The U.S. cannot, and should not, fund, parts of the military that provide no value.
The United States Marine Corps (USMC) does have vaule. Just, not the way we are using it or funding it.
Unfortunately, today, the USMC depends much on its image as opposed to its actual vaule to America's warfighting ability.
Does it field nuclear weapons for strategic deterrance? No. Does it have the force to handle large wars? No. Is it useful in the National Guard structure? No.
Is the idea of fielding a large number of assets to refight Tarawa a good idea? No. For one reason being that against a real opponent, there is such a diverse collection of weapons to make plinking landing craft easy. Look again at the failed Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV) requirement that got to $25M each. It was imagined that EFV ability would allow its big mother-ships to be farther out to sea when performing against opposed beach-heads. Reason distance from shore was used as a selling point? The diverse range of weapons available for a capable enemy to use.
History has not been kind to this kind of warfare thinking in an era where the military industrial congressional complex struggles to find an enemy worthy of American tax-payer support. A USMC amphibious landing could not be done in Desert Storm because it was too risky. Those forces sat out to sea. For starters, naval mines stopped that idea. Imagine if the enemy had been more capable. Also in Desert Storm we used a USMC land task force...doing the job of a second land army.
Like today, the United States Marketing Corps (Marketing is the mission not Marines) has to be where the main action is to keep funds rolling in, even if there is plenty of work for small-force USMC security actions in today's littorals. For some years now, new Marines have arrived in Afghanistan having never been near a boat.
We no longer have the funds to pay for such waste of resources.
Today, the second-land-army title fits. We do not need to fund a second land army. DOD planners should re-look at the map and recognize that Afghanistan is not a littoral environment. The littoral environment is the ONLY justification for having the USMC.
After Afghanistan, oh what will the United States Marketing Corps do?
3 comments:
Very reasonable arguments, but I take a different view on this topic.
And no, I personally was not a proponent of the failed EFV swarm strategy either and think the USMC could evolve it's missions and capabilities over the next 10-15 yrs...
But I would argue that rather, $5 billion per year of US Army's budget should be shifted to Marines for equipment acquisition and recapitalization (prudent acquisition not thrown at MICC programs).
The Corps budget is not large, the Army's is large. And the US in my view, should shift away from large armored, Invasion, Occupation-type Army anyway.
Cut the Army by $25 billion and shift $5 billion to USMC for procurement. A reduction of $20 billion in Defense Appropriations.
USMC can absolutely reduce numbers in the ranks, sure, (I've personally conjectured reducing somewhere to around 85,000). And that would only further allow capacity for building more muscle and cutting expensive, obsolete elements. But, I'd argue the value and capabilities of the Marines should be in fact elevated (not discounted) to fit new missions and increased readiness levels with more rapid mobility in mind.
So I'd argue that Army has redundancies which can be cut, with new capacity created for Marines. The US doesn't need a larger sized ground forces pie, merely the sizes of the slices could be altered all fitting the same dish.
Likewise, missions, readiness and muscle could also be evolved via restructuring of Army strategy, force structure and missions.
That's my opinion.
We may need the USMC if we want to protect our Pacific Islands, Australia and New Zealand from being overrun by a Peer competitor
This is a very interesting topic quite relevant to how Australia ought to be thinking regarding defence capabilities and where the defence dollar is best spent.
Replacing modest amphibious support capacity with large LPD aircraft carriers will prove to be a big and costly blunder from several perspectives. Multiple smaller vessels of lesser capacity would have been much more suited to the type of regional interventions that might be necessary for the ADF. I believe wrong conclusions were drawn from East Timor intervention.
The rent-seekers supportive of big defence spending keep on refusing to acknowledge the flawed status of multiple acquisition programs and the inabilities of all 3 Services within the ADF to adequately man what they have, let alone inappropriate types of hardware embraced within DWP2009 and the associated Defence Capabilities Plan.
The errors of going down the AWD/LPD track will likely only become apparent around 5 years downstream and those platforms are only part of very debatable defence strategic thinking.
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