The U.S. Marines’ biggest fight right now is internal
By George Will Contributing Columnist Nov 16, 2024
“Marines,” proclaim their recruiting ads, are “The Few. The Proud.” Nowadays, they also are: The Fractious. Their hymn (“From the halls of Montezuma …”) says Marines are “First to fight.” Today, for a number of senior Marines — including 22 retired four-star generals — the fight is intramural.
It concerns the U.S. Marine Corps’s future. And its understanding of itself, which is rooted in the past century, in major battles in major wars: e.g., Belleau Wood (1918), Iwo Jima (1945), the Tet Offensive (1968), Fallujah (2004). The Corps’s intensely practical, and perhaps perishable, élan is at stake in the heated debate about how Marines fit into the nation’s security strategy.
In March 2020, the USMC announced Force Design 2030, a 10-year plan to reconfigure the Corps and shrink it by 12,000 (currently there are 174,500 Marines) to conform to a national defense plan primarily — too much, critics of Force Design contend — focused somewhat on Russia but mostly on China. To that end, Force Design involves eliminating all the Corps’s tank battalions and bridging companies, reducing from 24 to 21 the number of infantry battalions, reducing the number of artillery battalions from 21 to five, and deactivating a number of aviation (helicopter and fixed-wing) squadrons.
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