USMC future
10/9/06
5:09 PM
Page 158
THE MARINES
FIGHTING FOR THE FUTURE
By J.R. Wilson
“Every Marine is a rifleman and a warrior; this represents our link to the past and our key to the future.” – Gen. Michael W. Hagee, Commandant of the Marine Corps
T
he 21st century and a new millennium officially began on Jan. 1, 2001, but the future of the U.S. military really began eight months and 11 days later, when a new kind of enemy launched the most deadly attack on American soil since the Civil War. As for all Americans, September 11 set the stage for the future of the U.S. Marine Corps. In many ways, a future it eventually would have reached, but one now significantly accelerated. The Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) brought the largest Marine deployment since Vietnam, and one of the Corps’ longest land attacks – the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force (MEF) sweep from Kuwait to Baghdad. It also has seen the rapid introduction of new technologies and equipment. But the Marines who went into Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan only weeks after September 11 or a little more than a year later into Operation Iraqi Freedom, had much in common with those who stormed the shores of Tripoli in 1805, entered the Halls of Montezuma almost a half century later, or reclaimed the Pacific from Japan during World War II. Those and many more Marine combat engagements along the way pushed humans and technology to their limits: All involved challenges in culture, language, geography, some even insurgents and terrorists.
“That will be the challenge, at least in the first half of the 21st century – maintaining a Marine Corps ready, relevant, and capable, as we have been throughout our history, but now across a broader and more complex spectrum of operations on a very technologically sophisticated battlefield. It remains maintaining the ethos of warriors, but being equally capable of feeding the hungry and doing counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism operations. It is extremely demanding to maintain a reasonable level of readiness across all those areas.” Those lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan are being applied to the Marine role in the broader GWOT, which also extends to relatively unknown places like Djibouti, a small African nation on the Red Sea between Somalia and Ethiopia. Several hundred Marines – until recently sharing command of a joint task force with the U.S. Navy – are supporting and helping train Djibouti security forces to prevent the spread of al-Qaida and other terrorist groups in Northeast Africa. Those groups have targeted the region’s large Islamic population for recruiting, training, and places to hide. They also have attacked there, bombing U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaamin, Tanzania, in 1998.
What sets the GWOT apart is its role as a forcing factor in changes to the single most important area: the Corps’ approach to training and educating the 21st century Marine – still a rifleman, but a lot more, as well. “We are not just the pointy end of the spear,” says Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Bob Magnus. “While it is absolutely true that warfighting excellence is a fundamental of Marines, along with expeditionary capabilities and ‘soldiers from the sea’ and ‘first to fight,’ ‘most ready when the nation is least ready,’ now it also is anything, any time, across the full spectrum of what used to be called conventional operations and, with MARSOC [Marine Special Operations Command, stood up in February 2006], extending into the area of Special Ops forces.
For the new Marine, forged in the mountain caves of Afghanistan and on the streets of Fallujah, winning in combat shares importance with being able to work with and understand cultures whose language, religion, lifestyle, and history are alien to most Americans, to make a smooth transition from combat to stabilization and rebuilding. Both officers and enlisted are now required to study languages and cultural awareness; for officers, that includes a regional career focus. As a result, a young lieutenant deploying to lead a rifle company in the Mideast will know some Arabic and something about the culture. By the time he – or, in traditionally non-combat posts, she – becomes a major, those skills will have progressed to street talk, reading, writing, and a much broader and deeper understanding of the culture.
158
Photo by Cpl. Ed Mennenga
“We have to ensure we are adaptive – not transformational, but able to adapt before change confronts us with a crisis.” – Gen. Bob Magnus, Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps
