Listen Up Marines, We Belong at Sea

SMALL WARS JOURNAL
www.smallwarsjournal.com
Listen Up Marines, We Belong at Sea
By SWJ Editors
Coming soon in April’s Proceedings – Listen Up Marines! We Belong at Sea,
Ready for Trouble by Lieutenant General Bernard E. Trainor, U.S. Marine
Corps (Retired). Here’s a sneak preview:

As the Marine Corps looks beyond Iraq, the question becomes “Where do we
go from here?”

    That question was asked of the Marine Corps after the two World Wars,
Korea, and Vietnam. After each conflict there were many who discounted the
utility of the Marines, citing cost-effectiveness, duplication, and myriad
other reasons as justification for the elimination or absorption of this
singular and peculiar organization. But the Corps survived and justified its
existence through its performance in and out of battle. Nonetheless, it will
face renewed scrutiny after Iraq and Afghanistan and the result will be the
same-but only if the Corps remains useful and does what it says it can do.

Marines have been almost indistinguishable from the Army for the past
five years of the Iraq War. That was also the case in the wars [previously]
cited. But the Corps was born to serve on the Seven Seas and that’s where
its future will again reside…

I sincerely hope so, but remain pessimistic. Senator Sam Nunn, when he
chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1990 (nearly two decades
ago), qustioned whether a lighter Army and a heavier Marine Corps were
already undesirably redundant and cost-ineffective. My take in the July 2005
issue of Proceedings noted that Title 10, United States Code, tells our
Marine Corps to organize, train, and equip forces for service with the fleet
in the seizure or defense of advanced naval bases and for the conduct of
such land operations as may be essential to the prosecution of a naval
campaign.

That prescription, however, isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on
because Marines repeatedly must supplement our shorthanded Army, which
cannot satisfy its assignments unassisted. Leathernecks during World War I
and since World War II have routinely taken up part of the slack by
performing protracted land power missions that have nothing in common with
naval campaigns. Included tasks frequently involve nitty gritty urban combat
rather than fluid littoral warfare, as demonstrated inside Seoul (1950), Hue
(1968), and Fallujah (2004)…

That sorry situation will persist until the Army expands enough to
satisfy commitments…

Discuss at Small Wars Council

By SWJ Editors on March 26, 2008 8:01 PM
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