Almost all our doctrine is "Approved for Public Release, Distribution Unlimited."
And how, pray tell, does US military doctrine enter into any kind of serious conversation?
Posted on 10/25/2020 8:08:11 PM PDT by Mariner
US Marine officers are notoriously dismissive of those who talk about strategy. "Strategy?" a Marine who served in Vietnam says. "Here was our strategy: hey-diddle-diddle, straight-up-the-middle."
The description rings true: The Marine Corps' most famous fights were straight-ahead affairs that gave the Corps its most celebrated moments: at Belleau Wood (in World War I), at Tarawa, Iwo Jima and Okinawa (in World War II), at Inchon (during Korea), at Hue (in Vietnam) and, most recently during the battles for Fallujah, back in 2004. Now, it seems, all of that is changing.
In August of last year, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger published his Commandant's Planning Guidance, a detailed recasting of the Marine Corps' force structure.
By any measure, Berger's guidance marked a breathtaking shift away from the service's urban combat focus and its follow-on mandate of "countering violent extremists in the Middle East" to a "great power/peer level competition, with special emphasis on the Indo Pacific…"
The shift, Berger admits, is sweeping: "from inland to littoral, and from non-state actor to peer competitor." The guidance reduces tank companies (from 7 to 0), artillery batteries (from 21 to 5), infantry battalions (from 24 to 21), amphibious vehicle companies (from 6 to 4), helicopter attack squadrons (from 7 to 5), and the number of F-35Bs in its air squadrons.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Excuse me, but how do you win if your CIC is owned by the enemy?
This is for survival. The Marines cannot sustain long logistical and maintenance lines. They will have to force the Navy to come up with the naval gunfire they lost when the battleships were decommissioned.
And they learned they cannot be the same as the Army in Iraq and Afghanistan if they are going to be competing against Space Force. Smart move. They have to get lighter and more mobile, and pick up realistic missions that are absolutely necessary for the Navy, rather than being the 2nd ground army.
It’s been customary, the last couple of wars, for the Pentagon to use Marine shock troops as just another 3 maneuver divisions, and ignore their specialization.
Are you referring to the Stryker? The Marines don’t have any.
To be fair, while the Marines are infamous for being able to break everything up to and including solid metal ingots that they are issued with, they have to think about things more than the other branches due to historical lack of equipment, lack of funding and being overtasked.
If its a hatchet job, its a self imposed one. I work with a Marine, and he approves of a lot of the moves. They want to focus to Corps on expeditionary strike missions and simply don’t see armor and artillery (with the accompanying logistical support requirements) as crucial to that effort.
We’ll see what happens.
Other sources going back months, if not a year, suggest that the Corps is going to focus on “raiding”. When I hear that I think of what the USMC did in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor at places like Makin Island and Kwajalein Atoll. Makes a certain amount of sense. Why would you seize an island & hold it when the Chinese could simply plaster it with ballistic missiles? If anything the US Military is talking about shifting assets around from strategic bases deemed to be too close to China to bases further away.
Al Grey when he was at 2nd MarDiv adopted Maneuver Warfare as doctrine way before the US Army — unless you consider Air-Land Battle as ‘qualifying’ which I don’t.
Also, the Marines studied USAF Colonel John Boyd’s theories when everybody else considered him a crank.
Then you have Major Pete Ellis (Intelligence, pre-WW2) and Gen. Roy Geiger (aviation pioneer, Cactus Air Force). So the USMC has had it’s share of free-thinkers over the years.
Broad discussions about doctrine and force structure are unclassified, in fact it would be hard to have them in a classified environment. People would notice that the Marines have coughed up all their tanks and reclassified or transferred to the Army all their tankers.
Almost all our doctrine is "Approved for Public Release, Distribution Unlimited."
Actual campaign, operational, and contingency plans are mostly classified at various levels from "UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY" through compartmented TOP SECRET plans.
Maybe (and I’m far from knowledgeable on USMC) this is aligning the corp with the current tactics associated with asymmetrical warfare readiness and planning.
The Chinese cannot hit what they cannot see, and even when they see a target, they will do little damage if the target is widely dispersed and dug in. Moreover, expending ballistic missiles and giving away firing positions incurs disadvantages.
Reality is a bitch, but you do less with less.
That's it.
So whittling down the Corps means the Corps does less.
I don't see that as a good way to run an armed service, but I was just an E-8, what the hell would I know?
Drone technology is being fielded, and demonstrating its capability.
When you have cheap drones flying over the battlefield, targeting expensive tanks and artillery, the future of big, expensive hardware is put in doubt, in the same way that big battleships were rendered obsolete by air power in WW2.
The first tactic of any Marine unit is to send off the CIA implant to Mama-san at the village for boom-boom and hooch so he won’t get in the way of the mission.
The cuts are no doubt to free up cash for new weapons and capabilities.
Some changes, like drastic reduction or elimination of conventional artillery, are already well underway in the Army. The replacement capability is guided missile artillery.
What tactical and operational doctrine are and/or should be is the core of serious military conversations. Doctrine provides the common language and baseline to guide commanders and staffs. But unlike what Soviet and Germans tended to perceive, it is not a prescription, but rather a guide to help shape analysis and thinking.
Doctrine discussions help leaders What can (or as important, can’t) military force do to achieve national policy goals? How can the existing force best be used? How do you effectively use land, air, sea, space, cyber forces to achieve tactical, operational and strategic goals?
Tactical, operational, and strategic doctrine guided most of my work for my 32 years in both the Regular Army and National Guard. It still does as a civilian planner for the DoD.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.