Compass Points appreciates professional comments and feedback from all points of view. Many readers commented on a post previewing Vision 2035. In particular the chapter called, The Choice.
Vision 2035
The Choice – Commit to a war in the Pacific or retain the ability to respond globally?
Comment # 1
Your opening question is based on bad data. You ask "Should the Marine Corps focus on a high-intensity conflict in the Pacific with the PRC or should it remain American’s global response force?" It seems to be based on the idea that only the current regiment can be the basis for global response.
Yet when completed FD2030 will have three MLRs and five regular regiments. Even if you assume the MLRs cannot assist with global response, there are still five regiments capable of doing so. The Corps deployed 6 regiments to Desert Storm. So its total global response force is only somewhat smaller than the one the Corps built with 6 months time to deploy. Seems more than a bit of exaggeration to state that the Corps will have no global response force.
Current operations in Ukraine are revealing the severe deficiencies of towed artillery and have revealed how quickly tanks can be destroyed by a variety of weapons that out range them.
Reply to Comment #1
Compass points contributor CFrog and many others responded to the comment:
Brother, your whole response is bad data. You are critiquing a reasonable question about the posturing of the force design for the USMC . . .
CFrog went on to discuss current operations in Ukraine:
. . . Current operations in Ukraine have the Ukrainians asking for more tube artillery and artillery shells as they fight a protracted artillery battle with the Russians. The HIMARS have been great, but are used in compliment to the volume and mass of tube artillery. Current operations in the Ukraine have the Ukrainians recovering and reusing every tank and armored vehicle they can get their hands on, in addition to asking for ammunition appropriate to those vehicles.
Another Compass Points reader agreed with CFrog:
Those five regiments [mentioned in Comment #1] have no armor, 67 percent fewer cannon batteries, no additional rocket batteries, 33 percent fewer AAVs, no assault bridging, 30 percent fewer helos and fixed wing, significantly fewer amphib ships, and an emasculated MPF. And oh by the way, none of the new FD 2030 capabilities to which he refers are on line or even close to operational.
Compass Points believes neither Congress nor the Commandant Commanders are in favor of a weaker, more narrow, less capable Marine Corps.
CFrog -- Yes the Ukrainians have asked for more artillery -- but NOT M777s. Towed artillery is too slow, too immobile and too short range. They like SP (wheeled or tracked) and rocket systems. You might have noticed that it was NOT tube artillery that cut down the Russian rate of fire but HIMARS destroying Russian ammo dumps that were well out of range of the tube artillery they had. The destruction of numerous ammunition dumps reduced the rate of fire of Russian artillery by more than 2/3.
One of the primary historical causes of obsolescence is lack of range. From the cross-bow armed peasant killing armored knights to carrier air destroying battleships to loitering munitions destroying armored vehicles being able to kill an enemy long before he gets into range has been key to the departure of previously dominant systems from the battlespace. Its one reason why the US is scrambling to figure out how to deploy airpower to Asia. Chinese drones, ballistic and cruise missiles vastly outrange our F-16, 18, 15, and 35s.
We can keep dumping money into systems like the M777, M1, and F35 that are already range obsolete or we can reshape our Corps so it can actually survive on the modern battlefield. FD2030 is the first step in that direction.
Long ago I was on then MGen Al Gray’s staff at the Development Center. One of his succinct “teaching points” was, “You go to war with what you have”. The current CMC stripped out assets long before the whiz-bang wonder weapons are to be in Marine’s hands. And I am unaware of a budget battle ever won by giving up systems and saying your new systems will cost less than those you already gave up. The main thing our Corps brings to the battlefield is the individual United States Marine.: their courage, tenacity and incredible ability to innovate combines with their utter certainty that they cannot be beaten.