State of the Marine Corps

What the heck is going on with the Marine Corps?  This is a Navy blog and I don’t follow the Marine Corp to the same degree but recent Marine Corps news is disturbing, to say the least.  I listened to a presentation by MGen. Frank McKenzie speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and it was eye-opening.  This is a bit long but has some stunning revelations.  It's worth the time to read this.

The General opened by stating that the Corps was directed to develop a “new” Corps in response to budget pressures and the need to implement a 20% overall cut with a target of FY17.  The new Corps will have an end force of around 174,000 with a deploy:dwell of 1:2  (example, 7 months deployed and 14 months home) in order to meet demands with the available resources and will be focused on forward presence and crisis response as opposed to heavy combat.  The Corps will become lighter and more mobile.  McKenzie noted that the other services target 1:3 dwell.

He identified two programs that he views as vital to the Corps moving forward.  The Marines want to protect the JSF, at all costs, and the amphibious combat vehicle (ACV) but noted that Corps needs significant time, still, to define what that vehicle will be.  Really?  How many years have the Marines been working on AAV upgrades, the EFV, and similar options?  -and they still don’t know what they want?

He further noted that the new force will have reduced numbers of artillery and tanks and be more focused on crisis response and humanitarian assistance and disaster response (HA/DR).  Huh?!!  The Corps is deemphasizing combat?  Who’s in charge of this movement?  I know Commandant Amos is unpopular in many circles but this is almost criminal.



Semper Fi?



McKenzie noted, “If we were developing a strategy driven force, we’d take a 186.8K force at 1:3 dwell.”  He went on to note that the 1:2 dwell would not be an issue for the “4 and out” portion of the Corps but represented a severe challenge for the career personnel and would have to be carefully managed going forward.

The new structure will be structured around:

3 MEBs - east coast, west coast, Okinawa

7 MEUs

2 MEFs

2 SPMAGTF-CR

21 Infantry Battalions

When asked about the apparent imbalance between air, ground, and logistics as evidenced by the MV-22 and JSF garnering the vast majority of budgets for the last several years, McKenzie opined that the balance is just fine and that the air component is the number one priority in order to maintain a proper balance.  This stunned me until he offered a further comment later in the session.  Read on and you’ll see what I mean.

McKenzie stated that the Marines are not in the business of conducting opposed beach landings.  How he reconciles this statement with his characterization of the ACV as the number two acquisition priority is unclear.

Questioned about the Navy’s amphibious lift capacity, he responded that the Marines are very happy with the Navy’s amphibious force structure.  Really?  An already understrength force that’s going to continue to shrink is cause for happiness?

Questioned about the Marines role in ASB, he responded by saying that the best way the Marines could fit into the ASB would be as an “expeditionary air force operating [the JSF] from a dispersed basing structure”.  This is an eye-opening statement that assumes the enemy will allow the establishment of air bases and ignores the short range nature of the F-35B as far as potential contributions to an overall military effort.  This “plan” seems optimistic in the extreme.  He went on to suggest that the Marines would establish far more bases than an enemy could detect and deal with.  He neglected to describe how the Marines would supply the logistical support necessary to operate numerous dispersed bases requiring highly technical maintenance, parts, and support.  This statement would seem to provide the rationale behind the Marines single-minded focus on air power.  Apparently, the Marines are transitioning from an amphibious land combat force to an expeditionary air force that is merely transported by ship to their expeditionary bases.  This is an absolutely stunning change in direction for the Corps.  Either that, or I really haven’t been paying close enough attention.

Questioned in more detail about the new force structure, he stated that in order to fit within the budget limitations the decision was made to predominantly take capabilities away from the high end combat forces in favor of emphasizing presence and crisis response.  This is really disturbing.

Regarding the ACV, McKenzie stated that the Marines did not want to build the “son of EFV”.  Fair enough but if the EFV was that bad, why was it pursued in the first place?  Has something changed so drastically as to render the EFV concept so unsuited, now?  Again, this speaks to very poor leadership decisions then, now, or both.  Speaking further, he noted that the ACV would spend 90% of its life on land, driving Marines around as a sort of armored personnel carrier while still being required to fill the amphibious landing transport role.  That statement leads one to wonder if this is, perhaps, too much to ask of a single vehicle?  The moderator noted that the ACV has been three years in conceptual development with no end in sight.  Again, this bespeaks a degree of indecision uncharacteristic of Marines.

Marines have always been noted among the services for their candor, outspokenness, disregard for politics, and single-minded focus on warfighting.  This presentation exhibited none of those characteristics.  This was the kind of generic, politicized mumble that routinely comes from the other services.  What happened to the Marines?

Here’s the link if you wish to listen to the presentation.  It lasts just under an hour.

http://csis.org/event/future-marine-corps

Amphibious Connectors

An amphibious assault?  We all have the mental image of hulking amphibious ships lurking on the horizon and Marines storming the beach.  But how did the Marines get from the ship to the beach?  Well, a variety of ways, I guess, from the futuristic (though they’re actually getting quite dated!) looking Landing Craft Air Cushion (LCAC) hovercraft to the ubiquitous Assault Amphibious Vehicle (AAV) to helos and now MV-22 Ospreys among other means.  All of these vehicles can be collectively referred to as connectors.  Simply put, the connector is the transport between the ship and shore.

The connector has the potential to be both a potent enabler of the amphibious assault force as well as a  bottleneck and vulnerability.

As an enabler, the connector should be able to transport Marines and their gear quickly, safely, and, ideally, with a little bit of inherent firepower to provide some support at the point of landing.  The Marines should land in good physical shape and intimately integrated with their gear.  In other words, they should be landed in peak physical readiness for battle.

As a weakness, the connector represents a potential bottleneck if there are too few connectors to transport sufficient numbers of Marines and weight of gear in a given time frame.  Marines and gear sitting piled up on ship waiting around for connector transport are a recipe for disaster. 



LCAC



Similarly, the connector represents a possible vulnerability.  Just as naval tacticians recognize that it’s far better to shoot archers than arrows, so too would any enemy recognize that it’s far more efficient to kill loaded connectors rather than deal with landed Marines.  Unfortunately, current connectors are slow and unarmored for practical purposes relative to the modern missile age.

The current connectors are aging rapidly and most are only marginally suited for the modern battlefield.  The AAV has been serving since the early 1970’s.  The AAV’s long anticipated replacement, the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV) is now a dead program with no other replacement in sight.  The LCAC entered service in the mid 1980’s and only 91 were built.  In addition, they’re large, slow (relative to missiles), attractive targets.    MV-22s are great for rapid transport of troops but can’t carry heavy gear.  The CH-53E heavy lift helo entered service in 1981 and airframes are being used up rapidly.  And so on …

All right, so the existing connectors are aging and ill-suited.  Can’t we just design new ones?  Well, therein lies the initial problem and the crux of this discussion.  What basic conceptual design is needed?  Do we need a traditional short range amphibious vehicle or do we need a very long range, way-over-the-horizon vehicle?  Are we doing traditional beachfront assaults or airborne, inland, maneuver warfare assaults? 



Cancelled EFV



The Marines tried to develop the EFV which is a short range beachfront assault vehicle despite the fact that both the Navy and Marines have stated that amphibious ships can’t survive within 50 miles of a defended beach due to the proliferation of shore launched anti-ship missiles.  In fact, for a decade or more, the Marines have embraced behind-the-lines, bypass-the-beach, maneuver warfare doctrine.  That being the case, why have they been fixated on the EFV?  Even now, with the cancellation of the EFV, they seem to be looking for yet another short range, slow, AAV-like replacement, suggesting a continued emphasis on short range beachfront assaults which is at odds with public statements regarding assault distances. 



On the other hand, the Navy is currently building a new class of amphibious ship (LHA-6) that doesn’t even have a well deck!  OK, so that means we’re going to be doing long range airborne assaults, right?  That’s fine except how do you transport M-1 Abrams tanks and all the other Marine combat vehicles and tons of gear and supplies by air?  The MV-22 can carry troops but not much more.  But wait a minute, didn’t the Navy just build an entire class of new LPD-17 class amphibious ships with well decks?  So, I guess we are doing beachfront assaults.

You see the problem?  I don’t think the Navy and Marines currently have a clear consensus on what type of assault operations they want to conduct in the future.  Of course, they could just opt to try and cover all possible scenarios but the cost of that would be staggering.

The Navy and Marines need to agree on how amphibious assaults will be conducted in the future and then start designing new connectors that complement that vision.

On a related note, here are some capacity/range figures for aerial connectors as cited in an NPS thesis (1).

MV-22

5 ton external, 50 nm range

10 ton internal, 100 nm range

CH-53E

18 ton external, 215 nm range

15 ton internal, 230 nm range

(1) Naval Postgraduate School, Thesis:  Cost Benefit and Capability Analysis of Sea-Base Connectors, Justin Dowd, Sep 2009, p. 17-18