The Marine Corps Must Reinvent Itself
By Captain Austin Dahmer, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve
December 2019
Proceedings
Vol. 145/12/1,402
"I'm worried that we’re going too slow and that we’re afraid of change,†former Marine Corps Commandant General Robert Neller said in 2017 while discussing the service’s efforts to prepare for the next conflict.1 Nearly two decades of sustained operations ashore have negatively affected the Corps’ institutional sense of self. Operating from static command posts and executing overt patrols with the luxuries of air and naval preeminence—as Marines have done in Afghanistan and Iraq—will not define operations in a peer conflict.
The National Defense Strategy states, “Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security.â€2 In China, the development of antiship ballistic missiles able to sink an aircraft carrier, ground- and space-based antisatellite systems, advanced cyber capabilities, an expanding overseas basing infrastructure, and the use of land reclamation activities to expand its regional maritime claims have created a powerful antiaccess/area denial (A2/AD) buffer and secured space for Beijing to expand its gravitational pull in the Indo-Pacific.3 In addition, Russian A2/AD networks, renewed investment in nuclear modernization, fait accompli paramilitary action in Crimea, and malign cyber activities in the Baltics, coupled with “sweeping and systematic†information warfare campaigns across the North Atlantic, have simultaneously increased Moscow’s strategic depth and undercut the West’s ability and willingness to oppose it.4
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2019/december/marine-corps-must-reinvent-itself
