Compass Points - Focus on Warfighting
Compass Points - Focus on Warfighting
Compass Points - Focus on Warfighting
Bring back warrior culture
January 17, 2025
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Bring back warrior culture. In his testimony before the Senate, Secretary of Defense nominee, Pete Hegseth, made it clear that he has been tasked by the incoming Commander-in-Chief with making sure the US military focuses on warfighting.
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As I’ve said to many of you in our private meetings, when President Trump chose me for this position, the primary charge he gave me was—to bring the warrior culture back to the Department of Defense. He, like me, wants a Pentagon laser focused on warfighting, lethality, meritocracy, standards, and readiness. That’s it. That is my job.
-- Pete Hegseth, SASC, January 14, 2025
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If Hegseth wants to focus on warfighting, perhaps he and his inner circle should read or re-read the Marine Corps' foundational publication: MCDP-1 Warfighting. MCDP-1 is the update of the original Marine Corps publication, FMFM-1 Warfighting. Together both publications have been translated and re-translated, studied and applied, not just by military units around the world, but by a wide variety of high achieving enterprises. Warfighting summarizes the essence of war.
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The essence of war is a violent struggle between two hostile, independent, and irreconcilable wills, each trying to impose itself on the other. War is fundamentally an interactive social process. Clausewitz called it a Zweikampf (literally a “two-struggle”) and suggested the image of a pair of wrestlers locked in a hold, each exerting force and counterforce to try to throw the other. 4 War is thus a process of continuous mutual adaptation, of give and take, move and counter move. It is critical to keep in mind that the enemy is not an inanimate object to be acted upon but an independent and animate force with its own objectives and plans. While we try to impose our will on the enemy, they resist us and seek to impose their own will on us. Appreciating this dynamic interplay between opposing human wills is essential to understanding the fundamental nature of war
-- MCDP-1 Warfighting pp1-3,4
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How valuable is the Marine Corps book, Warfighting? The civilian book review site, Goodreads.com, has high praise for Warfighting, describing it as the "quintessential guide to prevailing in competitive situations."
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Warfighting is an authentic American philosophy of action that will thrill the millions of fans of SunTzu's The Art of War and Musashi's The Book of Five Rings. This modern classic of strategy and philosophy is the quintessential guide to prevailing in competitive situations, be it war, work, play, or daily living.Sometimes life is war and sometimes business is war and sometimes you need to call in the Marines. Over the past two hundred years, the Marines have developed a reputation for getting the job done—fearlessly, boldly, and taking no prisoners.
What better role model for the hidden warriors in ourselves? What better advice to call on when the stakes are high and sensitivity just isn't going to work? Written in 1989 as a philosophical and strategic guide-book for the US. Marine Corps, Warfighting is a worthy successor to SunTzu's The Art Of War. With clarity, brevity, and wisdom, it describes the basic forces at work in every competitive situation whether on the field of battle, in the boardroom, or in the courtroom. With twentieth-century technology and its emphasis on speed and versatility, the rules of war and competition have changed. Warfighting's exploration of maneuver warfare takes readers beyond Sun Tzu's classic lessons and provides them a more thorough understanding of what it takes to fight and win in the modern world.
-- Goodreads.com
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It is very strange but over the last few years, the US Marine Corps, the world's expert on maneuver warfare has changed its focus away from maneuver warfare. Instead of keeping is focus on global, combined arms, offensive units prepared to use speed, creativity, and a warrior esprit to help any friend and fight any foe, the Marine Corps has turned its focus away from offense. In fear of modern precision munitions, the Marine Corps has retreated to a plan for small units of missile Marines scattered on islands off he coast of China.
Over the last 5 years, the Marine Corps has continued to focus on these Pacific island missile units. Over the same years, the Marine Corps has slashed its established global, combined arms units, equipment, and capabilities.
The result of the last 5 years is the Marine Corps has depleted its combined arms, crisis response capabilities without gaining any actual deployed missile units. Just as the incoming Commander-in-Chief and the incoming Secretary of Defense both want to bring back a warrior culture and a focus on warfighting, the Marine Corps needs to restore its own warrior culture and rebuild Marine crisis response capabilities.
What needs to be done now to restore the muscle and might of the Marine Corps? Author and Marine Gary Anderson, in his most recent article, "Has the Marine Corps Lost Its Edge?" provides some suggestions.
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If the Secretary of the Navy wants to preserve the Marine Corps’ legacy, urgent action is needed.
First, leadership must change. Appoint a Commandant committed to restoring the Corps’ combined-arms capabilities and its role as a global rapid-response force.
Second, halt or reassess Force Design until tangible results are achieved.
Finally, re-prioritize investments in platforms and strategies that ensure the Corps’ readiness to respond to crises anywhere, anytime.
Rebuilding the Marine Corps to its pre-2019 capabilities will take years, but it’s a necessary step to deflect the kind of existential questions posed above. Anything less risks the future of one of the world’s premier fighting forces.
-- Gary Anderson, "Has the Marine Corps Lost Its Edge?"
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It is time to rebuild the warrior culture and rebuild the Marine Corps. Compass Points salutes author and Marine Gary Anderson and both the incoming Secretary of Defense, and the new Naval Secretary, as well as all the friends of the Marine Corps working to enhance and restore Marine Corps units, equipment, and capabilities so that when the Nation calls 9-1-1, the Marine Corps is ready to answer.
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Goodreads.com
Warfighting: The US Marine Corps Book of Strategy
By Alfred M. Gray Jr.
Rating 4.26
1,050 ratings. 69 reviews
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19489855-warfighting
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The Defense Post - 01/16/2025
Has the Marine Corps Lost Its Edge?
The Marine Corps’ shift toward unproven anti-China strategies has weakened its core capabilities, leaving it vulnerable to scrutiny from the upcoming Department of Government Efficiency.
By Gary Anderson
Gary Anderson served as the Chief of Plans (G-5) of the Marine Corps Expeditionary Force responsible for the Indo-Pacific area. He was the Director of the X Unit, which evolved into the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab. When he retired, he was the Lab’s Chief of Staff. He lectures on Alternative Analysis at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.
https://thedefensepost.com/2025/01/16/marine-corps-doge/
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I admit up front I am not as well-read as those who contribute to Compass Points. And my seven years of active duty in the Marine Corps does not stack up to those who have given their careers to the Corps and continue to do so after service. The slight advantage or insight I have is two years with the amphibs in the mid-1970's on two ships. I know how difficult it is to load, embark, debark, and conduct an amphibious exercise. The Navy and Marines both have to be excellent and professional. The Marines can become even better warfighters but without ships, they cannot perform the mission. The Navy has demonstrated poor quality leadership, poor maintenance, poor ship design, long construction time, and other problems many of you have read. We need to push for an improved, professional Navy at the same time we work to refocus, rebuild, and restructure the Marine Corps.
Semper Fi
One of the problems is that the 38th and 39th CMC became distracted and then dilusional in their views of what and where the Marine Corps ought to go. Any CMC can get very bright Mairnes and or outside consultants to craft a cogent argument for FD2030 and “divest to invest.” Obviously they did just that, ergo they got distracted from a warfighting culture of maneuver warfare to one of chasing a “peer foe” in a combantant region (which is HUGE) and playing hide and seek in a totally defensive posture with no regard to logistics. It has been a puzzling time, General’s Berger and Smith are not dumb people, but here comes the dilusional part, they deluded themselves and the DC cocktail circuit or vice versa that skipping Title X was fine, that the MEU, MEB and MEF had seen their best days and moved on. Nearly everything they prognosticated was wrong or off kilter. The USA assuming that the new administration even bothers to keep the Marine Corps around, is going to find itself in a new war on terrorism, the bad guys such as Al-Qaeda and Isis are clearly reconstituted, on the move and likely many terror cells here and abroad waiting for orders. One might opine that “October 7th” was a dress rehearsal. To combat these threats we will need a highly agile fully complementary MAGTF that can attack from the platoon level and up, with full combined arms capability. No military outfit on the earth currently can mix and match men and equipment to the situation as fast and functionally as the USMC. Further, no fighting force has the Marine Corps secret sauce, namely “US” meaning we Marines and our ethos. We can find, fix and kill the enemy. We need strident senior officers to go up on the hill and tell the various committees that we are ready to degrade, wound and kill bad guys in that simple language that most Marines speak in. The language of FD2030 and “Divest to invest” is college theory talk. Time for hard talk, and a revitalized MAGTF that will meet the many small to medium engagements that are coming down the line. If it comes to a peer foe fight it’s gonna be a lot more than a couple of MLR’s being engaged or even an entire US Marine Corps, so sticking to our knitting and getting back to basics seems the order of the day.