We Need a Marine Corps, Part II: A Corps Confounded
June 19, 2025
Ben Connable
Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of three articles on the U.S. Marine Corps. The first article was published on June 16, 2025.
In just over 20 years, the Marine Corps has gone from being America’s reliable middleweight force in readiness to more of a secondary, general purpose backup force. Today, marines are more likely to find themselves assisting special operations teams and U.S. Army crisis response task forces than spearheading operations. Without meaningful change, a dangerous question resurfaces: “Why do we need a Marine Corps?”
In the first article in this series, I argued that there is an opportunity to reverse this slide. My research shows that broadly shared and influential assumptions about modern warfare are flawed. War has evolved but it has not dramatically changed. Therefore, some capabilities divested in the initial phase of Gen. David Berger’s force design plan should be recouped.
And while special operators and Army units have seized the lead on crisis response, the Marine Corps is still the only force that has the baseline capability and organizational culture to field on-call, fully integrated, combined arms units to respond to everything from noncombatant evacuation operations to large-scale amphibious assault. With some changes, the Marine Corps is the best organization to spearhead global competition against China outside of the so-called nine-dash line. It is also the ideal irregular warfare force in readiness.
https://warontherocks.com/2025/06/we-need-a-marine-corps-part-ii-a-corps-confounded/
