A VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES ON THE DEBATE WRACKING THE MARINE CORPS
STEPHEN W. LAROSEMAY 6, 2022
COMMENTARYlarose 5
As a Marine gunner, I have some candid advice to senior retired leaders lambasting the Marine Corps’ reforms: Look in the trenches. The character of war has changed. We will either adapt or perish.
This debate has provided many perspectives that are all important for the Marine Corps and the United States, but surprisingly the debate has overshadowed what Force Design 2030 is already doing at the tactical level — especially among the infantry units who are at the service’s tactical edge.
I have been a Marine infantryman for almost 30 years. For the last three years, I’ve served as one of my service’s representatives on the Pentagon’s Close Combat Lethality Task Force, which focuses on small-unit, tactical operations. As most War on the Rocks readers will likely recall, then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis created this task force in 2018 to improve the “combat preparedness, lethality, survivability, and resiliency of our nation’s ground close-combat formations.” Mattis explained:
These formations have historically accounted for almost 90 percent of our casualties and yet our personnel policies, advances in training methods, and equipment have not kept pace with changes in available technology, human factors science, and talent-management best practices.
Gen. David Berger’s Force Design 2030 is doing more than any other military service’s plan to realize Mattis’ intent on close-combat lethality. For example, the initiative directs educating and training in this area, as well as properly manning small units with more mature leaders. It raises the rank to job requirements for fireteam leaders, squad leaders, and platoon sergeants, increasing the time, exposure, and experience needed for these specific small-unit leaders. It also directs an investment in better weapons and equipment for squad-, platoon-, and company-sized formations in order to enable them with organic intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting capabilities; tactical network and communications systems; and organic precision fires that change the long-standing equation of attacker-to-defender, this math equation for planning operations used to require three attackers for every defender, but not anymore. These changes have led to marines being able to conduct attacks much differently than in the past. I seek to explain these changes and tell a broader audience why I’m so encouraged by the commandant’s initiatives. But in order to understand these changes, we need to explain first what it was like for Marine infantrymen only a decade ago.
https://warontherocks.com/2022/05/a-view-from-the-trenches-on-the-debate-wracking-the-marine-corps/?msclkid=4d22cecccd6511ecb7c86749d6eab8cd
