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FIGHTING FOR THE FUTURE
FIGHTING FOR THE FUTURE �
By J.R. Wilson
The 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.
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.
“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.
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.
A Marine with the 2nd Assault Amphibian Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, lies prone on the coastline of Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., as he and other comrades simulate seizing an enemy beachhead. The Marine Corps is adapting to new threats, but always retaining its core capabilities.
Photo by Cpl. Ed Mennenga
“That is something you have to develop, not just for this war, but for the entire 21st century. We need a broad breadth of officers in air and ground combat and combat service support who are specialized in a number of regions, including East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, and even more traditional languages, such as Spanish, Portuguese, or French, which are spoken a lot differently in-country than what you learn in college,” Magnus notes.
“The focus for the 21st century is to continue to recruit the highest quality Americans to become U.S. Marines; more than 98 percent of our recruits come in with a high school diploma, which is higher than the DoD [Department of Defense] standard. Before they get the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor, they learn not only to work to their potential but to work as teams, to make decisions as recruits, to achieve positions of leadership. The human element in war remains dominant, but the quality of those individuals – in training and education – is much more sophisticated today than it was 20 years ago.”
Marines from Charlie Co., Battalion Landing Team 1st Bn., 6th Marines, look toward the sounds of new firing during a firefight with anti-coalition militia in central Afghanistan during Operation Asbury Park.
USMCC photo by Gunnery Keith A. Milks
San Fernando, Calif., native Sgt. Robert E. Canales, chief scout with 2nd Platoon, returns fire on a target during an hour-long firefight in Husaybah, Iraq. Canales and his squad were providing security for combat engineers attempting to destroy a massive IED when a sentry saw armed men moving in houses across from them. Fighting the war in Afghanistan and Iraq has taught new lessons, but it has also reinforced old ones.
USMC photo by Cpl. Ken Melton
The United States Marine Corps has always maintained a strong sense of history and tradition, keeping the foundation concepts reflected in the Corps motto, “Semper Fidelis” (“Always Faithful”), the Revolutionary War call for “a few good men,” and the precept “every Marine a rifleman.” While the dedication of the National Museum of the Marine Corps provides a new opportunity to revisit and reexamine a proud heritage, Magnus believes it has an even more important role in securing the present and looking to the future.
“The focus of those visiting the museum, immersing themselves in Marine history and heritage, also must be on the people who make up the U.S. Marine Corps,” he says. “And that’s not just looking at history, but into the future. Which is why we will be expanding and keeping the museum current for anyone who wants to come back. It will be a living history, for people to think about how selfless sacrifice, talent, and the achievements of the men and women who were Marines before set examples, not only for Marines today and in the future, but for people who are not warriors, to develop themselves to their fullest.
“You also have to understand it was not mindless sacrifice – these warriors were educated and trained and physically and emotionally motivated for service. So when youngsters walk through the door, we want them to think about their own obligations of citizenship – knowledge of their society and issues, about war and taxes and all else – and what the young men and women to whom this museum is dedicated put on the line for their country.”
Lance Cpl. Scott J. Dempsey of Amherst, N.Y., a civil affairs support staff member assigned with 5th Civil Affairs Group, 2nd Marine Division, holds a young Iraqi boy during a goodwill mission in Fallujah, Iraq. Marines, soldiers, and sailors attached to 5th CAG officially kicked off a major community service project for the month of July by promoting goodwill to the local populace. Their immediate goal is to build rapport with the local townspeople and their children by giving out clothes, school supplies, and other items. Civil affairs operations are vital in the GWOT.
Photo by Cpl. Ruben D. Maesue
The future of the Marine Corps is very much rooted in its past, but also in carrying forward – through technology, training, and the personal development of individual Marines – the same adaptability it has always
demonstrated to unexpected developments on the battlefield. That has been especially true in the ongoing GWOT.
“We focus on warfighting excellence in all aspects of Marine Corps training, from boot camp to high-tempo joint and combined exercises,” Gen. Michael Hagee, commandant of the Marine Corps, says in his forward to the 2006 edition of Concepts and Programs. “A guiding principle of the Marine Corps is that we fight as combined-arms teams, seamlessly integrating our ground, aviation, and logistics forces. We exploit the speed, flexibility, and agility inherent in our combined-arms approach to defeat traditional, terrorist, and emerging threats to our nation’s security.”
Counter-terrorism and anti-insurgent operations are not entirely new to the Corps, but as future training and equipment are planned and implemented, the leadership is looking at today’s asymmetrical battle as one part of a far larger requirement. It is a future in which individual Marines and every component to which they belong must be ready for both the irregular and the conventional, in all terrains and environments, against all levels of technology. It will be a joint/coalition, combined arms, networkcentric, increasingly modular, fast-moving battlespace in which junior officers, NCOs, and enlisted will be called upon to make decisions, under fire, at the small-unit level, decisions that once were the purview of higher echelon.
“The first and most critical step continues to be how we recruit and train the right people, to be able to absorb and then process and then put into action whatever is going to be needed in battle. That emphasis on the basics – from recruits to officers – continues to be what gives the Marine Corps the opportunity to succeed,” Lt. Gen. Jan Huly, deputy commandant-Plans, Policies & Operations, maintains.
“Fourteen years ago we couldn’t predict what we are doing today, and no one really can predict what we will be doing in 2020. So the best way is to continue to recruit and train young men and women who are adaptable, flexible, cunning, and able to deal with the unknown challenges they are going to face.”
Keeping those basics fundamental to the training of all Marines also sets the stage for a future sea change in how Marine units operate on the battlefield, a change already being seen to some degree in Southwest Asia.
“If you lay that foundation early, you can build on the other enablers that allow you to adapt to the changing world, including cultural training, languages, adding new authority down to the NCO level,” adds Maj. Gen. George J. Flynn, commanding general of the Training and Education Command (TECOM). “Once the basics are built, units can do things traditionally done by higher headquarters – company doing battalion, platoons doing company. Part of that is because of technology, but also because of quality people we train to a standard that allows them to execute. If you have brilliance in the basics, you can add on all these other things.”
Recognizing what unique talents and skills Marines bring to the fight, what complements the contributions of other services and allies, also is vital to both the current and future fight. That begins with the oldest Marine niche – a truly expeditionary force coming from the sea.
“And doing it as a combined arms team, internally as well as externally. It’s not the only thing we do, but that’s what we bring that is unique,” Huly says.
Access to future battlefields from neighboring friendly land or air bases will be increasingly problematic in the 21st century, so projecting ground and air forces from the sea will be even more essential to U.S. military tactics and success.
“In the future, we must be able to conduct an Operation Iraqi Freedom without having access to a Kuwait,” Hagee says. “Can we do that today? No, but we believe that we must be able to do it in the future.
“To use the sea as maneuver space, we have to have certain enabling capabilities – [and] every service must be able to plug into any and all aspects of Seabasing, whether it is the command and control system, the sustainment, the strike, or the defensive set of capabilities.”
Magnus says a new generation of littoral ships will greatly enhance that capability.
“We see increasing leverage and value in amphibious and MPF- Future [Maritime Prepositioning Force-Future] ships, which we believe will be the ideal large platforms from which to base littoral operations,” he says. “They will become fundamental to joint Seabasing. If you have a 70,000-ton MPF-Future ship that can land tiltrotors and helicopters and large deck amphibs that can carry Harriers and attack helicopters and stay off the coast for 90 days, that is a huge national asset.”
Lt. Gen. Jim Amos, Commanding General of the Combat Development Command (CDC), says the importance of seabasing also will grow as fear of terrorist strikes leads some to deny U.S. and coalition forces access to other air and land routes.
“If you map out where the greatest conflicts have been in the last 15 years, 85 percent are within littoral regions; 70 percent of the Earth is covered by water and 80 percent of the world’s greatest cities are in the littorals. So Seabasing is the premier cornerstone for how the Marine Corps and Navy will continue to be relevant in the face of anti-access. Being in the littorals, persistently, is a prescription for success in how we fight and influence the world in the next 10 to 20 years,” he says.
“The best way to fight in the battlefield under such circumstances is in a distributed manner, which takes maneuver warfare to the next level, deploying forces through the air and over land and dispersing small groups of Marines in the enemy’s rear and throughout the battlefield. Seabasing enables distributed ops, the ability to maneuver around the enemy’s rear.”
The war in Southwest Asia has been a proving ground for both new technologies, such as air and ground robotics, as well as new joint command structures and responsibilities. It also has reinforced an old truth: When the shooting is over, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have won the war. In today’s joint world,
Marines from the 1st Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion speed across the Iraqi desert in a light armored vehicle. LAV crews face the dangers of landmines and improvised explosive devices on a daily basis, sometimes encountering one every other day. The Marines with 1st LAR provide security from Iraq’s northwestern border with Syria. The Marine Corps has placed two more LAV companies on line to add maneuverability to the force.
Official USMC photo by Cpl. Randy L. Bemard
Marines are not just the “pointy end of the spear” in combat, but also an integral part of the follow-on stabilization and rebuilding mission – a mission already significantly remolding the Corps.
“We’re working hard to understand the lessons learned from Afghanistan and Iraq as they relate to culture and language,” Amos says. “In 2004, the force structure review group took 15,000 Marine billets and realigned them to what we thought was more important, based on the war in Iraq, and just replowed that ground with the capabilities assessment group, looking at what we really need to fight irregular warfare for the next 10 years. We have put two more LAV [light armored vehicle] companies on line, giving us a more maneuverable force; we have moved some MOS [Military Occupational Specialty] billets to military police and civil affairs and psyops.
“The Marine Corps is well past the idea of a Marine who can only pull the trigger; we are into tough-thinking Marines who understand the culture and language and have an educated appreciation, based on tactics and the history of small wars, of building schools, roads, houses, and hospitals. Winning the GWOT involves helping nations bring peace and stability to their region. There are about a dozen
Marines today working in the middle of Fallujah with the local authorities to help rebuild that city, which is a far cry from kinetic ops. And that is the kind of thing we need to be doing to win this war.”
That applies not only to Southwest Asia, but has become a permanent part of the evolving Marine ethos, in which college degrees will become more common in the enlisted ranks, masters and doctorates among officers, and multicultural studies and foreign languages a requirement for both.
“The landscape will change in the next decade, but today we are rewriting our curriculum and training, requiring all our officers to study the region of the world to which they are assigned and to take foreign languages. We will soon begin doing the same for select MOSs on the enlisted side, where they will be required to specialize in regions of the world. And that will become a permanent part of how we do business in the foreseeable future,” Amos says.
“We will end up with Marines that are a bit like [Army] Green Berets, who are experts on specific cultures and languages. We are trying to build a force of Marines that have a piece of that, so when they are out there and there are six of them maneuvering behind enemy lines, they have a sense for how to survive and how to deal with the people. Or when we are in an environment such as today in Iraq, where we are a stationary peace force – living, eating, fighting, and protecting people in an entirely different culture.”
Marines from Company F, 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment line a trench as they fire at an enemy mortar position during the initial stages of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). The battalion took up positions on bridges across the Euphrates River after enemy forces attempted to destroy them. OIF seemed to begin as a conventional war, but soon took on the characteristics of an insurgency.
USMC photo by Cpl. Shawn C. Rhodes
Ensuring that the fielding of all Marine warfighting capabilities are integrated across the spectrum of doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership, education, personnel, and facilities is the responsibility of the CDC’s Capabilities Development Directorate (CDD), commanded by Brig. Gen. Thomas L. Conant.
“The CDD takes the concept and looks at what we can and can’t do now and in the future; what we can’t do we call gaps, and finding those is what CDD is all about. If we need on-the-move, over-the-horizon communications for distributed units, how do we do that and how far can we go to accomplish that solution? We try to find the challenges and concepts of the future – and solutions to them,” he explains.
“What we’d never done before was take an integrated look. It is no longer feasible to develop something in the aviation or ground combat ‘stovepipe,’ push that to the top, and try to fund it. What we now do is take those battlefield functions, find the challenges and solutions, and work them into the MAGTF [Marine Air Ground Task Force] of the future. That integration is the critical point of what we are doing since the reorganization two years ago.”
The MAGTF is the Marine approach to modularity, scalable from a special purpose force of several hundred Marines and sailors all the way up to an expeditionary force of 100,000, depending on the mission and limiting factors provided to the MAGTF commander.
Whether it is a MAGTF or a patrol, however, the future of the Marine Corps lies in a seamless integration of new and better technology, weapons, and tactics with more capable, versatile Marines.
“The future is empowering the small unit leader to make decisions as a proactive leader in the battlespace of the future. You need to give him the training, tools, and education to excel in that arena. And that is how we will be judged in the future,” Conant predicts. “That is an irregular and counter-insurgency focus, but what we have discovered is, if you give these young leaders the power, training, tools, and skill sets, they will do outstanding things in this fight of the future. And that includes cultural knowledge and being a stabilizing force in an unstable world.
The MV-22 Osprey is a common sight in the skies of Eastern North Carolina; however, tens of thousands of people recently had an opportunity to observe the aircraft for the first time when two Ospreys made the “self-deployment” from MCAS New River to the continent of Europe. The flight covered more than 4,000 miles, much over it over the North Atlantic Ocean, in challenging weather conditions. The Osprey will replace the aging CH-46, bringing higher speed, payload, and range to the vertical lift equation.
Courtesy photo by Bell/Boeing
“We’re still required to be the most ready when the nation is least ready, and cannot afford not to be able to fight the big fight and win at the MEF level in terms of access denial and fighting through sheer devastating combat power. But we also have to fight in the irregular combat arena, where you need to focus on enabling the lieutenant and captain leading small units in very challenging environments to excel and succeed. So we stood up the Center for Advanced Cultural Learning to train and educate a culturally astute force in the Marine Corps, for both the small unit leader and the big force.”
The MAGTF is the central focus in the Marine effort to deliver relevant, integrated capabilities to the current and future battlespace, from the individual rifleman to unit leaders at all levels, incorporating the right mix of ground vehicles, aviation platforms, assault support, and other capabilities. Another focus is making certain it all fits seamlessly into the evolving joint, network-centric environment.
“This is the No. 1 problem we are looking at in CDD – when you have the ability to collect, process, and share data and combine that with the art of command and control, you have a powerful tool for success in the future battlespace,” Conant says. “We are going to approach this from a Marine Corps enterprise that ties it all together from the small unit to the operations unit back to the home base. It isn’t wanting to do it, but having to do it.
“And we have to tie into the network, not only jointly but with our coalition partners. It is mandatory for every service’s future role in combat – taking advantage of technology and the power of moving a lot of information quickly and putting that into knowledge that can be used to make decisions.”
Decisions are being made on a daily basis that affect training, acquisition, TTPs (Tactics, Techniques and Procedures) unit structure – the shape and function of the Marine Corps, both near- and far-term. These decisions are heavily influenced by what has been called a “three block war” – fighting in one block, handing out humanitarian supplies in the second, trying to bring security and stability in the third, all at the same time and often with the same Marines shifting among them, trying to survive and succeed from day to day. But those same Marines also must be able to fight a traditional enemy in a more conventional environment.
“Our future – and possibly our institutional survival – depends on us being able to fight and win in this demanding new environment against a very lethal, vicious, adaptive enemy,” Conant says of the GWOT. “We are looking at that through the force structure process: what we buy, how we communicate forward and backwards, how we train reserves to the same core competencies as the regular force.
“What you see in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other parts of the world is training and being ready for the three-block war. And it is a moving target – what we fought and learned last week is not what we will face next week. And if you can’t adapt to fighting this very asymmetric enemy, we won’t win in the future. But neither can we lose our original focus as a fighting force, being the most ready when everyone else is least ready.”
USS San Antonio, the first of its class of LPD 17 amphibious assault ships, represents a new family of vessels that will comprise the Seabase fleet
Courtesy Photo by the Northrop Grumman
The enemy also is learning – on the streets of Iraq, in the mountains of Afghanistan, and in war rooms around the world. Operation Iraqi Freedom was not Desert Storm; insurgents with car bombs and IEDs are far removed from OIF; what worked last week in Iraq may not work this week in Afghanistan – or Iraq – much less in some future conflict in some other part of the world.
“We have to adjust TTPs and curricula and instructions in our schoolhouses to adapt to this new environment and have the ability to do that rapidly. We can’t take two years to change a program of instruction; the new requirement is to rapidly change what you are training for, what kind of adversary are you training against. We take that very seriously,” Conant says.
“We will try to understand what is demanded of us in the future to remain relevant. You can’t live on your laurels. History is great and we will never back away from our ethos, who we are as a Marine Corps, but relevancy to the nation is making sure you have an adaptable, flexible force – not only operationally, but also institutionally.”
The Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle will replace the old amphibious assault vehicle in the future. The vehicle is being created to address the weakness found in the current amphibious assault vehicle, and will have more speed, power, and range.
USMC Photo by Lance Cpl. Brandon R. Holgesnen
While the Corps’ top leaders focus their individual and combined efforts on the individual Marine as the key to future success, the technologies and equipment they will employ are undergoing often sweeping change, as well.
One of the most prominent of those is Marine aviation, which will experience a nearly complete turnover of assets in the next two decades and conversion to an almost all-STOVL (short takeoff and vertical landing) fleet, including the tilt-rotor V-22 Osprey troop carrier and a variant of the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter. Combining longer range, greater speed, and more austere airfield requirements, including the ability to operate from smaller – and far more numerous – ships than aircraft carriers, a STOVL fleet will add greatly to Marine agile maneuverability and self-sufficiency.
“Tilt-rotor aviation is a revolutionary leap forward in warfare, because the helicopter can only go so fast,” Flynn says. “What is enabled by technology is the concept of distributed operations; tilt-rotor is transformational because it changes the battlefield in terms of space and time – go deeper, go faster. How you leverage that is how good your force can adapt to the battlefield you fight on today – and the one you fight on tomorrow.”
The centerpiece of future Marine aviation is the F-35 Lightning II, which will allow flexible basing and bring a host of new capabilities to Marine Corps aviation.
Courtesy Photo by Lockhead Martin
Given the increasing focus on the MAGTF, starting at the basic schools for both enlisted and officers, air/ground operations are and will continue to be second nature to Marines. As a result, he says, the new STOVL platforms will not necessarily change the role of Marine aviation in supporting ground forces in a joint environment, but enhance it.
Lt. Gen. John G. Castellaw, deputy commandant for Aviation, says the centerpiece of future Marine aviation will be the F-35B Lightning II, which essentially will consolidate three legacy airframes into one, greatly reducing maintenance and logistics concerns. It also will provide linkage to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), tactical aircraft, and ground platforms, giving ground commanders a common operational picture.
“The STOVL version will give us flexible basing options, therefore not restricting us to airfields a conventional aircraft requires. We can also operate from amphibious shipping as well as fleet carriers,” he says. “But the F-35B isn’t just a ‘bomb truck.’ It has an ISR capability, an electronic attack capability, and, with its communications capability, can act as a control node for both ground and air commanders to increase shared situational awareness of the operating environment.
“Our rotary wing force will have greatly expanded capabilities. The MV-22B Osprey has six times the range, twice the speed, one-sixth the IR signature, and seven times the ballistic survivability of the aircraft it will replace, the CH-46 Sea Knight. The CH-53K, operating 110 nm out to sea, will enable Ship-To-Objective Maneuver (STOM) as well as flexible Seabasing. Our H-1 program, the UH-1Y and the AH-1Z, will represent quantum leaps in light attack and utility capabilities.”
Robots – UAVs, unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), and even unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) for littoral and riverine applications – already have become a valued part of Marine operations in Southwest Asia and are seen as playing an increasingly important role as a complement to flesh-and-blood Marines in the future.
“UAVs will open up the ability to see the battlefield and conduct precision operations, not limited only to the higher elements but also having an impact on how a fire team conducts operations,” Flynn says. “The more mature the technology becomes, the more it is available to lower echelons of operations, which is really where the future will be. You will have small units that are very much technology-enabled, and UAVs and robotics will play a big part in doing that.”
Other equipment areas also are under development, including sharing concepts and requirements with the Army, which is undergoing a massive transformation that will, in some ways, make it more like the Marines in terms of equipment weight, speed, and tactics. The Army already has fielded the first of its interim Stryker platforms in Southwest Asia as it continues development on the far more expansive and complex 19-platform Future Combat System (FCS). The Marines are observing both efforts and others, such as the Army’s Land Warrior and Future Force Warrior combat ensemble research and development.
“The question becomes how much or how little. We are looking at the Marine as a system, and how to outfit the infantryman, for example, to have the capabilities to be powerful in the future battlespace. So we are picking the best of the breed the Army is looking at,” Conant says. “Where can we have commonality and synergy in acquiring these things, whether individual systems or weapon systems? We want to have the same weapons and shoot the same ammunition. And if there are service-unique systems, maybe they come under an overarching system.
“As we look at the mobility piece, we’re looking at whether the Stryker can do what we want to do, with no preconceived notion of whether we want it or not at this point. FCS is spinning off a lot of things in the IT and capabilities worlds and, if it makes sense for us, we want to be part of it. We’re working to see how close we can shape each other’s requirements so we can do some things together to get commonality in purchase, supply chain, operating in the battlespace together.”
One possibility would be an adaptation of the Stryker instead of developing another derivative of the LAV to meet the Marines’ growing future need for more personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles, Amos says.
“The Army has about 1,200 of those (Strykers), so it is an established program and, if it meets our needs, with programmatic savings, we would be foolish not to do that instead of starting a new program. The old days of unilateral programs are gone,” he says. “For example, we are looking with the Army at the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, which will replace the Humvee and be mine resistant.
“We’re also mapping the architectural pieces of MAGTF command and control to the FCS right now. There are technologies both services are discovering as they get into FCS development that may well apply to other areas, from force protection to communications. So we are looking at what we can leverage or buy in a joint program with the Army.”
Even as the Marine Corps looks to adapt and adopt new technologies, increase the training of every Marine in other cultures and languages, and applies itself increasingly to the evolving joint/coalition, network-centric battlespace, Magnus firmly rejects any implication that current or future changes reflect badly on the past.
“There has been a lot of discussion in the last generation about the changing nature of war and the need to transform not only the battlefield but the military. I don’t think that’s wrong, but an undue focus on that would lead you to believe there was something so fundamentally wrong with the military and the Marine Corps in recent years that we have to radically change the systems and networks and culture and the people who are the warriors. That is flat wrong,” he says. “The Marine Corps has been evolving for 231 years – and every time the U.S. has found itself in a crisis, the Marines have been ready, relevant, and capable to that crisis.
“And that is what we must give to those Marines who come after us. We Marines need to continue to challenge ourselves to understand the changing nature of technology, of societies and cultures on this planet. We also need to adapt to what our government, our commander in chief, wants us to do – and to the fact that American culture also is changing. If we don’t do that, we won’t be able to attract the best young men and women to selfless dedication to the nation.”
Despite cutbacks in manpower and weapon systems and platforms during the 1990s, the U.S. military that went to war after September 11 did so with what it then had, and perhaps even surprised itself by how much it had learned since Desert Storm and how well it employed its combat forces in joint and coalition warfare, he adds.
Marines with 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing practice their marksmanship skills during Exercise Desert Talon at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, Ariz. Various models of the M-16, including the M16A2 and M16A4 used by Marines, have served in the hands of servicemembers, making it the longest-serving rifle in U.S. history. “Every Marine a rifleman” remains a watchword even in the 21st century.
Photo by Cpl. Johnathan K. Teslevich
“But we also need to remain very careful about never underestimating the enemy, because if the human element in war is dominant, then it also is dominant for our enemies. And if they do not have the technology we have, that does not mean they automatically will lose,” Magnus warns.
“You have to be very careful that technology itself does not become a weakness, to be ready for technology to surprise us as the enemy fields something you don’t expect or defeats your technology, reducing you to the very basic level of human against human on the battlefield. So we work very hard to make sure U.S. Marines, individually and as combined arms teams, are and will remain dominant on the battlefield.”
Huly, too, warns against the siren song of technology as the answer to every battlefield problem.
“Even as technologically advanced as we are today, I believe decades from now the battle ultimately still will be won by a young man or woman on the ground with a rifle and bayonet who can say ‘this is my piece of turf, I control it.’ Everything else will help, but it will be that welltrained, educated, adaptable man or woman who will win the day for us. And it will be the responsibility of the leadership in that time to make sure we maintain those basic qualities of a United States Marine.”
