Compass Points - Lock & Load!

Dr. Antonoff prepares Marines for the fight.

Compass Points - Lock & Load!

Dr. Antonoff prepares Marines for the fight.

July 15, 2026

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Lock and Load!

Marines know what that means.

Insert the magazine. Let the bolt go home.

That should chamber a round. The Marine should be able to fire.

But what if there is no ammunition in the magazine?

With a fire fight about to begin, and no ammunition, that is a problem.

For Marines, and particularly for Marine leaders, there are all kinds of ammunition.

To direct the fight, to give orders, to outwit a hostile adversary, and to adjust to rapid changes on the battlefield, Marine leaders need to be well armed intellectually. Before the battle begins, Marine leaders must have a brain housing group that is fully armed and ready to fire.

Marine Majors are sent to Command and Staff College at Quantico. The aim of CSC is to arm the Marine. Through a series of readings, discussions, staff rides, and problem sets, the Marines are prepared for crises to come. Throughout the school there are knowledgeable instructors, constantly prodding, questioning, and stretching the students’ understanding of war.

For years at Command and Staff College, there was no instructor better than Dr Anne Louise Antonoff, PhD. Dr. Antonoff is President, Antonoff Associates. She is a recognized expert in military-diplomatic history with a focus on War Studies. Dr Antonoff has been quoted, “I use both classical Great Power Politics and emerging strategy and concepts to inform geo-strategic analysis of today’s Great Power competition.”

What does Dr Antonoff think about the education of Marine leaders, about Force Design, and about Great Power Competition today? Like the Majors at Quantico, prepare to be challenged at cyclic rate by Dr Antonoff’s enlightening perspective.

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The Once and Future Marine Corps

An Inquiry into the future of Marine education and operations.

By Anne Louise Antonoff, PhD.

Part 1 - What Happened to Operational Art?

Part 2 - John Boyd, Art Corbett, EABO, and FD2030

Part 3 - Bending the Arc of Future History at CSC and Beyond

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Part 1 - What Happened to Operational Art?

By Anne Louise Antonoff, PhD.

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We have zero operational art right now. Ukraine, like Iran, demonstrates the power and limitations of missile and drone warfare. We inflict pain. Do we change behavior? Do we impose our will?

Marine-manned missile batteries on an island chain can inflict pain but not cost. We cannot outshoot the largest industrial base in the world. We cannot outspend a state determined to subsidize a chosen capability at all cost. Look at how China used the 2008-and-after financial crisis: muscling into the global shipping business. She started at zero. After ten years of driving competitors out during the slump, with massive slack capacity everywhere, she emerged as #2. This is the mentality we are up against. We cannot change Chinese behavior by driving up Chinese expenditure on missiles.

Cost imposition moreover is not forcing extra spending in fighting the war. We must re-read and understand Thomas Schelling -- his original essay, not some latterday perversion of his idea. Cost imposition is something we force the enemy to impose on himself as a diversion from the main effort. We provoke it by investing ourselves in a capability we claim to be the “new new thing” -- think SDI -- but that we know to be less vital to ourselves (less harmful if we fail) than the capability where the enemy is currently focused.

In our current planning, we are inviting the enemy to do more against us of what he already intended. We are arraying a thin blue-green line on his doorstep and calling it deterrence, because we think we can complicate his targeting and force him to shoot more missiles than he planned. ‘Nuff said. Except of course China can also do a Grozny or Mariupol; not take the island but flatten it. What then? Do we destroy the missile sights and drone factories in China itself? But again, to what end? How does this win the war? Neither in Ukraine nor in Iran has that worked.

So, what is the follow up? Where is the joint operational concept? How will we exploit space and time to achieve operational objectives, in sequence or in parallel, to accomplish the strategic goal? What IS the strategic goal? Where do the US forces want to end up?

I have been told our joint operating concept is now reduced to Get In & Get Out. More pounding dirt and water. So the Marines become part of an orchestra of percussion. For how long? With what result?

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Part 2 - John Boyd, Art Corbett, EABO, and FD2030.

By Anne Louise Antonoff, PhD.

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John Boyd has sometimes been called a tactical thinker, but in fact he understood war as few others did. He knew the need to impose one’s will by confounding enemy thinking.

I fear we have been engaged in confounding our own thinking.

In their initial incarnation, EABO and SIF emerged in an institutional vacuum, devoid of strategic guidance other than “the pacing threat.” However, no concept can take shape in an intellectual vacuum. Art Corbett did his best to fill in the blanks.

Art told my students that we needed to understand from the outset what kind of war we would fight; he believed it was defensive in purpose and positional in character, like a reverse of War Plan Orange. This time we (as Japan once did) would be defending in depth, behind the South China Sea, while China (as we once did) would be launching an amphibious/naval drive to impose its will on home islands. Will US Marines alone deter or stop that charge? Can they?

I asked Art, shortly before he died, whether he had thought about what EABO would look like in joint terms. He gave me a weary look and said not yet. Ditto for my question of whether EABO would work in other maritime theaters (I asked about the Baltic and Arctic as an example), or how the concept might have to be altered or the force supplemented to do so.

But Art’s own conception of EABO also was evolving. The night before he died, after co-teaching a wonderful Gray Scholars seminar on sea-power strategy in history, he emailed me to say that I had persuaded him EABO entailed not a revolution, but an evolution in warfare. As a defense in depth, he had always said, EABO was reverse slope tactics, modeled on Germany’s 1917 thinking. Who were the big guns a mile back from the front? Legacy naval forces, the very ones that we could not risk close in. And what would be enforcing the blockade meant to be accomplished by the Marines on the islands? What if China did what Mahan advised, concentrating forces at our weakest point to force a break in the line elsewhere? The legacy fleet.

So, as a naval concept, EABO was not a displacement of but rather a supplement to traditional naval operations.

This was as far as our conversation got. I meant to explore his new way of thinking -- supplementing rather than displacing older capabilities -- and pursue it with him to its logical conclusions. Alas, we were interrupted by life.

We are now at the mercy of other people’s thinking.

I have heard our EABO posture described as a force/fleet in being. For God’s sake, read and understand Julian Corbett. His fleet in being operated throughout British history on several key conditions:

1) to defend the North Sea and Channel -- i.e., to blockade the enemy in the European theater, close to home -- deterring invasion with an active defense while readily supplied and maintained from home ports,

2) all while supplemented by what Nick Lambert has called flotilla defense, and

3) only temporarily, while a squadron detachment dealt with an emergency in, say, North American waters, South Africa, or elsewhere, and then returned, with the result that

4) the full fleet for most of the time was superior to the enemy.

Absolutely not one jot of the above applies to US Marines in the South China Sea. They are to be a permanent deployment, stretched thin, many, many thousands of miles from home ports, within a WEZ denying ready resupply even given a long logistical tether, on the enemy’s front doorstep, facing a nation of 1.6 billion and an industrial base that has displaced much of Western manufacturing and occupies a critical place in Western supply chains, while purporting to inflict cost on that behemoth with a marginal increase in its missile expenditure (see above.)

I explained this Corbettian confusion in a revised naval warfare lesson card and lecture at CSC over a decade ago. It did not bubble upward. There may be good reason still to have an EABO capability, but let’s not drag Corbett into it. Know Thy History -- and as CSC’s Dr. DiNardo says, be ready to throw the BS flag. Lives depend on it.

Finally, what might the justifiable EABO capability be?

I go back to Art’s teaching.

He originally understood the SIF to be Marine logisticians and planners, putting a host-nation face on everything they did. Logistics problems grew more complicated, but the point remains: EABO presupposes intense training and cooperation with island chain nations. In fact, the locals must do it. THEY man the missiles, break up the invading force’s coherence and momentum, and maintain the blockade.

Marines go ashore and wage combat. We don’t need them as a new tripwire at a new Fulda Gap, forever stuck in place because withdrawing them signals loss of resolve, lack of commitment, change of heart --all the psycho-political folderol that kept US forces stuck in Europe for over 75 years after a two-year commitment. (We always meant Europe to grow the capacity and capability to defend itself within NATO.) The fact that we never did fight in Europe owes less to the tripwire and more to the Reagan strategy, a comprehensive approach using genuine cost imposition, psychological warfare and political subversion, information operations, and a very carefully planned and well informed economic warfare.

All of this was backed by the operational artistry of Air Land Battle, which led Soviet generals invited to observe maneuvers at the new NTC to comment ruefully that their soldiers could not do what ours were doing. All of this together, from samizdat to Solidarity, from the Big Five to Brilliant Pebbles, constituted a mutually reinforcing joint/inter-agency/interallied, all-domain, operational campaign, peace-time and grey-zone, that imposed our will without a shot.

Above all, the campaign to end the Cold War took place in global fashion, using the appropriate domains for local conditions. It built on solid allied and partner support from Thatcher to Kohl to John Paul II. It almost defies belief now, but it happened. It worked.

EABO and the SIF will not work without a regional agreement of some kind. All for one and one for all. Blockade chains, even when they are archipelagoes, cannot work any other way.

John Boyd recognized patterns and lessons in history. Are we allowing officers in PME today to do the same?

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Part 3 - Bending the Arc of Future History at CSC and Beyond

By Dr Anne Louise Antonoff, PhD.

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Some Concluding Thoughts.

The points I raised in my previous two posts cover a lot of ground, on purpose. The intrinsic “logic chain” involves multiple timespans and geographical scales. It includes operational, strategic, and grand strategic thinking -- not just weapons and tactics.

I have deliberately used acronyms and historical references without explaining them. They ought to be obvious to any field grade officer or higher. Anyone at any level of command or on any planning staff should know them like the back of his hand. From Mahan and Corbett, 1917 reverse slope, and War Plan Orange, to Grozny and Mariupol, each word or phrase should conjure up images, sounds, sequences of actions as if in a motion picture, and, above all, consequences that do not require explanation.

Who teaches this now? How will the CSC students learn case studies? Will they conduct Clausewitzian Kritik? Will they read Clausewitz? Will they know what Kritik means?

How will they develop operational thinking? What experiences, actual or vicarious, will teach them its meaning and importance? Will they distinguish its purpose-driven progress through time and space from a Big Bang approach to JADO? Will they know how to orchestrate a coalition to impose our will on the enemy?

I fear I know the answers: Unless we take a second look at CSC at MCU, no one will teach history. Students will not conduct case studies. They will not read and understand Clausewitz. They will not know the word Kritik, nor will they practice it under any other name. They will not think operationally. They will not learn JADO independent of a crippling dependency on EBO. (Not a typo; look it up.) They will be unable to command and direct coalitions to accomplish US objectives because they will not learn to connect simultaneous, synchronized tactical actions to such objectives, let alone understand the gravity of not clarifying those objectives in the first place.

They will not know Boyd. They will not understand OODA. They will not study the enemy as a true system, from his historical political culture to his present coalition partners, but only as a collection of infrastructure.

But they will know grand tactics!

And they will know defeat.

Can we change this trajectory now, and bend the arc of future history in our favor?

-- Anne Louise Antonoff, PhD.

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Compass Points thanks Anne Louise Antonoff, PhD for her insights on great power competition and her dedication to educating Marines. The Marine Corps needs a new generation of leaders, fully armed and fully prepared for the next round of conflict and competition. Marine leaders need to be taught hard lessons in the classroom, so they can teach harder lessons to the enemies of the United States.

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US Marine Corps

Weapons Handling

https://www.trngcmd.marines.mil/Portals/207/Block%20WP%20PP%27s.pdf?ver=2017-05-08-170933-317

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