Be All You Can Be: Why the Marine Corps Should Look to the Army for Lessons on Force Design
Walker Mills and Timothy Heck | 01.27.22
The United States Marine Corps has embarked upon a campaign of change as significant as any since the end of the Vietnam War. The Marine Corps’s collective efforts, named Force Design 2030, have emphasized a focus on China after nearly two decades of constant low-intensity conflict and counterinsurgency operations in the greater Middle East. The force design efforts are tied to two new operational concepts: Littoral Operations in a Contested Environment and Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations. These foundational concepts describe the future operational environment the Marine Corps anticipates and outline how it will fight. This significant reframing, however, is not without precedent. Following the United States’ withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973, the United States Army conducted a similar evaluative and reconstructive process that ultimately culminated in fielding the ground force that was victorious in Operation Desert Storm against an enemy modeled on Warsaw Pact militaries—precisely the force and set of capabilities that the Army set out to create.
As such, the Marine Corps should look to the Army’s history as a model for how to engineer successful organizational change in order to meet the challenge of a potential high-intensity conflict with a peer adversary. To facilitate organizational transformation and address its peer threat, the Warsaw Pact, the Army focused on three key areas: doctrine, equipment, and personnel policy. Simultaneously, the transition to the all-volunteer force also played a role in the Army’s post-Vietnam rebirth. Given the successful outcome of the Army’s efforts during the 1970s, the Marine Corps should emulate its sister service by properly resourcing these three lines of effort—doctrine, equipment, and people—in order to successfully redesign the force. Otherwise, it risks designing a brittle and incomplete Marine Corps for 2030.
Doctrine
Army doctrinal modernization was based around three consecutive iterations of Field Manual (FM) 100-5. For much of the 1970s, America’s capstone operational doctrine was 1968’s FM 100-5, Operations of Army Forces in the Field. In July 1973, General William E. DePuy took inaugural command of the newly formed Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) and initiated a force-wide doctrine reassessment. In his view, the Army needed to shift its focus from “infantry-airmobile war [to] conventional combined arms warfare in the theater of primary strategic concern.” DePuy’s vision for defeating Soviet forces on the battlefield required NATO to win the initial battles along the inner German border. In 1974, he assessed that “the tactical doctrine set forth in current training literature had, in significant part, ceased to be valid on the modern battlefield,” which was seen as central Europe instead of Southeast Asia. Supplemented by work done at the Pentagon by Andrew Marshall, DePuy’s concept coalesced around the belief that new doctrine coupled with new technologies could defeat the Soviets. An intellectual fervor took hold within TRADOC and the Army at large as it sought to shift from Vietnam back to Europe.
https://mwi.usma.edu/be-all-you-can-be-why-the-marine-corps-should-look-to-the-army-for-lessons-on-force-design/
