Marine Corps Stand-In Forces: A House of Cards

How did the United States Marine Corps transform itself from the world’s premier expeditionary force-in-readiness to a poor parody of the French Maginot Line in just four years? In his Force Design 2030 plan, the 38th Commandant of the Marine Corps radically redesigned and restructured the Marine Corps to operate as a defensively oriented, narrowly specialized regional force under Navy command to attack and sink Chinese warships in the South China Sea. This new mission came at the expense of providing much needed crisis response and global force projection capabilities to all Geographic Combatant and Functional Commands in an increasingly unstable world. The crown jewel of this new warfighting organization are called Stand-in Forces (SIFs), which are small isolated detachments of Marines, armed with anti-ship missiles, persistently spread across islands in the so-called “contested” areas of hostilities: specifically the first island chain.    

Some pundits hailed the Commandant’s plan as revolutionary, brave, and brilliant. Others saw it for what it was – a national security disaster and the death blow to the nation’s global 911 force.

Much has already been written about the adverse impacts of what has been recently renamed Force Design, but not as much scrutiny has been applied to the SIF concept, which is a complete “house of cards.”  The best definition of this term comes from the Cambridge English Dictionary: “a complicated organization or plan that is very weak and can easily be destroyed or easily go wrong.” And there in a nutshell is the SIF.  Not unlike the French Maginot Line that was built prior to World War II to protect France’s eastern border against invasion, the McNamara Line that was designed to prevent the infiltration of South Vietnam from the North and Laos, or Japan’s island strategy to protect the homeland during the Second World War, the SIF concept will fail during hostilities.

Let’s examine three loadbearing cards holding up the entire structure, each of which will fall of its own weight:

The first and arguably the most fragile card is logistics. The Marine Corps has no viable plan for inserting, repositioning, resupplying, or supporting the SIFs. The Marines have stated a requirement for 35 small, slow moving, and lightly defended ships (originally termed Light Amphibious Warships but more recently called Landing Ship Medium) as the lynchpin for logistical support.  The Navy has consistently balked at the number of ships as well as the concept for ship design and employment.  And the Marine Corps’ concept of employment simply does not make sense. Consider the statement by the Marine general in charge of requirements that the ship is “meant to look like a commercial vessel that could ‘hide in plain sight.’” Or his even more egregious statement that “As war nears, … the new amphibious ship ‘goes into hiding, it goes into bed-down somewhere.’” Given the vast distances of the Western Pacific, the SIFs cannot be logistically supported without ships.  The LSM is not the answer.  It is not survivable, nor is it even remotely likely to be built in the numbers the Marines say are needed.

The second card is survivability. We know from experience that lightly armed, isolated units inside “contested” areas can be easily overwhelmed by superior forces. One needs to look no further that the Marine Defense Battalions formed prior to World War II.  These battalions were manned and equipped with the best trained and most modern equipment then available. Not long after the Japanese attacked Peal Harbor, the garrison at Wake Island was overwhelmed and the battalion on Midway would have suffered the same end had the U.S. Navy not defeated the Japanese aircraft carriers in the waters offshore during the epic Battle of Midway. The same fate awaits the SIFs if isolated inside the contested areas. They cannot hide. They will be found, and if judged a threat, destroyed.

The third card is duplication and obsolescence. The Marines have essentially destroyed the combined arms capability of the operating forces to stand up 14 Naval Strike Missile (NSM) batteries and 3 Tomahawk Land Attack Missile Batteries.  The Marines intend to only keep 3 NSM batteries permanently forward deployed, while the sole purpose of the other 11 batteries is to serve a rotational pool of manpower and equipment. The Corps’ contribution to the other services’ anti-ship capabilities is minimal and duplicative. Worse, the other services are all investing in long-range, hypersonic missiles while the Marines are largely buying short-range, subsonic missiles that will be obsolete in the near future, if not already. The end result is that Marines will be marginalized, at best, on far flung island with ineffective missiles.

The Marine Corps has transformed to irrelevance.  The poster child for its new look is the SIF, a “house of cards,” supporting a flawed operational concept.  Even on paper, the SIF has minimal utility to confront threats from adversary general purpose forces or unconventional/irregular forces like those operating today in places like Ukraine, Syria, and Gaza where belligerents are effectively using combined arms together with emerging technologies to locate and destroy the opposition using fires and maneuver to great effect. No amount of slick talking points or empty words can alter the facts. Now is the time for a serious discussion about the future of the Marine Corps. Whatever the forum for this discussion, the participants must be balanced on both sides of the argument. The nation has gotten itself into this mess by only listening to one side of the conversation. The Congress must be willing to listen to both sides of this national security issue, preferably in open committee.

General Anthony Zinni (U.S. Marine Corps, ret.) is a career infantry officer. His last assignment was Commander, United States Central Command.

Brigadier General Jerry McAbee (U.S. Marine Corps, ret.) is a career artillery officer. His last assignment was Deputy Commander, United States Marine Corps Forces, Central Command