America upgrades its toughest fighting force

Members of the United States Marine Corps are difficult to miss. The combination of the barked oo-rah! greeting and the severe “high and tight” haircut do rather catch the attention. Its history pre-dates the American War of Independence and the Corps has been at the heart of the US military identity since 1775, never more so than in the Pacific Campaign against Japan in the Second World War. The immediate impression is muscular rather than cerebral. But that is misleading, as no military organisation in the world thinks more deeply about the application of organised violence than the USMC.

That is partly the result of always having to justify its existence. Like marine corps the world over it is the provisional wing of its national armed forces: always disputing proprietorial rights of the land battle with the army and locked in a passionate love/hate relationship with the navy; it rubs along with the air force, but, as it operates over 1,000 rotary and fixed wing aircraft, there is the occasional tension there too. They are the New Prussians in at least two senses. First, the singular sense of shared identity and values gives them a character with at least a passing resemblance to an enclosed Teutonic order; and second, the relentless analysis of the profession of arms has few historical precedents and the Prusso-German General Staff in the late 19^th Century is the most obvious.

They are also formidable. Any outfit that can fight and win the battle for Iwo Jima has a certain resilience, but the key point about the USMC is that it is an inherently joint organisation. Joint in the military sense meaning it is composed of land, air and sea elements. Most armed forces have to make this up as they go along and it is something the British military has always been pretty good at, but nothing beats a joint force which has been designed, trained and equipped to operate simultaneously in the three traditional warfare media. Starting from a maritime base, they pass over the sea and through the air in order to create an effect on land. The fighter pilot delivering his bombs in support of the infantry soldier closing with the enemy wears the same uniform, has been through the same training and shares a sense of fraternal identity — it is a unique characteristic. Weighing in at 186,000 active strength and 38,000 reserves (the British army has a regular strength of around 75,000, with 27,000 reserves), it has more aircraft than most air forces and more tanks than most armies.

Any organisation that can boast alumni like Steve McQueen, Gene Hackman, Harvey Keitel, Lee Marvin and (both) the Everly Brothers is clearly a broad church. It has accommodated its own legends like Chesty Puller (five Navy Crosses in World War II and Korea), Howling Mad (don’t ask) Smith and Minnie Spotted Wolf (the first native American woman to join the Corps; women have served in the USMC since 1918).

As recently as 2018 serving or retired marines were operating as the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs, the White House chief of staff, the Secretary of Defence and two of the six US regional commanders; former marines George Shultz, James Baker, Don Regan, Jim Jones, John Kelly and Jim Mattis have all held cabinet rank offices in administrations from Reagan to Trump. Throw in the recent bosses of Chrysler, Fedex and General Motors and you get the picture. It is the CVs in every walk of American life that contain an interlude — a national rite of passage — in the USMC that is the true testament to its reach. The Corps captures something that is at the heart of America’s sense of its best self that speaks to enduring values in a turbulent world, perfectly caught by its motto: Semper Fidelis — Always Faithful.

So much for the eulogy, now down to business. The 38^th and current Commandant of the USMC is causing a bit of a stir. General David Berger issued a Commandant’s Planning Guidance document (intended to do exactly what it says on the tin) in July 2019 followed by a Force Design 2030 blueprint in March this year. Taken together, they point the way to a fundamental revision of the way the USMC thinks about how it will organise itself to fight the next war. Out will go the mass hit the beaches assault beloved of both Hollywood and Corps iconography; out will go tanks and tube artillery; and out will go a lot of helicopters, some infantry numbers and a third of the planned F-35 fighter aircraft. In will come what is known in the trade as distributed operations capable forces i.e. smaller and more agile groups that depend not on the punch they pack in themselves but the punch they can control from long range, remote firepower; in will come rocket artillery; in will come persistent unmanned aircraft systems (aka drones) that will possess both intelligence collection and lethal payloads; and in will come sophisticated networking with access to cyber, information and space effects as well as more traditional weaponry.  The love/hate relationship with the US Navy will also enter a new phase of mutual infatuation as the revised operational design will only be possible with intimate naval co-operation.

General Berger is guiding the USMC in this direction for two reasons. The first is that it’s what he’s been told to do. The highest level of military strategic guidance given by the Pentagon is the quadrennial National Defense Strategy and the 2018 edition outlined a generational course adjustment away from the post 9/11 preoccupation with terrorism and back to great power competition as the primary focus of national military strategy. It then went beyond the general and into the specifics of the nations it considered the greatest threat, with China front and centre, and that was before trade wars and Covid-19. By ditching the legacy of the First Pacific Campaign, Berger is preparing his corps to fight the second. There is an arresting precedent for this in War Plan Orange, the campaign plan America developed to fight Japan that was developed and refined throughout the 1930s; in the event, the only thing that the plan did not anticipate was Kamikaze attack.

The second is that he has no operational alternative. The Chinese DF-21D ballistic missile can fire multiple terminally guided warheads over 2,000 kms and you get over 1,000 of them for the equivalent cost of a single US aircraft carrier. It is part of a layered missile defence system that is complemented by the ships, submarines and aircraft of the increasingly competent Chinese armed forces that is now able to pursue an area denial strategy within the East and South China Seas. So, if the USMC is going to play a role in, say, recovering territory after a Chinese attack on Taiwan, it will need to replace its limited number of large, expensive and capable amphibious ships with a larger number of smaller, cheaper and more utilitarian platforms. The future lies in the dispersion of effort rather than the concentration of effort which has been the USMC trade mark.

The Berger reforms have attracted a deluge of comment in the military equivalent of the trade press and when even the Economist offers a view, you know it’s serious. The balance of commentary favours a changed USMC approach as part of a wider containment strategy to be used in a potential future Cold War with China. But when the US Marines are contemplating a return to the island chains of the Pacific, it’s a hot war that we need to worry about: Semper Fi.