US Land Forces: Slouching Toward Sitzkrieg

America’s land forces appear to have lost their way. Beset by budget cuts, erratic strategic guidance, and uncertainty about the character of land combat, the Marine Corps and the Army have, for several decades now, lurched about in a variety of often contradictory directions. Military services that by the end of the Cold War exuded confidence in their ability to exert geopolitically significant influence through the conduct of large-scale offensive operational maneuver now seek merely to “protect Joint and Coalition forces” and, at best, “deliver long-range fires in support of joint-force maneuver.”¹

This retreat to a defensive crouch is particularly unfortunate in that a clear understanding of US national security interests, particularly in Europe and the Middle East, calls for a renewed emphasis on counteroffensive operations and securing territory. To be sure, emerging technologies are creating new battlefield problems, but US land forces must solve them if they are to meet the nation’s true needs—not merely in response to emerging threats but to seize the strategic opportunities of the moment. The rollback of Russian revanche and Iran and its proxies and partners (and the continued suppression of Salafi-jihadi groups) requires a restored ability to take and secure territory and populations. In such cases, land forces must do more than provide targeting information and munitions delivery if they are to fulfill the requirements for defending US global security interests.

Land Warfare: Change and Continuity

It has seemed to many observers that the conduct of land warfare is evolving, if not undergoing some more radical change.² Much of this discussion results from the fact that neither the Ukraine war nor Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon and blunting the effects of Iranian drone and missile strikes unfolded as anticipated. This is especially true in the Ukraine case; even the most senior US military and defense officials in 2022 believed Russian forces would overwhelm the Ukrainian army in a few days.³

This is to say that a degree of modesty is in order in predicting the future conduct of land warfare in general and the resulting implications for the US Army, Marine Corps, and special operations forces. In parsing the recent lessons of Ukraine, Gaza, and Lebanon, it is critical not to lose sight of the particulars of each conflict: the contestants’ strategic objectives; their operational, tactical, and technological capabilities and capacities; the geographical and human terrain; the character of the armed forces involved; and so on. For example, the prevalence of drones, electronic warfare, and indirect fires reflects the shortcomings of the contesting forces as well as their strengths. In studying recent conflicts, American forces must see the continuities as well as the changes.

It is further important to assess the lessons of ongoing conflicts in light of enduring American security interests. Having been slow to recognize the importance of Chinese military modernization and geopolitical ambition, the entire Department of Defense is now in danger of overreacting in at least two ways that have had deleterious effects on the Army and Marine Corps. First, an obsession with the potential invasion or blockade of Taiwan tends to reduce the strategic competition with Beijing (and American defense strategy overall) to the defense of the first island chain, the maritime littoral of the western Pacific. This may indeed be a focal point, but it narrows the US military’s strategic field of view, not only in Asia but globally. Second, and relatedly, this definition of the problem reinforces the tactical and technological obsession with what Soviet doctrinal writers defined as the “reconnaissance-strike complex.” The idea behind this concept was to exploit emerging technologies in sensing, computing, and precision weaponry to speed the process of finding targets, distributing target information, and attacking them. The US military has better developed the concept in practice, but when it is detached from an equal emphasis on maneuver, the result is an “attritionist” approach to warfare, leading to operational and strategic stalemate.

There are, however, at least two themes that emerge from the battlefields of recent years. One is that control of territory remains a principal objective in war, and thus that land power retains its strategic salience. The second is that land wars are by nature protracted struggles; if the Desert Storm dream of “rapid, decisive operations” had not already become the nightmares of Iraq and Afghanistan, the evidence from the Donbas, Gaza, and Lebanon would be a final wake-up call—these are already conflicts measured in decades. American land forces must prepare for a series of “forever wars.”

This has been a term associated with Afghanistan, Iraq, and the global war on terror, but in fact, it equally describes history’s great-power conflicts. French hegemonic ambitions began with Louis XIV in the 1660s and did not conclude until Waterloo in 1815. The same clearly applies to Russian revanche, Iranian aspirations, and China’s “rise.” No conflict with such adversaries can be concluded in a single battle or campaign. And if the United States consigns itself to attrition warfare, these protracted conflicts will prove even more costly and difficult to sustain.

The Department of Defense also needs to refocus its efforts and investments on the US Army, the nation’s principal land-war force. This also means, as will be discussed below, a reevaluation of the costs and benefits of the US Marine Corps and, to a lesser extent, US special operations forces, which have many of the characteristics of a separate service. Concomitant with this is a continued and, indeed, increased effort working with allies and longer-term coalition partners—without losing focus on adversaries. Long wars are team sports.

The Three-Theater Challenge

The measure of the United States’ status as a global power is calculated by the relative balance of power in three regions, or theaters: Europe, the greater Middle East, and maritime East Asia. This has been the structure of the post–Cold War peace, now under assault in each theater. To secure its global interests and the international order—the military, diplomatic, and economic arrangements conducive to American security, liberty, and prosperity—America cannot afford to pivot so sharply in any one direction that it neglects the overall picture, and it is a mistake to imagine that in an age of globalization, the balance of global power can be so neatly segmented. It may be better to see these regions as composing a larger theater: Eurasia.

Nevertheless, the particulars of the three theaters demand that US land forces set certain relative priorities. This means that even if the United States’ larger military strategy emphasizes the challenge from China as the “pacing challenge,”⁴ the maritime and aerospace characters of the Indo-Pacific, as the Pentagon has come to describe the region, tend to diminish the requirements for land forces, although this narrow understanding of Chinese strategy is historically debatable and tends to overlook China’s growing global presence. By contrast, ground troops earn their strategic keep in Europe and the greater Middle East.

The US Army especially needs to pivot back to a European focus, not simply maintaining the rotational brigades and division headquarters deployed there but building a more robust presence, in partnership with NATO allies, from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The war in Ukraine is but one manifestation of the larger conflict with Russia and its fellow travelers in China, Iran, and North Korea. This struggle is a threat to the United States’ foundational international security interest: the balance of power in western Eurasia. Therefore, Europe’s security is too important an American interest to be left in the hands of others, even our best traditional allies.

In Ukraine, the conflict is all but certain to continue regardless of any ceasefire—and negotiations cannot be expected to do anything more. The means of war are already quite varied, including subversion, corruption, and other forms of political and economic warfare, but the ultimate prize for Vladimir Putin and his backers is direct political control of the lands of Eastern Europe and the east of Central Europe, the fracturing of NATO, the neutralization of Western Europe, and the rollback of American influence on the Continent. A prime recent example is the cutting of communications and other cables in the Baltic, an act that may have involved not just Russian but Chinese vessels. Only a substantial US presence, including a substantial, permanent complement of US Army troops and formations, can prevent or deter further Russian revanche.

However, US forces’ principal role in Europe is to improve the command structures, lethality, and overall performance of NATO coalition forces. As will be discussed below, only US participation in a leadership role can create a new “allied AirLand Battle” counteroffensive capability centered in Poland that would act as a powerful deterrent by denial and punishment. Moscow might not only fail in any attack but suffer territorial losses in Belarus, for example. Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk oblast is another recent development that needs strategic and operational evaluation but has received precious little, and it has even been downplayed.⁵ That it has shifted Russian military planning is now without doubt, not only diverting Russian forces but prompting the introduction of more than 10,000 North Korean troops.⁶ Possession of Russian territory would, at a minimum, give Ukraine leverage in any ceasefire talks. There is a lesson for NATO here.

The need for land power is equally clear in the greater Middle East, as Israel’s failure to preserve sufficient defense in depth in Gaza—and its subsequent success in reestablishing it there and in southern Lebanon—makes plain. For the Jewish state, this is as much an existential issue as an Iranian nuclear weapon would be, perhaps a lesser but a more clear and present daily danger. The record of American land forces in the region is decidedly mixed. There have been evanescent successes—the 1991 Gulf War, the initial invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, the surge of 2007–09, and various special operations forces raids—framed by more failures resulting from imprudent withdrawals. The most egregious by far was the Obama administration’s retreat from Iraq in the wake of the surge, but the shambolic pullout from Afghanistan and the failure to provide support to the anti-Assad rebels in Syria stem from not only flagging political will but also the sheer exhaustion of land forces too small to sustain their missions.

The Israelis’ term for inevitable but invariably indecisive campaigns such as these—”mowing the grass”—contrasts significantly with Americans’ lament over “forever wars.” Israel may have little choice, but if the past five decades are anything to go by, neither does the United States. The region’s geopolitical importance has not, in fact, been diminished by the changes in energy markets or the US oil and gas boom. Moreover, the regional alliance of anti-Iran, anti-jihadist Arab states and Israel is a delicate thing, far less robust or institutionalized than NATO in Europe. In the greater Middle East, the United States has truly been an “indispensable nation,” a role underscored by the ability to deploy powerful land forces. This is a role that annoys China, which, while reluctant and perhaps unable to assume to itself, is looking for ways to raise its strategic profile in the region. As Jonathan Fulton and Michael Schuman report for the Atlantic Council, Beijing is shifting from a “hedging” to a “wedging” approach to the Middle East, seeking to pry apart American strategic and military partnerships.⁷

Finally, elevating the China challenge as the Defense Department’s pacing threat has distorted land force planning, particularly regarding the Marine Corps, which in turn has complicated overall, joint, allied, and coalition thinking. The Marines’ desire to get in the fight, while admirable, has consequences for others. Second, the addition of the “Indo” region to what was US Pacific Command has not sparked much broader strategic thinking about how to complicate Chinese planning by trying to create and leverage land power in Southeast Asia; summoning the spirit of Orde Wingate is worth a séance or two. The Indo-Pacific contains multiple theaters, and while maritime and aerospace forces are critical everywhere, the possibilities for land power may be greater outside northeast Asia.

The Army’s Role in the Three-Theater Construct

The United States Army has always been the principal measure of American land power. Even if the nation fully mobilized the National Guard and Army Reserve, it could not field a three-theater Army. Nor a two-theater Army; as the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, confessed to the House Committee on Armed Services in 2007, “In Iraq, we do what we must,” while “in Afghanistan, we do what we can.”⁸ In other words, there were insufficient troops to properly conduct what by historical standards were two relatively small wars. Since Mullen’s confession, the size of the active-duty Army has dropped by more than 100,000, from about 560,000 at the height of the Iraq surge to roughly 450,000 today.⁹

The Total Army also includes 350,000 National Guard soldiers and 175,000 in the Army Reserve. The small and shrinking size of the active component placed a substantial burden on the other two components through the duration of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, although deployments to the Middle East have picked up somewhat since 2024. On average, members of the Army National Guard will be deployed every two to three years for a year in support of federal missions; reservists, about once every five years.

As the scope of Russian revanche has revealed itself—the brutal suppression of Chechnya, the invasions of Georgia and Ukraine, troublemaking in Moldova, cyberattacks on the Baltic states, the barely concealed annexation of Belarus, the attempt to improve the quality of its military and now simply to expand its army with conscripts, contract soldiers, mercenaries, and even North Koreans—the requirements for European security have increased. This, in turn, should drive the Army to increase the personnel strength of all its components.

The post–Cold War period has seen two significant reductions in US troop strength in the theater: from about 220,000 to 60,000 during the Clinton administration and then to fewer than 40,000 during the Obama years. Halfway through the second Obama term, and in response to the initial Russian invasion of Ukraine, the administration created the European Reassurance Initiative, now renamed the European Deterrence Initiative, which has rotated additional tens of thousands of soldiers to Eastern Europe, including heavy armored forces. These programs have also added pre-positioned stocks of weapons and munitions and improved the theater’s logistics infrastructure to allow for quicker response across NATO’s eastern front. Yet while these initiatives have been a welcome development, they are sufficient in neither capability nor capacity. Even with back-to-back unit rotations, the effect of the presence is less than what the effect of a more permanent stationing arrangement would be.

How Did We Get Here?

To understand the confusion and challenges that US land forces face, one must begin with the reductions in funding that have been accumulating since the end of the Cold War. For the Army, the decline began with the 1992 “base force” budget, which saw a whopping 19 percent reduction in the services budget; measured in constant 2025 dollars, the total outlays for the Army that year were just under $175 billion, about 1 percent of US gross domestic product. Army allocations reached their nadir in the 1998 budget, falling to less than $129 billion in 2025 dollars, or 0.7 percent of the overall economy. In 2022, the Army’s expenditures totaled $201 billion in 2025 dollars, also 0.7 percent of that year’s gross domestic product. In sum, over the past three decades, the service has lost trillions of dollars in purchasing power relative to what was assumed to be the minimum required force.¹⁰

The result of this massive reduction in funding has been a hectic series of service reorganizations. Much of the Army’s effort in the 1990s went toward simply reducing the number of active-duty troops in as orderly and humane a manner as possible. The active-duty force dropped from over 610,000 soldiers to 493,000, whereas reserve-component strength—both Army National Guard and Army Reserve—has remained relatively constant at about 550,000 through the entirety of the post–Cold War period.¹¹

The first reorganization, completed in 2003, was to create a “Modular Army,”¹² optimized to “better meet the challenges of the 21st century security environment and . . . fight and win the Global War on Terrorism.”¹³ In so doing, the Army tried to increase the number of rotationally deployable units by 50 percent, design units that would require fewer augmentations before deployment, and create a more predictable deployment schedule. As the Association of the US Army observed, this meant “moving the Army from a division-centric structure to one built around a brigade combat team.”¹⁴ That is, the service broke itself into smaller, more self-contained units, sacrificing capabilities such as divisional artillery and logistics organizations needed for larger-scale operations, to meet the needs of constant rotations to the Middle East. Even more importantly, this rearrangement was driven by the need to maintain lower personnel levels—the Army did its best to execute a mission it was unprepared for by reallocating existing personnel and assets. The reorganization consumed a substantial portion of a stagnant Army budget, with the cost of the project rising from $28 billion in 2004 to $53 billion a year later.¹⁵

The second drawdown-cum-reorganization began with the second Obama administration. In the last years of the George W. Bush term, with the implementation of the Iraq surge and, during Barack Obama’s first presidency, the renewed effort in Afghanistan, the active Army had grown—rapidly and somewhat haphazardly—back to roughly 570,000 soldiers. But what had gone up quickly came down equally fast: The Obama Defense Department would cut end strength back to 490,000 by the end of 2017, along with 12 of the 35 newly formed brigade combat teams.¹⁶ Packaged as part of the administration’s “pivot to the Pacific” strategy, the reality was withdrawal from Iraq and Europe; in addition to terminating the US combat mission in Iraq, Obama reduced the number of brigades in Europe by half. The administration also initiated an effort to reorganize Army National Guard brigades in the “modular” fashion.¹⁷

The Obama administration also saw a third, smaller reorganization of Army structure in 2017 with a slight increase in personnel strength, also related to the new emphasis on the Pacific and threats from North Korea and China. About 30,000 additional soldiers were to be raised to “begin to address and reduce the capabilities gap against near-peer, high-end adversaries” such as China; “reduce modernization gaps; and improve readiness in existing units.”¹⁸ This permitted the Army to raise more units to full personnel strength, add additional training cadres, retain units in Alaska and South Korea that were to be inactivated, and convert and create additional maneuver and aviation brigades and artillery brigades.

Where Are We Now?

The Army’s confusion over its structure, posture, organization, and equipment—that is, in essence, its primary purpose—seems to have only increased in recent years. In 2018, it scurried to try to align itself with a new, formal national defense strategy, which veered away from the “countering violent extremists” mission that had driven modularity and a brigade-centric force design. The Army shifted its focus back to “near-peer competitors” or “revisionist powers” and unveiled a new concept for multi-domain operations, which tried to account for new and newly emphasized technologies—the proliferation of unmanned systems, information and political warfare (particularly in the cyber realm), electronic warfare, the influence of space systems, and so on. One very positive step from this was beginning to rebuild the capacity to fight at higher echelons—divisions, corps, and theater commands—to conduct larger, campaign-level operations against these more powerful adversaries.

By 2020, the Army had developed a roadmap for implementing this shift—the AimPoint Force Structure Initiative. This continued the effort to bring “hollow” units up to designed levels of personnel and equipment, but it also added back complements of staff, specialists, and new units with new capabilities. Signally, the Army reactivated V Corps—principally headquartered at Fort Knox, Kentucky, but with a forward-stationed element; while the personnel would rotate, the headquarters organization would not—in Poznań, Poland. This welcome development reflected an overdue return of emphasis on the Eastern European theater and Poland’s centrality to NATO and other coalition military operations in the region; Poland has vigorously modernized and professionalized its forces, committing more than 3 percent or more of its annual economic product to military spending.¹⁹

A second element of the AimPoint project was the creation of five Multi-Domain Task Forces (MDTFs) to enable land forces to penetrate adversary defenses by suppressing enemy anti-access and area-denial capabilities, disrupting targeting networks, and expanding and accelerating efforts to deliver longer-range precision fires. These task forces are to be theater-level organizations roughly the size of a brigade of four main battalions: an “intelligence, information, cyber, electronic warfare, and space” battalion; a “strategic fires” battalion, which will incorporate hypersonic weapons; an air defense battalion, which will include a counter-drone company; and a support battalion.²⁰ As theater-specific organizations, each MDTF will be tailored to combatant commanders’ requirements: one MDTF for Europe, two aligned for the Indo-Pacific, one for the Arctic but available elsewhere, and one for global response to be stationed at Fort Liberty, North Carolina, home of XVIII Airborne Corps and the 82nd Airborne Division and next to the Air Force’s hub at Pope Field.

These task forces are indicative of the Army’s increasing orientation toward a defensive, fires-centric understanding of its role. Further, the design reflects an intentional reduction in overall personnel strength and a diminishment of combined-arms reconnaissance formations, notably divisional cavalry squadrons. Whether a single MDTF will have the capacity to support a large-scale counteroffensive is an open question.

Corresponding to the overall AimPoint directive, in January 2022 the Army settled on a set of near-term “Army 2030” force designs that would standardize divisions as Standard Light, Standard Heavy, Penetration, Joint Force Entry Air Assault, and Joint Force Entry Airborne. The Penetration Division is the least traditional structure and is a key to rebuilding the Army’s operational counteroffensive capability. According to the original force design, it was to have additional engineer assets, an Extended Range Cannon Artillery piece with double the range of current howitzers, a powerful armored cavalry squadron instead of the previous Stryker-equipped divisional cavalry squadrons, an improved aviation brigade with a light armed reconnaissance helicopter, and a tilt-rotor Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft to replace many current UH-60 Black Hawks, capable of flying much farther and faster.

These ambitious plans have been substantially gutted. In a February 2024 white paper, the Army admitted it did not have the personnel strength to execute the designs.²¹ The current active-duty force of 450,000 soldiers is far below the total of 494,000 needed under the Army 2030 force structure.²² The planned expansion of engineer capabilities has been rolled back, and the Army will deactivate all but one of the cavalry squadrons in its Stryker and infantry brigades. Some of these capacities will be consolidated at the division level, but the overall number of engineers will be reduced. In addition, the Army is reducing the weapons companies in infantry brigades to a single platoon. Together, these force-structure changes will reduce brigades’ ability to fight for information, their firepower, and their independent ability to create defensive works and penetrate adversary lines. Brigades will be extremely dependent on help from their parent divisions and the theater MDTFs.

The service’s transformation plans have been further handicapped by halting modernization efforts. Also, in February 2024, the Army terminated the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA), the fourth attempt to build such a helicopter since 2004. Tens of billions of dollars have been spent on the Comanche, the armed reconnaissance helicopter, the Armed Aerial Scout, and FARA efforts. Despite these failures, the importance of the air-ground littoral, the low-level airspace surrounding the tactical battlefield, has only grown—particularly with the proliferation of drones. In the announcement of the FARA termination, the Army argued that “in light of new technological developments, battlefield developments and current budget projections, . . . the increased capabilities [FARA] offered could be more affordably and effectively achieved by relying on a mix of enduring, unmanned and space-based assets.”²³ This is undoubtedly a correct assessment, but it leaves the Army with much work to do to develop alternative capabilities—no easy task in a constrained budget environment. FARA’s problems also raise questions about its bigger brother, the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft.

Under the umbrella of long-range precision fires (LRPF), the Army has also thrown in the towel on its previous effort to build a longer-range artillery piece. The Extended Range Cannon Program was an experiment to examine a very long, 58-caliber gun tube, much bigger than the current standard 39-caliber models and even longer than the 52-caliber tubes on the French Caesar, German Panzerhaubitze 2000, and Korean K9 howitzers. These longer tubes are already prone to wearing out prematurely due to the stress of firing. In its search for a gun that will reach to the ranges desired on modern battlefields and necessary for its doctrine and force designs, the Army has little alternative but to turn to research on advanced propellants.

A second element of LRPF is the Precision Strike Missile, slated to replace the venerable Army Tactical Missile System, which was first employed in Operation Desert Storm and is still effective in Ukraine. The new missile has approximately double the range, to something like 250 miles, and a slimmer design that will double the number of missiles in each pod. The program appears to generally be on track, and the Army has taken delivery of a first batch of missiles. Moreover, later versions of the Precision Strike Missile will be able to hit moving targets and targets at sea, a capability demonstrated in a recent exercise.

Two final areas of Army modernization should be of concern. The first is the service’s efforts to exploit the revolution in unmanned systems and the related issues of electronic warfare and rapid software development, all distinguishing elements of the Ukraine war. The Army has recognized the importance of these issues, but it is hard to discern whether it has a coherent plan to field such capabilities or is well organized to do so. Many of the Ukrainian army’s innovations have come from outside, civilian developers; many are also short-lived improvements in a constantly shifting contest with the Russians. Second, the Army’s chief of staff has nixed the idea of a “drone corps,” or “drone branch,” an idea proposed in the House of Representatives version of the fiscal year 2025 National Defense Authorization Act. “Specializing a singular drone branch to get after the operations of these capabilities,” says Under Secretary of the Army Gabe Camarillo, “runs counter to what we have been focused on, which is ensuring that we are experimenting with different parts of different formations to understand how to best employ them.”²⁴

The Pentagon-wide Defense Innovation Unit is spearheading work on smaller drones. Two factors call this approach into question: First, the overall drone (and counter-drone) effort may fall prey to the entrenched interests of the Army’s current branch system. Second, the track record of organizations such as the Defense Innovation Unit, with limited budgets, overseen by the Office of the Secretary of Defense rather than the services, and an emphasis on new technologies rather than fielded systems, is poor.

In sum, decades of declining resources, strategic uncertainty, and halting or misconceived modernization programs have left the Army whiplashed. Perhaps most importantly, these intertwined problems are eroding the service’s doctrinal commitment to operational counteroffensives that are the Army’s unique contribution to US national defense strategy. To be sure, attriting adversary forces from a distance is a necessary condition for land campaigns—and it is also a job for joint and coalition forces. Yet it is far from sufficient. Today’s battlefields reveal new challenges, but the need to close with the enemy, drive him from occupied territory, secure the gain, and reset for follow-on operations remains the salient characteristic of victory on land.

So, what should the Army be doing, and what should it be doing differently? Here are six recommendations:

• Rethink the Army’s role in the Pacific theater with a view to providing only those capabilities and capacities that are unique to the service and necessary to overall, joint-force operations.
• With the Air Force and Space Force, rapidly develop a new concept of counteroffensive operations and accompanying service doctrine, an AirLand Battle that accounts for current conditions, particularly in the European theater. Until these challenges are met, the Army lacks guidelines for investment, personnel strength, force posture, and design.
• At the division level, establish force protection organizations able to synchronize effects in the electromagnetic; cyber; air, missile, and drone defense; and other related capabilities to enable larger-scale land force maneuver. These organizations must retain the command agility to rapidly adapt to shifting battlefield conditions and integrate the talents of civilian auxiliaries.
• Quickly determine the viability of long-range, large-scale air assaults. The program cost estimate for the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft is, at minimum, $70 billion; the Army should either accelerate or terminate the program within two years.
• Accelerate the development and fielding of the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (Dark Eagle) while preparing multiple lines of production. This 1,700-mile-range missile, unlike other Army capabilities, can be a cardinal Army contribution to operations in the western Pacific; while the Navy (which is jointly developing the missile) intends to mount this on its Zumwalt-class destroyers, the sea service has but three of these ships. The Army’s program to buy just 300 Dark Eagles would be insufficient to sustain extended operations.
• Continue to modify the M1 Abrams tank and M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles to improve their survivability, particularly against autonomous drone attacks, and lethality. As emphasized above, these modifications must be capable of rapid production and fielding, as the Ukrainian army has done with its first-generation Leopard tanks.

Corps of Contention

If anything, the Marine Corps is undergoing even greater turmoil than the Army. The corps’s new force-structure concept, Force Design 2030 (now known simply as Force Design), introduced in a surprise announcement by the then-commandant, General David H. Berger, represented a decisive move away from the Marines’ previous role as a medium-weight, combined-arms maneuver force able to rapidly project a substantial amount of initial combat power from the sea onto land.

While a full explication of the issues and arguments is beyond the scope of this chapter, suffice it to say that the concept has been utterly rejected by Marine traditionalists, including former commandants Walter Boomer and James Conway. In the summer of 2024, they wrote that the Marine Corps was “no longer capable of effectively conducting combat operations across the spectrum of conflict,” and that Force Design betrayed a “flawed operational concept” resulting from a “lack of operational competence in some current and recently retired senior Marine Corps leaders,” a direct shot at Berger and his successor, General Eric Smith.²⁵ Other notable opponents of Force Design include former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford, and former Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly, all retired four-star Marine Corps generals.²⁶

The critique, however, is more than a fit of personal pique on the part of retired generals. Berger’s new force design was a reaction to the 2018 National Defense Strategy (a document that has caused much mischief) and its increased emphasis on rising threats from China. In critics’ minds, this was a hastily conceived overreaction, and in assessing the changes made and planned for Marine structure, force design, equipment, personnel levels, and modernization, the charge rings true.

The first step toward implementing Force Design was eliminating substantial ground force units and capabilities—including all Marine tank battalions, bridging companies, and military police battalions—reducing the number of infantry battalions from 24 to 21, howitzer battalions from 21 to five, and amphibious vehicle companies from six to four. The Marines took similarly rapid reductions in aviation—an area they have invested in heavily over the past several decades (including the Navy’s creation of America-class amphibious ships that can serve as small aircraft carriers with up to 35 F-35B jump jets)—including two V-22 tilt-rotor squadrons, two attack helicopter squadrons, and an undetermined number of F-35s organized in smaller squadrons of just 10 aircraft.

Force Design’s Pacific orientation is best revealed in the reorganization of higher commands, principally focused on the III Marine Expeditionary Force (III MEF), based in Okinawa, Japan. The role of the Marines’ other, similar commands, based at Camp Lejeune on the East Coast and Camp Pendleton on the West Coast of the United States, serve as sources of force generation for III MEF. This inevitably will shortchange the Marines’ ability to operate in Europe or the Middle East. To put it mildly, this is a big mistake. Traditional Marine capacities and capabilities can be especially useful in a number of Middle East scenarios, and if, for example, greater sustainment capabilities were incorporated in organic Marine formations, the Marines’ strategic utility would be not merely restored but enhanced. The Marine Corps should be heavier, not lighter.

More broadly, the extent of changes under Force Design is unclear. To begin with, the Marines’ plan creates three Marine Littoral Regiments, organized, trained, and equipped for “sea denial”—threatening adversary naval vessels—and “control within contested maritime spaces.” These regiments would have three main subordinate units, a Littoral Combat Team with an infantry battalion and long-range anti-ship missiles, a Littoral Anti-Air Battalion, and a Littoral Logistics Battalion. These would operate on small islands, hopscotching from location to location.²⁷

The underlying operational rationale parallels that of the Army and similarly reflects a static, attritionist view of warfare. Given the size of China’s air, naval, and missile buildup, this may be the best approach to the immediate maritime dilemma in the first island chain. However, the amount of firepower such small Marine detachments could bring to bear—and the relatively short range of the anti-ship missiles that would equip the initial regiments—would be of questionable effect. The corps also plans to field three modified Marine Expeditionary Units with some traditional and some of these new capabilities—the unit design is unclear and intended to be flexible—that could deploy as part of Amphibious Ready Groups, the configuration of which is equally unclear.²⁸

Finally, Force Design calls for up to 35 of the Navy’s Medium Landing Ships to deliver the Littoral Regiments to their dispersed locations.²⁹ Sized to carry just 75 or fewer marines and their gear³⁰—and to hide among the busy commercial shipping trafficking the western Pacific—the program is intended as a supplement to larger, traditional amphibious warships. Navy leaders, recently burned by the troubles of their own Littoral Combat Ship program, which was also intended as a smaller, relatively inexpensive platform for close-in brown-water operations, are skeptical of the small amphib design, believing that the Marines’ advertised price tag of $100 million per ship is unrealistic and that the ship itself is not survivable.

In sum, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Marines jumped too quickly back in 2020 and did not anticipate the world of 2024 and beyond, where crises in Europe and the Middle East forced their way to the immediate forefront of US national security concerns. In particular, the Marines should reevaluate the virtues of their previous posture and design—an initially powerful, sea-based, combined-arms maneuver force—which is well suited to respond to Middle East crises and opportunities and to conduct larger-scale raids ashore. These would make a greater contribution to a three-theater defense strategy than the “rockets on rocks” of Force Design, a marginal element in a large-scale confrontation in the western Pacific.

Here are recommendations for reviving the Marine Corps:

• All Marine units should be redesigned to increase their firepower, mobility, and sustainability. This should apply especially to the expansibility of the Marine Expeditionary Forces—the largest organic Marine formation, commanded by a three-star general. Additional amphibious assault and logistics ships should be added to Amphibious Ready Groups, which should routinely deploy with at least five such ships rather than three, thus perhaps reducing the need for support from Navy carriers, destroyers, and submarines.
• The First Marine Expeditionary Force—the MEF stationed on the East Coast and most suitable for Mediterranean and Middle East operations—should be given precedence in this rebalancing. III MEF—already being transferred from Okinawa to Guam and thus less able to intervene rapidly in a western Pacific crisis—should be deactivated or become a mostly reserve-component organization.
• Older amphibious ships should be decommissioned or put in reserve status. It would be preferable to have two modern, fully equipped and capable Amphibious Ready Groups than three hollow ones.
• In general, the Marine land forces should be transformed into a kind of shipborne air assault unit, but with the fixed-wing support of the F-35B. Infantry units should return to their traditional size, and missile- and rocket-artillery units should be re-created.

Conclusion

The saga of American land forces over the past three decades resembles nothing so much as a children’s soccer game, a frenzied scramble to follow the ball with little thought to how it got there and where it might go next. While in large measure this was the result of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and understandable as a response to the strategic surprise of 9/11, the Army and Marine Corps had earlier traditions in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency warfare. But the mania of the Pacific pivot and the reaction to technologies creating an apparently transparent tactical battlefield have had more disorienting effects.

Ultimately, the Army and Marine Corps need to find roles commensurate with the requirements of the overall, joint-force three-theater construct outlined above. There are more things in being a global power than were dreamt of in our recent national defense philosophies, things that call for counteroffensive land power and the ability to seize and secure territory. America’s land forces need to rise to these challenges, not be further paralyzed by them.

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