Posted on 01/04/2018 9:52:18 AM PST by Elderberry
The Marine Corps is doing away with its 0351 infantry assaultman military occupational specialty and phasing out the assault section of Marine rifle companies in an effort to build up communities such as cyber and electronic warfare, Military.com has learned.
Commandant Gen. Robert Neller, who confirmed planning in December while on an annual tour of deployed Marine elements around the world, said he expects the move to happen in the next three to five years as part of a slate of changes designed to help the Corps prepare for future fights.
The 0351 infantry assaultman, one of the Marine Corps' five core infantry positions, is tasked with breaching, demolition, and rocket fire against fortified positions. Assaultmen carry the MK-153 shoulder-launched multipurpose assault weapon, or SMAW.
But Neller said he's making changes that will ensure those roles are filled by other members of a rifle company.
Each future rifle company will have an element of combat engineers aligned with it to take on breaching and demolition duties. The engineers will carry the SMAW, but they may not be the only ones.
(Excerpt) Read more at military.com ...
MT the magazine ?
I also work in the industry & I think cyber is being emphasized at the expense of real weapons!
I am constantly being told by management, ‘put a cyber spin on it so we can get the moneys!
I am not a Luddite, but what I see is cyber being spun up as the “ultimate weapon”. No need for other weapons, we got “cyber”!
This one's for cyber warfare, and this one's for fun.
Dunno If This Will Appear here?
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Gunny G
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Not at all.
Anything that acts as a force multiplier is good stuff.
Use them while you got them.
But when machines and tech aids fail, break, act up, or get destroyed (and they do) it all comes down to the guys on the ground slogging through the mud and blood.
So just as it doesn't make sense to go to battle without the latest technical tools, it doesn't make sense to eliminate their back up, which is still the grunt on the ground.
I read a very interesting account of the Battle of Guadalcanal - from the POV of the Navy.by James D. Hornfischer
- Neptune’s Inferno:
- The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal
It turns out that the Navy was providing all the support it could to the Marines on Guadalcanal, but they were hampered by shortage of resources and a very serious technological problem. The Japanese didn’t have radar, but they did have what they referred to as "Sanso gyorai” - the "oxygen torpedo.” - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_93_torpedo
In daylight, the US had air superiority over the vicinity of Guadalcanal, of course, and at night the Japanese were sometimes able to bombard Guadalcanal. Both navies faced fuel constraints which limited what ships could be sailed what distances, when. The USN had a battleship available for use at that time and place, but it was such a fuel hog that they never actually used it. The naval battle was basically between destroyers and cruisers - and Japanese "oxygen torpedoes” were a signal advantage in that context. Just as with Japanese ignorance of radar, American commanders had difficulty getting their heads wrapped around the idea that Japanese topedoes had half an order of magnitude better propulsion energy than their own torpedoes had.
Historically torpedoes were propelled by compressed air. But when you do that, of course, the temperature in the air cannister drops with the pressure - and that compounds the temperature drop, drastically reducing the output energy. The solution was to burn fuel in the air coming from the air tank to raise the pressure. But even that is far below what is practical. You could burn five times more fuel in pure oxygen than you could in compressed air. The result would be five times as much energy available, neglecting the space you would have to take away from oxidizer propellant to quintupple the amount of liquid fuel you would need. The upshot would be that the Japanese torpedo probably had nearly four times as much energy, allowing it to go twice as fast for about the same duration of run time. So basically the effective range of the oxygen torpedo might be about twice that of an American WWII torpedo.The upshot was a balance of differing advantages of the combatants which prevented the losing combatant from knowing when to quit throwing good money after bad. And the US Navy suffered even more casualties in the Guadalcanal campaign than the US Marines did.Quite the interesting story. At that time, BTW, USN radar was primitive in lacking IFF. And was only on cruisers.
And Japanese destroyers could go faster than PT boats, and sometimes chased them down and rammed them.
I would have expected the slots to come from the signal corps
Right you are. Wars are still won or lost by boots on the ground. Always have been, always will be. Regardless of MOS, a soldier is always an ‘11 Bravo’ first.
Exactly. We are STILL CURRENTLY in a war against 7th Century barbarians which witnessed a cavalry charge and bayonet charge in Afghanistan while Iraq and Syria are urban hellholes. The battlefield thus far has not seen a great advantage due to technology and without fighting and holding ground by infantry, wars become as protracted as the silly "War on Terror".
“The Marines need this stuff more than they need a low tech bazooka.”
I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess you have never been in a rifle company.
True.
Later in the Guadalcanal campaign both sides brought in battleships.
Also, Japanese lookouts had astonishing night vision. They trained for it, ate to preserve it, and kept lookouts in dark conditions during the day.
Their lookout always saw our ships before our lookouts could see them. They were orders of magnitude better than us there. Radar saved the day for us.
Forget Marine Assault Infantry Men and replace them with elements of Global Warming Experts (GWEs) to mitigate environmental damage, immediately, in the battlespace, before things can get toooo bad.
Hard to call Mattis an Obama general when he fired him without even the common courtesy of a reach around (erm... phone call.)
Well, if the kind of cyber we’re talking is intel and attack drones, breaching robots and the like, that’s a very different matter. That would suggest they are upgrading the Assault Man into a Combat Engineer role. That seems to be what I’m reading.
My nephew graduated from Marine bootcamp (Parris Island) this past September and this is his specialty.
“The Marines need this stuff more than they need a low tech bazooka.”
“I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess you have never been in a rifle company.”
I am going to go out on a limb and say you have no idea what ‘stuff’ I am talking about. Go find someone who as been recently deployed and on patrol and ask them to chose between a bazooka and a portable IED jammer. Go ahead. I will wait.
“That would suggest they are upgrading the Assault Man into a Combat Engineer role. That seems to be what I’m reading.”
That is how I read it.
Some here seem to think it means they are replacing infantry with some punk in a closet with a PC. Which is not at all how I read it.
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