By Carlo Munoz
The Marine Corps will plus-up its intelligence, cyberwarfare and special operations capabilities over the next several years as a way to compensate for an anticipated 15,000- man cut to its total force scheduled for 2015, according to a recently-released service report.
Those capability increases are part of a larger plan designed to restructure the force and put the service in a position to fight wars in a post-Afghanistan environment, according to service leaders. Drafted by the Marine Corps Force Structure Review Group, the report’s recommendations will result in “a force optimized for forward-presence” and one better prepared to handle the service’s main expeditionary mission.
Members of the review group wrapped up its work last December. In February, Defense Secretary Robert Gates blessed the group’s findings and paved the way for the report’s final release this week.
“We knew we were not going to get it exactly right, but we for sure did not want to get it exactly wrong,” Marine Commandant Gen. James Amos said of the assessment during a Feb. 18 Defense Writers Group breakfast in Washington.
On intelligence capabilities, service leaders want to increase investment of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets by 25 percent, according to the report. That move will allow the Marine Corps to capitalize “on the ISR, [command and control] and future strike capabilities of unmanned aerial vehicles,” it adds.
Along with investing in more unmanned ISR systems, the service will also reorganize its intelligence and collection and exploitation operations by strengthening ties between its forward deployed and garrison support forces with elements of the intelligence community.
The service will also increase the number of billets in its nascent Marine Corps Cyberspace Command, and augment its communication and radio battalions with “cyber network defense, exploitation and attack operations,” to push those capabilities down to the ground level, the report states.
Another one of the Marine Corps’ newest commands, Marine Corps Special Operations Command, will also get an uptick in personnel, with service leaders looking to increase the number of “critical combat support and combat service support” troops within MARSOC by 44 percent.
The Marine Corps will also look to support a number of SOF core competencies among its special operations and general purpose forces, according to the report. The service will take steps toward “retaining and better integrating the training, advising and assistance” capabilities to better equip Marines for irregular warfare operations.
That effort will include a stronger focus on cultural competency and partner-nation engagement missions and other types of non-kinetic activities to strengthen ties between the Marine Corps and allied forces around the globe.
In developing these areas of focus, group members took cues from the Quadrennial Defense Review and the White House’s National Security Strategy, “and projected that into the future security environment, or what [the service] thought the world would look like over the next two decades,” Amos said in February.
The Marine Corps future force plan, as drafted, also addresses “high demand, low density” types of capabilities–such as organization and personnel–and recommends a number of cuts to meet Gates’ force reduction goal.
Coupled with a 13 percent drop in ground combat forces, the Marine Corps will also cut its tactical aviation squadrons by 16 percent and draw down its artillery and armor forces by a combined 40 percent, the report states. Additionally, the logistics force will be brought down by 9 percent, but that drop will be augmented by a “significant organizational restructuring to enhance responsiveness,” the report states.
While, in the end, the planned force reductions and commensurate combat capability increases will reshape the Marine Corps into a “middleweight force” designed to be light enough to get to the fight and heavy enough to finish it, the service is admittedly taking a risk by implementing these moves, the report states.
“We will accept a degree of risk by reducing our active component capacity for conducting multiple, major sustained operations ashore, relying on an operationalized reserve component to mitigate that risk,” the report states. “Of necessity, our force structure represents many judiciously considered factors and makes pragmatic trade-offs in capability…and provides an operational stance that enables flexibility and a rapid response.”