Marine Corps Stand-In Forces: A House of Cards
By Anthony Zinni & Jerry McAbee
May 28, 2024
U.S. Marine Corps
How did the United States Marine Corps transform itself from the world’s premier expeditionary force-in-readiness to a poor parody of the French Maginot Line in just four years? In his Force Design 2030 plan, the 38th Commandant of the Marine Corps radically redesigned and restructured the Marine Corps to operate as a defensively oriented, narrowly specialized regional force under Navy command to attack and sink Chinese warships in the South China Sea. This new mission came at the expense of providing much needed crisis response and global force projection capabilities to all Geographic Combatant and Functional Commands in an increasingly unstable world. The crown jewel of this new warfighting organization are called Stand-in Forces (SIFs), which are small isolated detachments of Marines, armed with anti-ship missiles, persistently spread across islands in the so-called “contested” areas of hostilities: specifically the first island chain.
To fund these largely experimental units, the Marine Corps divested proven capabilities needed to fight and win today anywhere in the world, an unwise and unproven approach termed “divest to invest.” The Corps jettisoned all its tanks and bridging, most of its cannon artillery and assault breaching, and much of its infantry and new, state-of-the art aviation at a time when these certain capabilities are showing to be critical in ongoing conflicts.
In an act that can only be described as negligence, the Commandant reduced the Corps’ long-standing requirement for 38 amphibious ships to 31 and stood silent as the Navy decimated the Maritime Prepositioning Squadrons (MPS) by reducing their numbers from 3 to 2 and the total number of ships from 17 to 7. The loss of MPS ships together with the reduction in the number of major amphibious assault ships – and their poor state of maintenance and availability – make it doubtful that the Marine Corps has the capability to project even a limited Marine Expeditionary Force in time to influence events before or after hostilities commence.
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/05/28/marine_corps_stand-in_forces_a_house_of_cards_1034266.html
