After publishing the latest annual update to his plan for redesigning the Marine Corps by 2030, the force’s top official said ongoing experimentation has continued to validate the shift to smaller, lighter formations armed with capabilities to meet future challenges against peer competitors such as China.
Gen. David Berger, commandant of the Marine Corps, detailed for attendees at the Modern Day Marine conference in Washington, D.C., his vision for 21st century combined arms that will need to bring together “ISR, precision fires, cyber, information warfare and electronic warfare” at the lowest tactical level, i.e. a squad, a platoon or on a ship, for the future operating environment.
“Here’s what we’re learning, small, distributed lethal teams that can employ organic ISR, loitering munitions and weapons like the Javelin and Carl Gustaf [anti-tank weapons], are much more lethal than larger formations in traditional force structures and concepts. And it’s not even close,” Berger said. “So far it looks to be more lethal than its predecessor. If that’s the trend than the Marine infantry battalion of 2030 is going to be certainly more capable at distributed operations.”
Berger has been leading the effort to retool the Marine Corps by 2030 with a focus on naval expeditionary warfare in actively contested spaces and building lighter formations capable of acting as a “stand-in force,” while recent media reports, including an April Politico article, have indicated the initiative has faced pushback from a slew of former generals arguing against the scale of transformation.
The newly released report detailing progress and the latest updates to the Force Design (FD) 2030 plans includes a note from Berger that the Marine Corps must communicate better on its transformation plans moving forward.
“Our FD 2030 communication has not been effective with all stakeholders. While we are modernizing the Marine Corps using the pacing threat as our benchmark, we have consistently said that a modernized Marine Corps must still be capable of performing global crisis response operations. Regardless, we must do better in explaining to all stakeholders the analytic rigor underpinning our Force Design choices, and how a modernized Marine Corps will perform our traditional roles and functions in the future,” Berger writes in the report.
In the report, Berger reiterates he is confident the Marine Corps can “achieve the majority of our modernization goals without asking for an increase in our budget topline, with continued redirecting of funds from divested programs to new efforts, noting over the last year the service has tested and fielded new systems and expanded force-on-force experimentation.
When Berger’s FD 2030 vision was initially rolled out in March 2020, it detailed plans for eliminating tank battalions, cutting the number of artillery cannon batteries and amphibious vehicle companies and reducing all tiltrotor, attack and heavy lift squadrons (Defense Daily, March 24 2020).
The report notes modernized infantry battalions will now have new capabilities for loitering munitions, enhanced small unmanned aerial systems, signature management tools and electronic warfare and signals intelligence capabilities.
“The ability to manage your own electronic signature, locate the threat, detect and exploit their communications, jam their transmissions, interfere with their command and control, these have always been important in war but today I would offer they can be decisive,” Berger said on Tuesday.
For new weapons capabilities demonstrated over the last year, the report notes the Marine Corps has partnered with the Navy to demonstrate the Navy Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System (NMESIS), launching two Naval Strike Missiles from a Joint Light Tactical Vehicle -based, Remotely Operated Ground Unit for Expeditionary Fires carrier, striking a moving maritime target at over the horizon range” and conducted a ground launch of a Tomahawk Land Attack Missile mounted on a remotely operated mobile launcher.
On experimentation, specifically, Berger noted over the past year and a half the Marine Corps has conducted nine force-on-force exercises at the Twentynine Palms base in California, achieving a perfect record in meeting objectives.
“We’ve done a lot of experimentation over the past couple of years. We have a lot more to do. But what we’ve learned so far points to the future of the infantry battalion in a couple of ways. First, while the infantry battalion mission is to locate, close with and destroy the enemy through fire and maneuver, the range of options for how they can do that…are rapidly expanding,” Berger said. “Every one of those exercises has validated what we have seen in other war games, other experiments.”
Based on recent experimentation, the report notes cannon battery capacity will be set for seven batteries, two more than planned for in the original force design plan, and the Marine Corps has settled on retaining 16 squadrons each with 10 MV-22 tiltrotor aircraft rather than 14 squadrons with 12 aircraft each.