Editor’s Be aware: That is the second in a sequence of three articles on the U.S. Marine Corps. The primary article was revealed on June 16, 2025.
In simply over 20 years, the Marine Corps has gone from being America’s dependable middleweight drive in readiness to extra of a secondary, basic goal backup drive. As we speak, marines usually tend to discover themselves aiding particular operations groups and U.S. Military disaster response activity forces than spearheading operations. With out significant change, a harmful query resurfaces: “Why do we’d like a Marine Corps?”
Within the first article on this sequence, I argued that there’s a possibility to reverse this slide. My analysis exhibits that broadly shared and influential assumptions about trendy warfare are flawed. Conflict has advanced but it surely has not dramatically modified. Due to this fact, some capabilities divested within the preliminary section of Gen. David Berger’s drive design plan ought to be recouped.
And whereas particular operators and Military models have seized the lead on disaster response, the Marine Corps continues to be the one drive that has the baseline functionality and organizational tradition to subject on-call, absolutely built-in, mixed arms models to reply to all the things from noncombatant evacuation operations to large-scale amphibious assault. With some adjustments, the Marine Corps is one of the best group to spearhead international competitors towards China exterior of the so-called nine-dash line. Additionally it is the best irregular warfare drive in readiness.
On this bridging article I handle the failings within the core assumption driving defense-wide drive innovation and design. The character of warfare shouldn’t be altering dramatically. Certainly, my view is that the very idea of warfare having a discernable, common character is flawed.
Present Perceptions Concerning the Character of Trendy Conflict
Widespread perceptions of the so-called character of contemporary warfare are too usually influenced by unfounded histrionics. Standard tradition is breathless concerning the impression of drones, precision munitions, AI, and different applied sciences on the conduct of warfare. Over-the-top movies and articles proliferate, with titles like “The Missile That Adjustments The whole lot!,” and “This new superior drone is insane!” An article claims that with advances in AI, the “central psychology of warfare will disappear.” It will be straightforward to dismiss all this out of hand if it weren’t reiterated in solely barely much less hyperbolic phrases by senior army officers and establishments.
Whereas paying lip service to the imprecise notion that warfare has some form of enduring if ill-defined nature, senior U.S. army leaders have repeatedly said and written that the character of contemporary warfare is altering so dramatically that it places in danger each present army idea and functionality. Joint Warfighting cemented these highest-echelon views: “In 2023, we’re witnessing an unprecedented basic change within the character of warfare.” In different phrases, warfare as marines may expertise it within the mid-2020s and past would little resemble iconic battles like Iwo Jima, Khe Sanh, or Fallujah. Failure to embrace dramatic change would subsequently be disastrous.
Different senior leaders have been extra circumspect. However these broadly held maximalist beliefs concerning the altering character of warfare clearly influenced the authentic Drive Design 2030. Whereas then-Commandant David Berger might not have purchased into all the hyperbole, he appeared to argue that basic adjustments within the character of warfare was shifting the standing Marine drive in direction of obsolesence. He wrote: “I’m satisfied that the defining attributes of our present drive design are now not what the nation requires of the Marine Corps.” This was not simply Berger’s considering: It resulted partly from almost twenty years of usually contentious debate throughout the Marine Corps. Nonetheless, his central rationale for change stemmed from the notion that growing vary, accuracy, and availability of precision-strike munitions would successfully preclude conventional assault-from-the-sea-style amphibious warfare operations.
There are a number of issues with this argument as initially written, every of which I handle in my new guide, Floor Fight: Puncturing the Myths of Trendy Conflict. Most significantly, the core of this argument builds from an empirically unsubstantiated description of contemporary warfare. Broadly held assumptions about trendy warfare emerged from a recurring however mistaken perception that surprising discontinuities, or revolutions in warfare, periodically render standing capabilities out of date.
On shut examination, the idea of a revolution in warfare dissolves into unprovable opinion. It offers no stable floor for the strategic theories or drive designs we now embrace. Fed by illusions and imprecise concepts, present arguments for wholesale army transformation are distorted and indifferent from actuality. However there’s a clear, evidence-driven rationale to maintain each a strong amphibious combined-arms drive and the extra technical parts of Drive Design — together with the stand-in drive — in some kind. Each advocates and critics of Drive Design have made related factors that drive in direction of an inexpensive middle-ground resolution.
Conflict As It Is
Within the new Floor Fight Database I present a big set of coded battle information describing 45 instances from World Conflict II by 2002, after which 423 extra trendy battles and skirmishes fought between 2003 and the top of 2022. This contemporary set consists of the key battles fought by the USA and its allies and companions in Iraq and Afghanistan; over 150 battles fought in civil wars in Syria, Libya, Sri Lanka, Mali, Yemen, and Myanmar; different counterinsurgency fights in locations just like the Philippines, Kenya, Pakistan, and Nigeria; and the warfare in Ukraine from 2014 on.
Collectively, these battles describe land warfare — together with amphibious operations at locations like Al Faw, Iraq; Kilali, Sri Lanka; and Mariupol, Ukraine — because it has really been fought, not because it has been imagined. It seems that international floor fight from 2003 on has been functionally just like warfare because it was fought in 1942. After all, missiles make ship-to-shore operations extra harmful. Drones and another precision munitions, each of which have been employed in World Conflict II, have lately proliferated to smaller states and irregular forces. And it’s clear that drones have had a big impression on some battlefields. Nevertheless, given warfare’s many idiosyncrasies, extrapolating from Ukraine or some other single case (e.g., Nagorno-Karabakh, 2020) is unwise.
Drones and superior applied sciences like AI shouldn’t be discounted, after all. However even the actual proof of drone proliferation and battlefield worth doesn’t justify the technophilic and technophobic exaggerations now used to characterize trendy warfare. It’s attainable for 2 issues to be true at one time: New know-how might be proliferating shortly and the commonest points of land warfare can stay usually constant. Throughout 423 trendy battles, together with 61 from Ukraine, old-school tanks have been employed by not less than one facet in 69 p.c of instances; manned plane and artillery have been utilized by not less than one facet in 82 p.c of instances; armed or armored mild autos by not less than one facet in 96 p.c of instances; and infantry have been employed by either side in each case.
Conflict As It Is in Ukraine
Prima facie studying from the more moderen and widespread employment of AI, floor robots, and smaller aerial drones in Ukraine is stimulating extra keen acceptance of technophilic and technophobic characterizations of contemporary warfare. Some proof is certainly compelling. Since not less than mid-2022, a day by day firehose of drone compilation movies, frontline testimonials, and volumes of provable, concrete proof of drone strike successes have influenced many U.S. army consultants and senior leaders to argue for a right away reshaping of America’s floor forces for superior drone warfare.
Presumably tens of hundreds of drones from either side within the warfare in Ukraine are misplaced every month to countermeasures, drone–killing drones, excessive winds, or technical failures. And whereas drones fly overhead, preventing continues apace on the bottom. In Ukraine and on different international battlefields, precise floor fight stays usually according to World Conflict II-era fight. Infantry and armor transfer to contact, assault, ambush, and defend. Troopers kill one another with rifles, machineguns, rockets, and grenades, very often at intimate ranges. Brutal knife fights like this one (train warning earlier than viewing) nonetheless happen. Collectively, infantry weapons, mines, unguided rockets, artillery rounds, mortars, and manned air-delivered munitions virtually actually have induced a preponderance of contemporary battlefield casualties from 2022 by mid-2025. All of the components that represent mixed arms fight as described by the Marine Corps within the authentic 1989 model of its core doctrinal publication, Warfighting, are as related in 2025 as they have been in direction of the top of the twentieth century.
So, there’s a provably dichotomous actuality wherein superior know-how use meshes with twentieth -century-style floor fight. This dichotomy challenges essentialist ideas just like the clear battlefield. Perception that motion of any type on or behind the entrance line in trendy warfare can’t be hidden from drones is unsubstantiated. Shock is tough in Ukraine however usually achieved — see, for instance, Kursk 2024. And drone countermeasure know-how and proliferation are of their infancy — a rebalancing ought to be anticipated. This cycle of measure, countermeasure, counter-countermeasure, and so forth, is an everlasting characteristic of warfare.
It’s a logical fallacy to imagine that tendencies of any type are irreversible, and it’s unwise to guess on a future army drive predicated on the concept that drones, or AI, or some other know-how has or will indelibly change both the character or nature of warfare. These sorts of forecasts have been made repeatedly since not less than the top of the nineteenth century and have repeatedly failed to come back true. Whereas the types of weapons, gear, and know-how change over time, their capabilities in land warfare stay usually constant: Discover the enemy, launch issues to destroy him or drive him to stop, and transfer to, seize, and maintain terrain. Conflict doesn’t revolt — it evolves inconsistently in operate whilst its kind stays pretty constant over time.
Working from this evidence-driven, tempered, evolutionary, and long-term view of not less than land warfare, the concept of a versatile, full-spectrum, middleweight Marine Corps is interesting.
Drive Design As It Is
This all brings us again to Drive Design. Berger’s plan set in movement two essential alterations to the construction of the Marine Corps, one additive and one broadly reductive. It added — or to be truthful, tailored — the stand-in drive within the type of a brand new Marine littoral regiment whereas sharply decreasing service-wide mixed arms fight energy. Collectively these two adjustments feed into the unresolved conceptual change that underwrites the suggestions I make in Half 3 of this sequence.
A Marine littoral regiment is a extremely modified model of the usual Marine infantry regiment. Revolving round a single infantry battalion, the brand new regiment is designed to interrupt down into discrete platoon-sized groups with hooked up anti-ship and anti-air missiles, superior sensors, cyber, and different high-technology capabilities. Its central goal seems to be to discourage and deny adversary operations within the littoral house, which usually equates to an space from the shoreline out to roughly 200 nautical miles. Platoons that successfully compose the stand-in drive are designed to function stealthily in an effort to survive what’s described as a “mature precision strike regime.”
Critics of the Marine littoral regiment and the stand-in drive query the power of those models to stay unseen and to survive in a high-threat setting. I share these considerations. In a battle with China, it appears probably that the Chinese language will both ignore these platoons as a result of they don’t pose a big menace, or they’ll discover and destroy them as a result of they do pose a menace. Nevertheless, Marines are more likely to die in any wartime state of affairs. Even when they’re noticed and are killed, they might nonetheless have helped deter and deny maritime house to some extent. On this means, the stand-in drive is a extremely dangerous however cheap functionality in a Chinese language context. Danger might be no greater than in a mixed arms floor combat with a Individuals’s Liberation Military Floor Drive unit.
It’s not clear, nevertheless, that the Marine littoral regiment can be broadly helpful exterior of the Far East Asian maritime context. Profitable operations and workouts within the European theater underneath Job Drive 61/2 present that a few of these ideas and capabilities may very well be utilized towards a Russian menace. However no facet of Drive Design has actually been examined in fight. Some superior missiles and different applied sciences that underpin the stand-in drive stay on the drafting board or are nonetheless present process experimental testing. That is all regular for a brand new, experimental design. However exhausting, lingering questions on functionality and mission alignment counsel towards broader extrapolation and drive change.
A much less tangible however equally related concern with the Marine littoral regiment is the dearth of a compelling mission assertion. Traditionally, the mission of a Marine infantry regiment has been unflinchingly direct: Find, shut with, and destroy the enemy by fireplace and maneuver, or repel the enemy’s assault by fireplace and shut fight. Whereas even that wording is now a bit fuzzier, the mission of the Marine littoral regiment seems to be to “persistently function” in a assist function to the Joint Drive, offering a menu of attainable missions it’d undertake. Nebulous language like this exacerbates considerations over the regiment’s goal and, subsequently, over the bigger goal of the Marine Corps. That is considered one of a number of points that may be addressed with straightforward, no- or low-cost changes.
Discount within the service’s mixed arms fight energy is a better concern than the adoption of a modified regiment. Paying for Drive Design out of conceal required steep cuts in weapons, gear, and personnel. Tanks have been eradicated, cannon artillery was lowered by greater than two-thirds of its present power, deliberate funding within the F-35 program — an enormous and controversial finances hog — was additionally lowered, and three infantry battalions have been lower. A brand new amphibious fight automobile with a lightweight 30mm cannon was acquired to concurrently exchange getting older amphibious assault autos, mild armored autos, and tanks.
All of those cuts objectively lowered each the amount and high quality of firepower and floor footprint the Marine Corps will be capable to contribute to a joint combined-arms combat. In response to Marine Corps doctrine, fight energy is the full harmful drive a unit can carry to bear on an enemy at a given time. By this commonplace, decreasing out there artillery, armored direct fireplace methods, and air-to-surface fires with out commensurate and confirmed replacements reduces not less than floor fight energy inside any task-organized Marine preventing unit.
Unresolved Dichotomies
These fight energy cuts helped pay for Drive Design, however additionally they quantity to self-inflicted wounds. They created an everlasting set of dichotomies that drag down arguments for sustaining the Marine Corps as a service. Whereas the Navy has moved to purchase 4 new amphibious ships, central ideas in Drive Design and weakened fight energy within the Marine air-ground activity drive problem the core rationale for an amphibious fleet. Why construct and maintain a fleet of ships designed to combat in an setting that renders these ships irrelevant? Why preserve amphibious ships and enormous fight divisions to assist an assault the Marine Corps appears to be avoiding? And the way can the Corps concurrently lower manpower to pay for Drive Design whereas additionally searching for out extra international missions that require extra troops?
Acquisition of the amphibious fight automobile exemplifies this complicated mixture of arguments and capabilities. Drive Design applies the idea of a maritime, or ship-on-ship, missile-on-ship precision strike regime to floor fight. On this mindset, something that strikes on the fashionable battlefield might be seen and destroyed by precision strike. Because the Floor Fight Database exhibits, this all incorrectly assumes that weapons like first-person video drones will render heavy, armored autos irrelevant, and that conventional weapons like direct fireplace cannons can have little use in trendy warfare.
However the amphibious fight automobile is a giant, extremely seen, lightly-armored automobile. It’s going to carry 13 marines behind what is going to essentially be a mild (learn: skinny) protecting shell. It seems to don’t have any built-in counter-drone methods. Its 30mm cannon is not going to present beyond-line-of-sight firepower and is extra more likely to annoy than kill an enemy tank. That issues as a result of most important battle tanks have been utilized in almost 70 p.c of the bottom battles I reviewed, and so they stay in frequent use in 2025 on each main battlefield together with in Ukraine, Syria, Gaza, Yemen, Sudan, Lebanon, and Myanmar. China might have greater than 7,000 tanks in service.
If the Marine Corps meant to keep away from floor fight fully, then the amphibious fight automobile is perhaps helpful for bringing Marines ashore for stealthy superior base operations. However it’s not in any respect a stealthy platform, so it appears sick fitted to that function, too. This poor match scales as much as service stage. Concurrently making use of Drive Design whereas retaining a big however weakened mixed arms drive suggests the Marine Corps is making an attempt to have it each methods with a drive which may be unready for both means. All of the dichotomies above culminate in a central downside with Drive Design because it was meant and because it has been utilized: The Marine Corps because it exists in 2025 is inexplicable.
Dangers of An Inexplicable Drive
In my final article, I argued that the Marine Corps was dropping the battle for public relevance. Whether it is true that America doesn’t want a Marine Corps, and that the Marine Corps solely exists so long as it conjures up standard assist, then the Marines want a transparent, simple, and galvanizing justification for existence. Whereas the stand-in drive might certainly be a viable tactical idea, the broad — even when unfair — impression of a stand-in drive of small groups of missile, cyber, drone, and radar technicians hiding on distant islands is fully uninspiring.
Efficient idea language conveys each sensible intent and broader goal. “Stand-in drive” is meant to imply a drive that stands to combat inside (stand-in) the Chinese language missile hazard zone as a substitute standing off safely out of vary. However that that means shouldn’t be instantly clear and its vagueness shouldn’t be compelling. Even when the that means of “stand-in” is clarified, the concept of standing in unintentionally conveys an un-marine-like inertness that sharply contrasts with the hyper-violent activity of finding, closing with, and destroying the enemy with fireplace or repelling assaults with shut fight. When varied efforts to finish the Marine Corps within the twentieth century surfaced, Marine leaders may all the time rely on some impassioned public assist to assist save them. However no American goes to scream bloody homicide for extra stand-in forces.
On the opposite finish of the spectrum, the Marine Corps has retained a big mixed arms fight drive that has little artillery and no tanks, works from ships that the Marine Corps itself generally (however, confusingly, not all the time) argues are barely survivable in trendy warfare, and (in a few of its public-facing documentation) embraces a bleeding-edge understanding of fight that, if true, would obviate its personal existence.
And promoting the Marine Corps on its warfighting capabilities is tough when arguments for Drive Design stay predicated on the concept that the Marine Corps shouldn’t be America’s second land military, even when it clearly has been and continues to be a 3 mixed arms division-capable second land military that can also be amphibious. A Marine Corps predicated on seemingly irreconcilable dichotomies shouldn’t be a Marine Corps that America wants or essentially needs.
A Viable Center Floor For a Center-Floor Drive
The excellent news is {that a} center floor all the time lies between any dichotomy, and the center floor is all of the extra viable when the dichotomies are exaggerated and repairable. Critiques in Half 1 and a pair of of this sequence are meant to strip away presently unhelpful debate over Drive Design to get to some constructive suggestions.
In my subsequent article on this sequence, I’ll provide clear, viable choices for present amphibious belongings. Some constructive changes to Drive Design are already underway. A particular operations succesful Marine expeditionary unit was rebuilt in an effort to wedge the Marine Corps again into the worldwide disaster response mission, embracing its historic middleweight function. The Marine littoral regiment can combat if wanted, even when it’s not but as much as meant functionality. And we are able to contemplate “stand-in drive” a stand-in title for what may very well be an much more aggressive, and subsequently extra compelling, actualization of the expeditionary superior base drive idea. A touch to efficient rebranding sits in plain sight within the littoral regiment’s present mission set.
Extra importantly, the center and soul of the Marine Corps — its infantry battalions — stay sturdy, succesful, and out there. Since warfare has not essentially modified, sturdy, succesful infantry haven’t been rendered irrelevant. In actual fact, infantry have been essentially the most constant element in all 423 instances in my research: As I famous above, either side employed infantry one-hundred p.c of the time in all instances. No floor was taken or retained with out infantry preventing onto an goal or holding quick. Previous shouldn’t be prologue, however longstanding and unaltered tendencies in floor fight recommend the USA will want dependable Marine mixed arms infantry for the foreseeable future.
Ben Connable, Ph.D., is a retired Marine officer, government director of the nonprofit Battle Analysis Group, adjunct professor at Georgetown College, adjunct principal analysis scientist on the Heart for Naval Analyses, and the writer of Floor Fight: Puncturing the Myths of Trendy Conflict.
Picture: U.S. Marine Corps
