By Emelie Rutherford
Newly minted Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Amos’ guidance for the service calls for creating a new board to oversee equipment proposals, increasing energy efficiency, and enhancing cyberwarfare capability.
Amos, who replaced Gen. James Conway as the service’s top officer last week, issued his Commandant’s Planning Guidance for 2010 on Wednesday.
And the general, who previously led Marine Corps Combat Development Command, directs Assistant Commandant Gen. Joseph Dunford to implement and chair an Expeditionary Equipment Review Board. The board, Amos’ 20-page guidance says, will provide “final approval and oversight of all new equipment proposals, viewing them through an ‘expeditionary footprint and lighten the load’ lens.”
Dunford is directed to create the board by Dec. 17.
Amos’ guidance has four overarching priorities for the service, the execution of which Dunford will oversee. The guidance emphasizes lightening the weight of the Corps.
One of Amos’ four stated priorities is to “rebalance” the Marine Corps, and “posture it for the future and aggressively experiment with and implement new capabilities and organizations.”
The direction for the new equipment oversight board falls under this category.
Amos also directs the head of the Marine Corps’ Expeditionary Energy Office to craft a plan by Feb. 11, 2011, to decrease the service’s dependence on fossil fuels in theater. The plan should be implemented starting in fiscal year 2011, which ends next Sept. 30, and be fully funded in the Program Objective ’13 budget cycle, the new commandant writes.
The guidance calls for the new energy-efficiency plan to concentrate on three major areas: increasing the use of renewable energy; instilling “an ethos of energy efficiency;” and increasing the efficiency of equipment.
“The objective is to allow Marines to travel lighter–with less–and move faster through the reduction in size and amount of equipment and the dependence on bulk supplies,” the guidance states.
Amos also calls on Marine Corps Forces Cyber Command to help the Corps increase cyberwarfare capability and capacity. By Jan. 14, 2011, he says, the command should recommend options for achieving this goal through steps including offensive and defensive cyber operations, joint cyber integration, and staffing.
Of Amos’ four broad priorities for the Corps in his new guidance, he says the top one remains providing “the best trained and equipped Marine units to Afghanistan.”
The other two overarching priorities in his guidance are to “better educate and train our Marines to succeed in distributed operations and increasingly complex environments,” and to “keep faith with our Marines, our Sailors and our families.”
Conway, who is now retired, consistently said the Marine Corps strayed too far from its expeditionary roots, with so many troops serving on the ground in Afghanistan and previously Iraq, and is too heavy.