1975 evacuation of Saigon. They cannot execute large humanitarian operations such as the 1991 Sea Angel effort in Bangladesh or the 2005 response to the devastating earthquake and subsequent tsunami in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. They cannot conduct brigade-sized amphibious operations, much less division-sized assaults similar to Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and Inchon. Even worse, the Corps can no longer be a meaningful participant in major regional conflicts such as Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom — it lacks the tanks, armored personnel carriers, and heavy engineering assets that broke through Iraqi lines in both conflicts.

. . . If Congress acted today to repair the Navy and Marine Corps and return it back to 2018 capabilities, it would take at least a decade to recover. Our civilian leaders were sold snake oil, and the rubes bought it.

-- Gary Anderson

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Restrained diagnosis or blunt? One author writes of, “The Marine Corps the United States Needs.” The other author writes, “The Marine Corps Has Gone Off the Rails.” Both come to much the same conclusion, the Marine Corps is not healthy.

With the US facing a growing collection of threats and challenges around the world, it is time for the Congress to step in and guide the Marine Corps away from its failed focus on Force Design. What the Nation still needs today is what the Marine Corps provided so well in the past: a true combined arms 9-1-1 force patrolling the globe on amphibious ships ready to arrive off any troubled coast to deter, assist, and fight.

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 NDU - Joint Force Quarterly

The Marine Corps the United States Needs

By Adam Clemens, CNA

https://digitalcommons.ndu.edu/joint-force-quarterly/vol114/iss2/12/

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The American Spectator - 10/18/2024

The Marine Corps Has Gone Off the Rails

The U.S. Marine Corps’ Force Design 2030 has been a dismal failure.

By Gary Anderson

https://spectator.org/the-marine-corps-has-gone-off-the-rails/