Under President Biden and his woeful national security team the Marine Corps has fallen from the nation’s premier 911 force to a regional coastal artillery force concentrated on China and a light infantry force of marginal use in a conflict anywhere else. Moreover, our president and what passes these days for military leadership probably do not realize what they have done.
Force Design will not seriously deter China from attacking Taiwan.
The Marine Corps’ senior leadership promotes itself as China-focused and no one has questioned its wisdom, despite the possibility that China is a “flavor-of-the-month” in national security circles. In addition, what is not to like about a service that voluntarily divests itself of $3.8 billion in capabilities at a time that other services are competing desperately for a share of the defense budget. Harry Truman once vowed to reduce the Marine Corps to little more that the Navy’s police force. Biden has largely succeeded where Truman failed. (READ MORE from Gary Anderson: The End of Civilization Starts With a Phone Call)
The Corps’ situation is largely self-inflicted, as an intellectual civil war within the Marine Corps has entered its fourth year. At issue is the current leadership’s effort to reduce Marine Corps amphibious attack capabilities in return for anti-ship missiles to fight the Chinese Navy. This has upset many inside the Corps and a cadre of former Marine Corps general officers.
In order to placate its critics, the current leadership of the Corps has changed the name of its controversial “Force Design 2030” strategy to simply “Force Design” (FD). Under pressure from critics who believe that the Navy-Marine Corps team had reduced amphibious forward presence to dangerously low levels, the current commandant — General Eric Smith — has thrown a bone to the insurgents, affirming the importance of having forward deployed Marine Expeditionary Units in the world’s most likely trouble spots. He has also agreed with the Chief of Naval Operations to “fix” the availability of amphibious shipping. How they will do this in the short term is yet to be explained.
The insurgents in this intellectual battle is led by a group of retired Marine Corps general officers calling themselves Chowder II after a group of retired generals (“The Chowder and Marching Society”) who led the effort to save the Marine Corps during the Truman administration.
Chowder II has reacted to General Smith’s limited concessions with conciliatory statements. Their efforts to date have resulted in “hand wave” efforts by Smith while he has doubled down on the Force Design strategy of giving up critical Marine Corps war-making capabilities to buy anti-ship missiles to fight the Chinese navy in the South China Sea. I am more bloody minded than Chowder II. I want to see Force Design uncovered as the fraud that it is and those responsible for it held accountable.
There are two reasons for my unrelenting opposition to FD. First, it is bad strategy, operational art, and tactics. The second reason flows from the first. The rationale for FD is based on some war games that are suspect at best and rigged at worst. A recent article in the Marine Corps Times detailed this controversy, and the current senior leadership has yet to tell its side of the story.
However, it is instructive that — with the exception of the current commandant in his guidance to the Corps — not a single three or two star general officer has come out to defend Force Design publicly. They are staying low in their foxholes.
General Berger cleverly classified the war games for reasons that have never been fully justified. Consequently, no one without a “need to know” can directly criticize their conduct or analysis. But to date, billions of dollars in capabilities once deemed essential to Marine Corps readiness have been discarded, including all of its tanks and the heavy engineering equipment vital to both sides in the Russo-Ukrainian War. Instead, more will be spent on anti-ship capabilities already possessed by the other services and our regional allies. That should raise some serious questions in Congress and among the inspectors general of the Defense Department and Department of the Navy, to wit:
— Will force design be useful in American efforts to defend Taiwan?
— Second, if Force Design has merit as a strategic or operational concept, could it not have been better implemented by multi-service joint task forces and regional partners rather than by a single service?
— Third, have any of the retired Marine Corps general officers who developed and “validated” Force Design become contractors, board members, or senior corporate officers of the companies trying to sell the anti-ship missiles and sensors used in FD?
If the answers to the first is no, and the two latter is yes, further questions should be asked by an Article 32 investigation, the military equivalent of a grand jury. Many of the retired Marines who have serious questions regarding FD spent their careers building worldwide force readiness capable of handling contingencies ranging from humanitarian disasters to major theater conflict. Seeing it reduced to a region-centric blend of coastal artillery and light naval infantry is distressing indeed. (READ MORE: Israel Isn’t Prepared for a Three Block War)
This is an issue that Mr. Trump and the Republicans should jump on in the coming election. Force Design will not seriously deter China from attacking Taiwan, nor would it be decisive if a war should occur over that island nation.
Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps Colonel who served as a Special Advisor to the Deputy Secretary of Defense and is the author of the Naval War College Newport Paper “BEYOND MAHAN.” He was the Director of Wargaming for the Marine Corps and Chief of Staff of its Warfighting Lab.
