“In our history we teach Marines that the Marine Corps doesn’t change in many ways … we train, we fight, we win, every Marine is a rifleman — it is part of our soul,” Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps Troy Black told Marine Corps Times on April 1 in an interview at the Pentagon. “How we do that, there’s got to be forward thinking, and that’s not a new concept.”

On March 24, Black published a memo outlining how the Marine Corps changed during the 20th century from trench fighters to island-hoppers to America’s force in readiness, ready to respond to any crisis around the globe.

For the top enlisted Marine, the new Force Design concepts are simply another evolution for the Corps.

‘Change is necessary’

The modern plan laid out by Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger is aimed to better ­prepare the Marine Corps for a fight against China.

Berger argues that the Corps cannot fight a ­near-peer adversary with the tactics, weapons and logistics systems it has spent 20 years during the Global War on Terror developing and refining.

Instead, small forces will need to avoid getting wiped out by large missiles. Those small forces will have to be better trained and better equipped, capable of launching their own large missiles or ­electronic warfare attacks.

Almost all aspects of the Marine Corps — from weapons systems, formations and even how the Marine Corps will recruit and retain the best Marines — will go through some form of change.

Since the outset, the change has drawn criticism from the retired community, but criticism has grown in recent weeks, with multiple opinion pieces being published from notable Marines like retired Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, the former head of Marine Corps Combat Development Command, who retired in 1997.

The cultural pushback should not be a surprise, coming from a service that cherishes and teaches its history better than any other branch in the U.S. military, Black said.

He noted that when former Commandant Gen. Al Gray redesigned the Marine Corps based on maneuver warfare concepts, he too drew criticism.

That was until those concepts were used to completely route the Iraqi military during Operation Desert Storm in 1990, Black said.

The sergeant major acknowledged that combat is the only way to truly test a new design, but added that the Marine Corps is at even greater risk of being too conservative as it prepares to faceoff against China.

“Marines are figuring out that change is necessary,” Black said.

Part of the plan relies on the Corps getting more mature and improving retention. As part of those ­efforts, Black has taken the lead in changing the ­human performance outlook and resources in the Marine Corps in the hopes of improving all ­Marines’ mental, physical and spiritual well-being.

But that may be difficult as the Corps gets ­smaller and reorganizes without giving up most of itsncommitments.

“There are no fewer MEUs than there ever have been,” Black said.

With the closing down of the three special purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Forces, the Corps has been relieved of a significant manpower burden and is moving closer to a 1-to-3 deploy-to-dwell cycle, he said.

He added that improved retention would allow units to train more efficiently as the bulk of veterans will no longer be replaced by junior Marines every four years.

“If we overtax the force … that is going to have the effect” of reducing retention, he said.

The sergeant major did note that there was a risk that a small Marine Corps eventually will mean a higher operational tempo, which could damage the Corps’ ability to retain troops. But he does not believe that is currently in the cards.

The Corps also is undergoing a small cultural ­rethink of what it means to be in the infantry.

No longer will the entire focus of the Corps be on providing the infantry everything it needs to win a fight. In some future situations infantry will be a supporting unit acting to help enable the movement of naval vessels. With the changing focus, some have speculated the entire ethos of the Corps will move to a defensive posture and the concept that ‘every Marine is a rifleman’ soon will die.

Black understands why someone without insider knowledge could see it that way, but vehemently disagrees.

“The mission of the Marine Corps rifle squad is taught to every single enlisted and officer,” Black said. “It is to locate close with and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver and to repel the enemy assault by and close combat.”

“That’s not going to change,” he added.

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“Adversaries do not like this concept at all,” Gen. Eric Smith, the assistant commandant of the Marine Corps, told reporters at a briefing on Monday. “They don’t like the fact that units are highly mobile, that they have a low signature, and that the adversary doesn’t know where these things are.”

The new 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment will be headquartered out of Marine Corps Base Hawaii and is based around the current 3rd Marine Regiment.

Designed based on potentially thousands of hours of war games, the new unit is set to the be the flagship formation seeing the Corps enter the post Global War on Terror era.

But not everyone is sold on the new concept or buys the Marine Corps’ total confidence of the fear these units may strike in potential enemies.

“It was as if they had entered the mind of our opponents,” Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel and current senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told Marine Corps Times.

“I think it would be more accurate to say, ‘In our war games the Chinese player finds it very difficult to track down these platoons,” Cancian said.

Staying undetected

The new littoral regiment will be made up of three elements: a littoral combat team ― consisting of one infantry battalion and one missile battery potentially capable of sinking ships, a littoral anti-air battalion and a combat logistics battalion.

The littoral combat team will be capable of deploying in plus-sized platoon elements ranging from 75 to more than 100 Marines depending on the mission, Smith told reporters.

The Marine Corps envisions using those teams to create and occupy expeditionary advanced bases widely dispersed across the littorals of any future fight.

Those Marines will be able to launch cyberattacks, spot targets and possibly even sink or destroy large enemy ships.

Despite the firepower, the Corps hopes the small size and the dispersed nature of the unit will keep it undetected from enemy sensors for an extended period of time, while the unit’s mobility will allow it to run away unscathed once the enemy does stumble upon it.

Eventually the Corps will have three littoral regiments, all stationed within III Marine Expeditionary Force, Smith said on Monday.

The Marine Corps has been experimenting with the formations and tactics the regiment will implore since the 2020 release of Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger’s Force Design 2030.

Smith said it was those tests that have shown how worried the enemy is about the new Marine Corps formation.

“We’re talking about an organization of 75 Marines … that are inherently mobile and have capabilities to shut down a network to strike an enemy capital warship and then fade away and move again,” Smith said. “Adversaries hate that because they don’t have effective control over the adversary’s plan.”

Smith said he could not give details on how that information was gathered or assessed because it was classified.

‘It’s all very sensible’

The Marine Corps’ hesitancy to publicly provide data about Force Design 2030 tests has caused some to be skeptical of the Corps’ assertion that potential adversaries are shaking in their boots.

“The Marine Corps states that the war games support their concept and maybe they do, but it is not evident,” Cancian said.

But not all are as pessimistic.

Dakota Wood, a retired Marine and current senior research fellow for the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, told Marine Corps Times, “It’s not 100% guaranteed, but I think there’s been a lot of intellectual effort put into it.”

“I think these newly derived solutions will be applicable against a range of tactical scenarios,” Wood said.

Cancian agrees that the Marine Corps needs to modernize and shift its focus toward near-peer threats like China.

But the retired Marine pointed out that this was the first major introduction in Marine Corps war fighting concepts during peace since helicopters were introduced between World War II and the Korean War.

While the Corps has gone through significant changes since the late 1940s, most of those changes came out of weaknesses exposed on battlefields and almost immediately were tested in the fires of war.

By contrast, Force Design 2030 has been developed and tested through simulations and field exercises that allow the Marine Corps to make its own assumptions about the enemy’s capabilities.

“It’s very good that the Marine Corps is conducting them,” Cancian said. “It’s all very sensible, but nobody on the outside has any visibility into them.”

Wood acknowledged it is possible for confirmation bias to make its way into the Marine Corps analysis process.

He noted that it is important for the Marine Corps and outside observers to constantly question these studies and experiments to ensure they hold up. But from his vantage point, the Marine Corps seems to be heading in the right direction.

Though he did not provide many details, Smith said the Corps is constantly listening to small unit leaders running Marines through these exercises to figure out what is working and what is not.

“We are constantly adjusting the exact size of an infantry battalion, the exact number of missiles a unit needs to carry so that it matches our logistics capability, the exact signature that they will put out,” Smith said.

“Those things are constantly in motion, but our cardinal direction has not changed at all and every piece of analysis that we have comes back and says, ‘The adversaries do not like what you’re doing at all,’” Smith said.

The Corps estimates that it will need $198 million over the next five years for immediate upgrades to make possible boot camp gender integration at both San Diego and Parris Island, South Carolina, according to the documents.

Beyond gender integration, the Marine Corps said it needs more long-term money, “to address resiliency concerns, modernization of facilities, and sustainment of overall recruit training.”

Between five and 30 years from now the Corps believes those costs with come out to about $4.72 billion.

With the passing of the of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, gender segregated training at Marine Corps boot camp was banned.

Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, South Carolina, had five years to comply with the law while Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego had eight years.

Initially members of Congress believed the law would require boot camp to be integrated at the platoon level, where most of boot camp training takes place.

But the Marine Corps seems to be on the path of arguing that the law only requires it to gender integrate companies.

Either form of gender integration would require large overhauls to the barracks at both Marine Corps recruit depots, the document said.

The Corps has trained at least 19 coed companies at Parris Island, South Carolina, and one coed company at San Diego, despite neither location having barracks capable of handling a coed living situation.

“The Marine Corps was able to temporarily overcome this shortfall by using unoccupied aging barracks to expand capacity,” a document shared with members of Congress said. “Long term support is still needed for a permanent solution.”

With a rising sea level and the precarious position of Parris Island, South Carolina, in the middle of swamp on the edge of the Atlanta Ocean, the very existence of the Corps’ historic boot camp site may be at stake.

By 2050, parts of the base would be underwater nearly a third of the year, a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists predicted.

The costs of keeping the two recruit depots safe from a changing climate and upgrading facilities to allow gender integration caused Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger to consider closing the two bases and consolidating Marine Corps boot camp at a third location.

“We have to get to a place where on both coasts or at a third location, or whatever we end up with that every recruit male, female, there’s all there’s male and female around,” Berger said at Defense One’s 2020 state of the Marine Corps event.

But that idea found little support on Capitol Hill.

“It ain’t gonna happen!” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, tweeted out in response to the idea of moving the base.

“Anyone in the Navy or Marine Corps thinking about closing Parris Island has limited growth potential,” he wrote.

The Corps has taken the lead in the Department of Defense in its preparation for a war in the Pacific, with its Force Design 2030 plan released shortly after Gen. David Berger took over as commandant of the Marine Corps in summer 2019.

“If anybody thinks we are moving fast enough, you’re crazy,” Lt. Gen. Karsten Heckl said Wednesday at the Marine Corps’ western seaboard West Conference.

“I would say we need to double down our efforts and figure out a way to move quicker,” Heckl said.

The commandant’s plan sees the Marine Corps getting smaller, lighter and more mobile in order to conduct a distributed fight in the Pacific, with the focus shifting toward how the Marine Corps can support a naval campaign in the region.

Small teams of Marines potentially armed with ship sinking missiles will take up small outposts throughout the Pacific.

The small size will ideally keep them hidden from enemy forces. If the Marines are detected, the increased maneuverability will ideally allow them to leave a position before it is targeted by the potential enemy.

The Marine Corps already has created units that are experimenting with the new formations Marine leaders believe are needed to fight in this way.

“My commandant has stepped off at speed,” Heckl said Wednesday. “We are moving very, very quickly and I assure you there will be no let up on the accelerator.”

In August 2021 the Marine Corps launched a Naval strike missile at U.S. Navy hull, and plans on spending the next two years allowing the 11th Marine Regiment to experiment with the missile and the best way to incorporate it into the fleet.

In the meantime, the Corps recently added a second battery of High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, battery to the Okinawa, Japan, based 3rd Battalion, 12th Marines ― doubling the number of Marine rockets deployed in Asia.

Heckl said he wants industry to give the Corps more products to the fleet in order to start testing them.

“What I’m looking for is getting certain different capabilities in the hands of the operators and letting them begin to experiment,” Heckl said.

Heckl added that continuing resolutions risk slowing down the progress the Marine Corps is making.

“We want to not break trust with our families, our sailors, our Marines; we want to maintain that competitive edge for our strategic rivals; and we want to be a good partner to our industrial base. A year-long CR does not do any of those things, so it’s not in our best interest,” Rear Adm. John Gumbleton, the deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for budget, told reporters in a Jan. 25.

The government has been operating on a series of continuing resolutions, which freeze government speeding at the fiscal year 2021 levels since the new fiscal year started in October.

The current continuing resolution would fund the government through March 11.

“We need stable, predictable funding,” Heckl said.

The general went on to voice his concerns that military development tends to lead to over engineering at the cost of developmental speed.

“If we continue to overengineer, over cost everything and over schedule everything the Chinese are just going to get farther and farther and farther ahead,” Heckl said.

The Corps is planning to increase the number of active duty rocket batteries it fields as it hopes to modernize for a potential future conflict with a near-peer threat like China.

The Corps confirmed that in 2021 it added two HIMARS batteries to the active duty force, one in Japan and one with the Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, based 1st Battalion, 10th Marines.

Despite the two additions, the Corps has yet to transition any active duty battery away from using the M777 tube artillery piece, as called for as part of Force Design 2030.

The Okinawa, Japan, based 3rd Battalion, 12th Marines, is unique among the Corps because it does not have any native firing batteries.

Instead, it is filled by two tube artillery batteries and now two HIMARS batteries rotating to Japan for six-month periods as part of the Unit Deployment Program, Maj. Kurt Stahl, a spokesman for the 3rd Marine Division, told Marine Corps Times in an email.

One HIMARS battery slot is currently filled by the active duty Battery T, 5th Battalion, 11th Marines, normally based out of Camp Pendleton, California, Stahl said.

The second HIMARS battery slot is comprised of the Marine Reserve Battery D, 2nd Battalion, 14th Marines out of El Paso, Texas, Stahl said.

Battery D has been a part of a HIMARS battalion since 2006, while 5th Battalion, 11th Marines, transitioned to HIMARS in 2008.

The East Coast HIMARS addition was a reactivated battery from 5th Battalion, 10th Marines.

Ultimately the Corps wants to arm the HIMARS or other newly developed rocket systems with missiles capable of sinking ships.

The rockets will help form a picket line in the littorals of any future fight with the goal of keeping sea lanes clear for the U.S. Navy and possibly keeping any opponent Navy pinned up in their home ports during the conflict.

Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger, as part of Force Design 2030, originally called for an 300% increase in missile batteries and for the Corps reduce its number of M777 batteries from 21 to just five.

Unlike other moves made by the Corps, the transition will take place slowly over the next eight years. And the exact ration of rocket to tube artillery batteries and the exact rocket system used will be determined by the experimentation currently taking place, Maj. Joshua Benson, a spokesman for Marine Corps Combat Development and Integration, told Marine Corps Times in an email.

The Marine Corps is experimenting with the unmanned Navy-Marine expeditionary ship interdiction system, or NMESIS.

The systems sees a Raytheon built naval strike missile carrying a 500-pound warhead strapped to the back of a remotely operated joint light tactical vehicle.

A 2021 test saw the Marine Corps use the system to fire the missile more than 100 nautical miles against the former guided missile frigate Ingraham off the coast of the Hawaiian island of Kaua’i at the Pacific Missile Range Facility.

As more and more experiments happen, the Corps does not plan on transitioning any M777 batteries to HIMARS batteries in 2022, Benson told Marine Corps Times.

The CH-53K King Stallion, with a maximum external lift of 36,000 pounds and the ability to transport 27,000 pounds 110 nautical miles is a major improvement over the CH-53E Super Stallion the Corps currently employs.

Both helicopters are manufactured by Sikorsky. The extra lift will play a critical role in the Corps’ plan for a future fight that sees Marines widely dispersed across the littorals of the Pacific Ocean.

“Today our Marine Corps got a little stronger,” Maj. Gen. Michael Cederholm, the commanding officer of the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing, said in a press release.

The CH-53K also comes with 63% fewer parts than its predecessor, ideally making it easier to maintain in austere conditions.

Bill Falk, Sikorsky’s director of the CH-53K program, said the helicopter hitting fleet marked another step in the company’s history of working with the Marine Corps.

“While sad to see the beginning of the phase out of the venerable Super Stallion, Sikorsky is thrilled the Marine Corps is introducing the CH-53K King Stallion heavy lift helicopter into the fleet and is moving one step closer to initial operational capability (IOC) and first deployment,” Falk told Marine Corps Times in an emailed statement.

Though the helicopter making it to the fleet is a positive step, the helicopter’s journey was a bumpy one.

The Corps originally ordered the aircraft in 2008 and expected it to hit the fleet in 2019.

But in 2018, after testing one of the first CH-53Ks, the Corps found more than 100 technical problems that caused a multiyear delay in the program.

By September 2020 the helicopter was back on track, with Sikorsky saying it had solved 118 of the aircraft’s 126 technical problems.

But with the delay and fixes the cost of the aircraft ballooned.

The current recurring flyaway cost for the CH-53K is just under $91.6 million per aircraft, Maj. Jay Hernandez, a Marine Corps spokesman, told Marine Corps Times.

For comparison, the F-35′s current recurring flyaway cost is $77.9 million per aircraft.

The goal is to eventually get that cost down to $87 million per aircraft ― the price that the Corps expected to pay in 2017.

But despite the cost, the Corps is happy to finally get its new helicopter to fleet and eventually start putting it to work.

“Quite simply, 2nd MAW will be able to move more troops and equipment, at higher altitudes, faster speeds, and in more austere environments than ever before,” Cederholm said.

“Although our battalion colors will no longer fly tomorrow, our spirit — the nature and character of the Island Warrior — spreads throughout our Corps,” said Lt. Col. Brandon H. Turner, the unit’s final commander, in a press release.

“Our Marine Corps moves forward, and we, ever faithful to the cause, move forward as well. Fortune Favors the Brave. We are and always will be the Island Warriors,” Turner added.

The unit was founded on May 1, 1942, as the 3rd Training Battalion during the Corps’ expansion during World War II.

The battalion was redesignated as 2/3 the following month, and in 1943 it was the first to land on Bougainville, Papua New Guinea.

Though the battalion was deactivated from 1945 to 1951, it had earned a well-known legacy in the Corps.

“The Island Warriors have served bravely and fought well in Bougainville, Guam, the Republic of Vietnam, Kuwait and Afghanistan,” said Lt. Gen. James Bierman, commander of III Marine Expeditionary Force, in a memo about the unit.

Between 2005 and 2011 the battalion deployed to Afghanistan three times and to Iraq twice.

The battalion is “one of the finest and most storied battalions currently in the Marine Corps,” Bierman said.

The battalion was deactivated as 3rd Marines is slated to become the 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment.

The Marine littoral regiment is a new formation the Corps is debuting that will be specifically designed for a dispersed fight in the littorals of any future war.

The 3rd MLR will be the Corps’ first official Marine littoral regiment and the final makeup of the unit will be based on experiments it conducts in the coming years.

“While today is a somber day in history as the Island Warriors deactivate, today symbolizes a critical shift for the Marine Corps; a necessary shift to once again answer the call,” said Col. Timothy S. Brady Jr., the commander of 3rd Marines, said during deactivation ceremony. It is “a shift that enables the Marine Corps to reorganize and establish new formations like the Marine littoral regiment, a unit ready to fight and win against any rising threat in the Pacific.”

Though it was a somber day for some, Bierman looked back at the battalion’s initial deactivation after World War II for clues to the unit’s future.

“There is every likelihood that we have not seen the last of 2/3; it may be the page is only being turned on the latest chapter,” the III MEF commander said in his memo.

“If, at some time in the future, Corps and Nation again call, the proud colors and streamers of 2/3 will once again be uncased,” he added.

Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 314, (VMFA-314), based out of Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, California, left San Diego Jan. 3 aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, according to a Marine Corps press release.

The squadron, also known as the Black Knights, was the first Marine Corps unit to transition to the F-35C in January 2020 and the first squadron to declare full operational capability for the F-35C in July 2021.

“The Black Knight’s deployment of F-35C Lightning II aboard USS Abraham Lincoln is the newest chapter in the Marine Corps’ long history of naval integration,” Maj. Gen. Bradford J. Gering, the commander of 3rd Marine Air Wing, said in a press release.

The F-35C variant of the Lightning II was designed to take off of large Navy aircraft carriers. The Marine Corps also fields the F-35B vertical takeoff variant and already has deployed F-35B squadrons on aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships.

“The upcoming deployment represents years of hard work and innovation by the Marines and Sailors of VMFA-314, MAG-11, and 3rd MAW,” the general added. “It also reinforces our commitment to fielding the most lethal and ready Navy-Marine Corps force as we project warfighting capabilities throughout the Indo-Pacific region, or globally wherever our nation calls.”

The Marine Corps hopes the F-35C’s long range fires and electronic warfare capabilities will increase the forces ability to operate in the Pacific.

“Having this asset available greatly increases the Marine Corps’ ability to provide security to our allied nations and preserve a free and open Indo-Pacific,” Lt. Col. Brendan M. Walsh, the squadron’s commanding officer, said in the press release.

The deployment of the F-35C is not the only historic moment for the Abraham Lincoln’s deployment.

Capt. Amy Bauernschmidt, the carrier’s commanding officer, is the first woman to lead a nuclear carrier in U.S. Navy history. She took command of the ship in August 2021.

After a tragic July 2020 sinking that killed nine troops, AAV operations had been halted. But the Marine Corps renewed its waterborne operations in the spring of 2021, believing the issues had been fixed and operational requirements had been improved.

“Given the current state of the amphibious vehicle program (the program that manages both AAVs and ACVs), the Commandant of the Marine Corps has decided the AAV will no longer serve as part of regularly scheduled deployments or train in the water during military exercises,” Maj. Jim Stenger, a Marine Corps spokesman, told Marine Corps Times in a Wednesday email.

The Marine Corps did not provide specific details about what exactly caused the commandant to pull the aging vehicle from deployments.

Citing operational concerns Stenger did not say whether any AAVs were currently deployed.

In September the Marine Corps beached the AAV’s replacement, the amphibious combat vehicle, due to issues with its towing mechanism.

Stenger said the ACV is still prevented from conducting waterborne operations, leaving the Corps with no amphibious landing vehicles that it can train with in the water.

“ACVs were temporarily suspended from open ocean waterborne operations as we worked to solve an issue that was identified with the towing mechanism,” Stenger said. “We expect that issue to be resolved soon and for ACVs to return to the water early in the New Year.”

On July 30, 2020, an AAV carrying infantry Marines from San Clemente Island, California, sank, killing eight Marines and one sailor.

Investigations into the incident found multiple vehicles on the deployment had serious mechanical issues before joining the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit in addition to failures in training that may have led to the accident.

After the sinking the Marine Corps halted all waterborne AAV training and conducted a thorough inspection of the fleet in an attempt to find out the real state of the vehicles.

The thorough inspection, based off of initial tests developed by the manufacturers, found that nearly all AAVs in the Marine Corps leaked at unacceptable rates.

Only 10 of 3rd Assault Amphibian Battalion’s nearly 200 vehicles passed the more intense inspection, Operations Officer Marine Maj. Justin Davis said while testifying at a board of inquiry for the unit’s former battalion commander, Lt. Col. Keith Brenize, on Dec. 7 at Quantico, Virginia.

He said he believed the 2nd Assault Amphibian Battalion did slightly better than his battalion.

Multiple members from the AAV community testified that the age of the Vietnam-era vehicles led to constant maintenance woes, regardless of the amount of attention spent working on the vehicles.

“These are old vehicles,” Lt. Col. Matthew Hohl, the executive officer for 3rd AA Battalion, said during his Friday testimony.

“As a community, AAVs are extremely maintenance heavy,” he added, noting that an AAV typically requires eight hours of maintenance for every hour of operation.

Brenize is facing the board of inquiry for his alleged role in the July 30, 2020, sinking. As the former 3rd AA battalion commander, Brenize was responsible for providing the MEU with fully operational vehicles and well-trained Marines.

Despite the decision to stop sending AAVs on deployment, Stenger said the Corps stands by the fixes that led to the spring waterborne training.

“The Marine Corps stands by the efficacy of the recommendations that came from the multiple investigations into the AAV mishap from the summer of 2020, and with those recommendations implemented and sustained, the AAV is a safe and effective vehicle for amphibious operations,” Stenger said.

While the vehicles will not go on “regularly scheduled deployments,” Marines will still train on them for ground operations and they are ready to deploy if a crisis arises.

Stenger said further guidance to fleet will be coming soon.