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Author Topic: Marine Corps Force Design: A Failed Operational Concept  (Read 101 times)

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Offline rangerrebew

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Marine Corps Force Design: A Failed Operational Concept
« on: July 29, 2025, 11:50:18 am »
Marine Corps Force Design: A Failed Operational Concept
By Gary Anderson
July 29, 2025
U.S. Marine Corps

When the Marine Corps adopted a concept called Force Design as its new warfighting concept in 2019, so called military experts hailed it as a groundbreaking adoption of emerging technology. Unfortunately, most of the praise has come from senior Marine leaders in the form of Press releases from the U.S. Marine Corps Communication Strategy and Operations Office, Marine Corps Combat Development Command, Release 002-2020 and ill-informed journalists. On July 6, 2025, the Washington Times published an article by Bill Gertz, " Marine Commandant: Corps To Focus on Advanced Weapons and Contested Logistics in Prep for War."

Since that time, things have gone sideways for Force Design. The Tomahawk cruise missiles envisioned proved logistically untenable. The shorter range subsonic NEMSIS anti-ship missiles that the Corps has heavily invested in has become obsolete before being fully fielded while also being vulnerable to Chinese countermeasures. The idea behind Force Design was to hide small units on the many islets and shoals in the south China Sea and along China’s first island chain to interdict passing Chinese warships.


The stunning failure of Force Design is the lack of warfighting and logistics capabilities to operationalize the concept.

To begin with, inlets and islands are not assured locations as they are sovereign to nation states like the Republic of the Philippines that has already stated that the NEMSIS will not be allowed to be used in a conflict with China over Taiwan.

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2025/07/29/marine_corps_force_design_a_failed_operational_concept_1125551.html
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Offline DefiantMassRINO

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Re: Marine Corps Force Design: A Failed Operational Concept
« Reply #1 on: July 29, 2025, 12:16:02 pm »
The Marines' greatest asset has been their tenacity and adaptability on the battlefield, as exmplified by the Pacific campaigns of World War II.

The Marines are not meant to be a static fighting force that waits for the enemy to come to them.  They are a maneuverable, infiltrative force that takes the fight to the enemy.

The Marines need to be more like the Ukrainians in their real-time tactical adaptability and less like the folks behind desks at the Pentagon.
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