The United States Marine Corps has embarked upon a campaign of change as significant as any since the end of the Vietnam War. The Marine Corps’s collective efforts, named Force Design 2030, have emphasized a focus on China after nearly two decades of constant low-intensity conflict and counterinsurgency operations in the greater Middle East. The force design efforts are tied to two new operational concepts: Littoral Operations in a Contested Environment and Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations. These foundational concepts describe the future operational environment the Marine Corps anticipates and outline how it will fight. This significant reframing, however, is not without precedent. Following the United States’ withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973, the United States Army conducted a similar evaluative and reconstructive process that ultimately culminated in fielding the ground force that was victorious in Operation Desert Storm against an enemy modeled on Warsaw Pact militaries—precisely the force and set of capabilities that the Army set out to create.
As such, the Marine Corps should look to the Army’s history as a model for how to engineer successful organizational change in order to meet the challenge of a potential high-intensity conflict with a peer adversary. To facilitate organizational transformation and address its peer threat, the Warsaw Pact, the Army focused on three key areas: doctrine, equipment, and personnel policy. Simultaneously, the transition to the all-volunteer force also played a role in the Army’s post-Vietnam rebirth. Given the successful outcome of the Army’s efforts during the 1970s, the Marine Corps should emulate its sister service by properly resourcing these three lines of effort—doctrine, equipment, and people—in order to successfully redesign the force. Otherwise, it risks designing a brittle and incomplete Marine Corps for 2030.
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