Compass Points - Infantry Battalions
Fewer battalions? Smaller battalions?
Compass Points - Infantry Battalions
Fewer battalions? Smaller battalions?
September 9, 2023
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In every field there are fast answers and slow answers.
At a hospital emergency room, a doctor looks at a gunshot wound and stops the bleeding immediately Fast answer. Five floors up, a team of doctors study a patient with a perplexing condition. The team of doctors do not act immediately. They study immediately. They search for slow answers. They read up on every case like this one. They review new developments, new treatments, and new medications. They do a literature search.
Senior doctors will always ask the doctor in charge of the perplexing case, "Have you done a literature search?" In other words, have you taken the time to learn the history, to broaden your perspective, to learn from doctors and patients who have gone before?
Taking time for a literature search is critical. Perhaps a young resident one morning excitedly tells the doctor in charge of the perplexing case that he thought up a new solution. The doctor in charge will listen to the idea and then ask the young doctor, "Have you done a literature search?" Do not just waive around an idea. Get the history. Get perspective. Get informed.
The Marine Corps is experimenting with changes to the Marine infantry battalion. Writing for the Marine Corps Times, Marine and author Todd South has written a thorough and fascinating article on the latest thinking about Marine infantry battalions.
Todd South reports,
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Before these experiments began, the infantry battalion manning stood at approximately 965 Marines, which emerged from an early 1980s study and reconfiguration that reduced the post-Vietnam War sized battalion of more than 1,000 Marines.
The new Marine manning now sits at 811 Marines . . . .
There are 21 active-duty infantry battalions and eight Marine Reserve battalions. The service cut three active-duty infantry battalions since 2020 as part of Force Design 2030.
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The new idea for Marine infantry battalions is first, to eliminate three of them entirely and then, second, to reduce the number of Marines in each remaining battalion from 965 to 811. Fewer infantry battalions? Smaller infantry battalions?
The Marine Corps has a long history in war and peace with infantry battalions, with companies, platoons, and squads. The Marine Corps has made changes over the years. The question is what is the right size and number of Marine infantry battalions today?
One Compass Points contributor, when asked about the changes to Marine infantry battalions, posed three questions.
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First -
Have they considered the need for all infantry units to possess resilience, the ability to take causalities and continue to function effectively? Resiliency demands large units: 13 Marines in squads, 40-45 in platoons, 180-200 in companies, 1,000-1,200 in battalions. Improved weapons and equipment are not a valid rationale for reducing the size of infantry units even if this hardware (or software) makes those units more effective. Precision weapons may mean more casualties -- not fewer casualties -- which makes resiliency even more important. This is the hard lesson from combat experience that we appear to relearn in the years following all our wars. Let's not wait until after the shooting starts to relearn the importance of resiliency.
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Down through history to today, infantry is of central importance in every fight. We are seeing this now in Ukraine. History gives many more lessons. Even at the height of mobile and mechanized operations in Europe during World War II, there was a dire need for more infantrymen. Russell Weigley’s book, "Eisenhower’s Lieutenants" illustrates this as he describes the efforts to retrain tens of thousands of soldiers from other MOSs to be infantrymen in late 1944 and early 1945.
Later during Vietnam, all the lieutenants graduating from several of The Basic School companies in 1969, no matter their assigned MOSs, were given orders to Vietnam as infantry officers. Despite the developments of new technology, the need for skilled, determined infantry never goes away. To carry the fight to the enemy in the battles of the past and in the battles of the future, we need infantry and infantry leaders.
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Have they done a literature search? Have they done the work to understand what the Marine Corps has learned from the battlefield about the right size for squads, platoons, companies, and battalions? For example, a squad of 13 with three fire teams is substantially better than having only two fire teams. There is an entire study by the Center for Naval Analyses on squad size. It takes study to understand how small changes in the numbers of Marines, make a big difference in a fire fight.
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Todd South ends his article about the current experiments with the Marine infantry battalion by telling a story about two Marine Majors who meet with a Marine General officer about changing the size of the infantry battalion:
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They wanted to talk about the need to reorganize the Marine infantry Battalion.
“I said, gentlemen, let me tell you a story. When I came in the Marine Corps, we had a weapons company -- that went away. Now it’s back. When I came in, we had 60 mm mortars, they went away before Vietnam and then came back and then went away again. And I’ve seen this thing played over and over and over. We keep reinventing the wheel.”
Then he had a task for the two ambitious majors.
“I want you to tell me the history of the Marine Corps infantry battalion, so we don’t end up repeating things that are erroneous,” . . .
“They went away, and I never heard from them again.”
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Although Todd South ends his article with the two Majors walking away, there is more to the story. One of the Marines, after walking away, devoted much of the rest of his life to compiling an exhaustive and definitive study of the infantry battalion down through history. The history of the infantry battalion by the late Lt Col John Sayen is being prepared now for publication.
What should be done about Marine infantry battalions? Fewer battalions? Smaller battalions? It is easy for someone to waive around a new idea, a new answer, but there are all kinds of answers. Fast answers and slow answers. Dumb answers and wise answers. Uniformed answers and informed answers. There are new ideas by themselves or, something far better, new ideas placed in a context of study, history, and experience.
Compass Points salutes Todd South for his fine article on the changes being considered for the Marine infantry battalion. Compass Points also salutes all those experienced Marine leaders who have the wisdom to ask, "have you done a literature search?"
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The Marine Corps Times (marinecorpstimes.com) 09/08/2023
The new Marine infantry battalion is slimmer, saltier and more techy
By Todd South
Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.
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Center for Naval Analyses
Development of the Squad: Historical Analysis
Ahmed Hashim
CRM D0002705.A1/Final
October 2000
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD1014512.pdf
I'm afraid they're going to have to learn the hard way. Think about current conditions and mindsets, which are prevalent in the active duty force today:
-Marines who enlisted or accessed in 2001 are approaching 22 years in service
-These Marines are Staff NCOs and Field Grade Officers who have never known warfare pre-2001.
-These Marines have only known slow-moving, certain, violence-minimized warfare that values persistent ISR, precision, and the immediate gratification of a kill in support of CT/COIN.
-These Marines have not been encouraged to study history; these Marines have been primed to read "Ghost Fleet" and "The Kill Chain."
-These Marines truly believe, based on their experience and their PME value system, that the past way of warfare is passé. Violence, Friction, and Uncertainty, while described by Clausewitz as the Nature of War, have been eliminated by Progress. The future way of war will be different than all of human history.
Today's senior leaders are complicit in this mindset, as they've been dazzled by defense contractors advertising the latest technology, pressured by political fads, and have abandoned their philosophical groundings.
This is the future, and they will only learn the hard way.
The Corps went from 27 Infantry Bns to 21. The Bn’s over time went from 1100 plus to the current number of about 800 with additions of all sorts of additional Marines while shrinking the squads to 11. All of this is justified by fantasies and supposed greater situational awareness and “increased firepower”. Where is this firepower? Additionally these BNs will not have tube artillery in support. In the defense, what does the FLOT look like. To those who claim it can maneuver better I would ask how does it March faster? A rendezvous with reality is coming. It will not be pretty.