Marines have spent too much energy in the past five years debating the merits of former Commandant David H. Berger’s Force Design 2030 plan. Force Design is now part of the Marine Corps. It is time for all marines on and off active duty to set aside their disagreements and focus forward, towards the vision articulated by current Commandant Eric M. Smith. And it is time for the allies of the Marine Corps to lean in and support this reorientation. The U.S. Marine Corps is facing a relatively slow moving but all too real existential threat.
This threat emerged well before anyone first envisioned Force Design. A long and dangerous slide towards institutional irrelevance began about 20 years ago, coinciding with the shift from an era of crisis response and into the Global War on Terror. This slide may be existential, but it can be stopped and reversed with a series of low cost force and concept adjustments.
In this three-part series of articles, I describe this existential threat and then build a case for keeping a robust and globally relevant Marine Corps. This is a necessarily complex build: If we want to solve these problems we need to first understand them in detail. I lay bare both the institutional and cultural threats to the Marine Corps. I provide an evidence-driven challenge to the mistaken assumptions about modern war that have fed the current crisis. I then wrap up the series with recommendations for action. These recommendations focus on better integrating the enduring parts of Force Design while creatively supporting the Marine Corps’ recentering on the amphibious ready group and Marine expeditionary unit.
I start here by describing what has been a remarkable narrowing of the service’s global roles and missions. This decline in operational relevance was paralleled by the dwindling cultural significance of the Marine Corps. In both cases, the Marines have lost out to special operations forces, most specifically to the U.S. Navy SEALs, and also to the U.S. Army. While some changes were beyond the service’s control, a few bad leadership decisions along the way made things worse.
General-Special Purpose Forces: A Delicately Balanced Middle Ground Service Culture
Building on its legacy from the two world wars, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and a range of smaller but high-profile operations in the 20th century, the Marine Corps commanded a remarkable niche. It was simultaneously a fast-moving crisis response force for noncombatant evacuation missions, etc.; a robust ground combat force for major contingencies like the 1991 Gulf War; and a pseudo-special operations organization trusted to execute raids, counterdrug operations, and even some daring off-the-books missions unsuitable for publication here.
This kind of middle ground position between conventional and special operations force has generated tension within the Marine Corps. Opponents to the creation of special operations marines have long tried to protect the broader force from being watered down by the creation of specialized units or any kind of individual super-soldier elites. This has been a central force preservation issue: When some marines are special and more trusted than others, then what is the real value of a “regular” marine to either the joint force or the American public?
Simultaneous evolution of two specialized units in World War II laid the foundation for current debate. Marine infantry divisions needed small teams to reconnoiter beaches. These teams evolved into organic amphibious reconnaissance companies. In parallel, then-Lt. Col. Evans Carlson and Maj. James Roosevelt leveraged their high level political connections (Roosevelt was the son of the president) to create the hand-picked Marine Raiders. By the end of the war, top generals had incorporated the reconnaissance companies into Marine divisions. But they also purposefully watered down and then eliminated the Raiders for three broad reasons: they didn’t like Carlson, they didn’t like independent specialists, and they didn’t want the existence of special, independent marines to undercut the Marine Corps’ distinct cultural identity. Somewhat special, quiet, and internally controlled was okay — but elite, high-profile, and separate was unacceptable.
Marine leaders maintained this delicate general-special balance through the 20th century, even when pressed to lean harder into the special operations world. Arguably, the fulcrum for this balance was the afloat-ready amphibious unit, now called a Marine expeditionary unit.
Culmination of the General-Special Concept
Marine expeditionary units are central to both the story of declining Marine relevance in the 21st century and to my recommendations. A brief history is useful here.
The Marine Corps’ first notable amphibious assault took place in the Bahamas in 1776, and small Marine security teams were attached to most Navy ships well into the 20th Century. But Navy-Marine amphibious assault was mostly an ad hoc affair through at least the 19th century. Interest in permanently stationing large, ground-combat-capable units of marines aboard Navy ships first arose in the late 1800s. In 1898, the Marine Corps created the 1st Marine Battalion (Reinforced) and put it aboard the USS Panther, just in time to participate in the blockade of Cuba and Battle of Cuzco Well. By the 1960s, the first official afloat-ready units were operational and were soon continually engaged in global crisis response operations.
Afloat-ready units provided the Marines with a safe middle-ground capability until the early 1980s. Three years after the failed hostage rescue operation in Iran in 1980, the Office of the Secretary of Defense mandated that each service generate more specialized capabilities. In sequential response, Commandants Paul X. Kelly and Alfred M. Gray deftly managed this order by doubling down on what had become the Marine Corps’ most relevant, high-demand asset: its afloat expeditionary units.
Kelly bought the Marine Corps time and then Gray stepped in to build the Marine expeditionary unit (special operations capable). With these reformatted units, the Marines would provide constantly afloat combined arms teams capable of flexing mid-range combat power while also conducting hostage rescue operations, long-range raids, night assaults, deception operations, electronic attacks, and other specialized actions. Each deploying unit would go through a rigorous training and certification program that allowed them to execute complex tasks at scale within six hours from initial mission order.
Through 2001, these special operations capable, afloat-ready units represented what I and many others would describe as the best version of the Marine Corps’ mid-range, general-special mindset and capability. They were called on for just about every mission imaginable, including the rescue of Air Force Capt. Scott O’Grady in Bosnia in 1995. Success of the Marine expeditionary units elevated the value of all marines for the U.S. military. Both military and political leaders in the United States generally held a common view through mid-2001: If you want something difficult done right, send in the Marines.
Post-9/11 Shift to Special Operations Command
That narrative started to unravel almost immediately after 9/11.
While a Marine unit led by then-Brig. Gen. James N. Mattis launched what may have been the longest-range amphibious deployment in history to secure parts of Afghanistan after landing on the Pakistani coast, Army Special Forces and CIA officers had been called upon earlier to lead the daring operation that defeated the Taliban. Senior leaders drew some distinct lessons from the first phase of Operation Enduring Freedom.
Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and some of his acolytes saw Afghanistan as a validation of their defense transformation plans centered on small, distributed, and increasingly specialized units. Rumsfeld rammed through a paradigm shift in the Pentagon and the White House: If a handful of highly skilled, mature special operators could easily overthrow a country, then special operations forces could do anything marines could do. And it looked like special operators could do it at a fraction of the cost. Moreover, given the deceptively minimal casualties in 2001 and early 2002, they also could operate with negligible risk. So, if Washington wanted something difficult done right, send in special operations forces.
Iraq cemented this special operations forces-centric viewpoint. Marines and soldiers constituted the vast majority of deployed American ground forces across the country. They were not just sitting by idly to support special operators: By volume, these so-called “general purpose forces” certainly conducted a large majority of all combat operations in the Iraq War. But special operators grabbed the narrative by the horns and never let go.
While infantry units probably also executed the majority of dangerous raids across Iraq, special operators perfected and then loudly trumpeted their mastery of the targeted raid. Joint Special Operations Command, led by then-Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, gave the special operations raid an almost magical aura. While Marine units ashore struggled with all the confounding and often dissatisfying aspects of counter-insurgency, special operations raids consistently produced clean, tangible, and quantifiable results: dead and captured bad guys.
Putting aside the debate over whether raids won the Iraq War (and I think that is an absurd proposition), one had to respect both McChrystal’s performance and salesmanship. At the height of Joint Special Operations Command’s activities in 2006, he was leading more senior generals around by the nose. Tangible and well-sold results generated compounding interest: From 2001 to 2021, U.S. Special Operations Command grew by over 60 percent. And as it grew, so did its appetite to eat missions that had typically been given to the Marines.
In the years following the first phase of the Iraq War, both military and political leaders increasingly leaned on Special Operations Command to answer the crisis hotline. Ongoing counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency operations continued to fall below the threshold for high-order conventional war. These high demand missions included tactical targeted raids, hostage rescue operations, destruction of mid-sized extremist militia units, clandestine infiltration, and small unit training activities. Ongoing global, low-spectrum conflicts and the absence of another large-scale war like the 2003 invasion of Iraq ensured special operators remained the hot ticket item on every combatant commander’s menu. Even after Rumsfeld left federal service in 2006, his plan to transform the military towards special, small unit capabilities and away from general purpose forces was constantly reinforced.
Raiders Revived and SEALs Take the Lead
Following the tremendous success of special operations forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, Rumsfeld forced the Marine Corps to pay a service-wide tax to the special operations community by establishing what became the Marine Forces Special Operations Command.
Built in 2006 from a small foreign internal defense detachment and existing Force Reconnaissance units at each Marine Corps division, the command grew from a few hundred specialists to nearly 3,000 marines by the mid-2010s. The Marine Corps now mans and equips the nostalgically named Raiders, but these elite marines effectively work for the Special Operations Command in Florida. Arguably, the Marine Corps created an elite organization that continually drew thousands of talented marines away from the broader force while it also encroached on the missions that might otherwise have been tackled by a special operations capable expeditionary unit
Indeed, when the Raiders were created, the justification for special operations capable expeditionary units faded out. Gone was the mid-range, general-special balance that service leaders had long struggled to maintain. Expeditionary units were (albeit temporarily) stripped of their special operations qualifications. With most Marine units tied up in deployments to Iraq and the Navy edging away from amphibious shipbuilding, the century-old afloat-ready concept then faded out with remarkable rapidity.
Worse still, even the elite Raiders could never hope to compete with the popularity and global flexibility of the Navy SEALs. Within the special operations community, SEALs became the go-to force in readiness for small, irregular crises. The rise of the SEALs both within the Department of Defense and in popular culture paralleled a relative decline in both military and popular interest in marines. As I argue below, this shift in perception has real consequences for the future of the Marine Corps.
Afghanistan: The Bleeding Wound
As Iraq wound down, then-Commandant James T. Conway volunteered the Marine Corps for an expanded role in Afghanistan. Over the next half-decade, tens of thousands of marines were tied up in counter-insurgency operations in Helmand Province. Another decade of dissatisfying counter-insurgency rotations simply accelerated the marine to special operations forces shift started in Iraq.
Across Afghanistan, the Marines were characteristically aggressive. They took high casualties from improvised explosives in places like Sangin and tried (but rarely succeeded) to prop up a flailing Afghan partner force. Meanwhile, top-tier special operators ran their own brutally tough and often costly missions. While the whole operation ultimately failed — the United States effectively surrendered to the Taliban and then abandoned its Afghan partners — special operations forces had further amplified their prevailing narrative.
A Pivot Away from Ground Combat Towards a Long Range Fires War with China
Even as the surge in Afghanistan dominated national security news from 2009 to 2012, a quieter but increasingly frenetic struggle was underway within the Beltway. It is hard to articulate the speed and intensity with which the entire national security community moved to erase Iraq and Afghanistan from the country’s collective memory and from the military’s operational mindset.
In January 2012, before the surge in Afghanistan had really ended, President Barack Obama’s Defense Department published strategic guidance that stated “U.S. forces will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations.” In other words, no more Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. In a mid-1970s redux, Obama and his advisors were wiping their hands of counter-insurgency. They were done with the Middle East and with Southwest Asia. They were ready to pivot away from messy irregular ground combat towards conceptually clean long range missile warfare against China.
Service leaders and plenty of the rank and file were receptive to this shift. As a whole, the country was ready to move on. By the mid-2010s, mentioning counter-insurgency, irregular warfare, or certainly any prospective hot war with a mid-threat country like Iran would earn you a virtual persona non grata sticker on your Pentagon access badge. Land warfare was out, “AirSea” warfare — a super high-order reimagination of the revolution in military affairs focused on the Chinese threat in the contested waters of the Western Pacific — was in.
In my book, Ground Combat: Puncturing the Myths of Modern War, I argue that in our collective haste to erase the uncomfortable prospect of any future mid-intensity irregular warfare, we embraced a fantastical, historically unsubstantiated, and strategically maladroit understanding of modern warfare. As they had in previous interwar periods, shimmering illusions of clean, mechanistic war emerged. A new threat — in this case, the modern Chinese military — was and continues to be painted with sometimes ham–fisted exaggeration. And the proposed solution to the Chinese military threat in “AirSea” warfare was a bad fit for the Marine Corps as it existed in the 2010s. So, the pressure to change increased.
Amos at the Pivot Point
Gen. James F. Amos took over as commandant in 2010, inheriting the inevitable drawdown in Afghanistan, the pivot to Asia, and the country’s ostrich-like efforts to avoid messy, mid-level warfare. In order to address what he rightly viewed as a prospective challenge to future Marine Corps roles and missions, Amos sent a letter to then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta titled “Role of the United States Marine Corps,” in which he described the Marine Corps as a “middleweight force.” Marine units could, in Amos’s words, be dialed up or down like a rheostat to tackle any mission anywhere in the world — and particularly in a maritime-heavy theater like the Indo-Pacific — all while sustaining themselves at sea.
This was a clear, logical case for continuing relevance. It anchored back directly to the era of the ready-afloat force and it signaled a reset from the counter-insurgency era to global maritime crisis response and interdiction. Really, it put the Marine Corps back to its pre-9/11 general-special settings, neither over- nor under-committing to any one role. But at this narrow point in time, it was the wrong message to send. In the minds of Beltway staffs, there was no “middleweight force” case to be made.
One could easily blame Amos for misreading the room. I thought he made a good argument at the wrong time. Looming budget sequestration certainly did not make things easier. But Amos received a great deal of flak throughout and after his tenure as commandant for what I view as more serious missteps. His almost myopic fixation on materiel, and particularly on exquisitely expensive aircraft and vehicles, cratered the Marine Corps’ budget and further narrowed maneuver room for future commandants.
“The ACE That Ate the Marine Corps” and the Joint Force Black Hole
Amos was the first aviator to lead the Marine Corps, and he did not disappoint his fellow aviators. He leaned in hard on the MV-22 Osprey and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. One can only imagine the pressure he was under from Congress to commit to these buys given the brilliant manufacturers’ strategy to spread their construction across nearly all 50 states. But Amos appeared to be genuinely enthusiastic about both platforms. He emphatically argued that investment in these two airframes would go a long way towards supporting the Obama administration’s pivot to Asia by providing the kind of long range, joint force reach needed in a prospective war with China.
In 2014, James W. Hammond III published a now famous — or depending on perspective, infamous — article in the Marine Corps Gazette entitled, “The [Aviation Combat Element] That Ate the Marine Corps.” Hammond patiently laid out both the top-line and hidden institutional costs imposed by the F-35 and MV-22 buys. Hammond’s article was a subtle but compelling rebuttal to what some read as Amos’ “all-in” approach to advanced aviation.
Even a rounded acceptance of Hammond’s numbers shows the prospective impact on the Marine Corps’ legacy amphibious mission: approximately $110 billion naval investment in high-end aviation compared to an approximately $77 billion investment in amphibious ships, more marines tied down to maintaining and supporting exquisite aircraft, and higher fuel and parts costs.
Money spent on advanced aircraft (and also new vehicles) at least indirectly reduces money available for the expert infantry marines who arguably constitute the Marine Corps’ most enduring and important asset. Perhaps more importantly, the acquisition of ultra high-end joint aircraft significantly increases the likelihood that Marine commanders will not retain control over those aircraft in a prospective war with China, or even another mid-level war with an Iranian or North Korean adversary. Joint commanders will be inclined to simply take high tech, joint enabled Marine aircraft away and toss them into the big purple airpower blob. That very real risk directly threatens the central and longstanding Marine operating concept: organic, combined arms, air-ground warfighting.
I am not the only marine to raise this concern. In general, the more technical and specialized the Marine Corps becomes — special aircraft, special operators, special technical experts — the more likely the service is to transform into something like a joint force temp agency rather than a cohesive combined arms force. While staying relevant also means willingly responding to piecemeal force requests at any scale from fireteam on up, in the long run, nobody really needs an approximately $50 billion a year temp agency.
Into the Force Design Maelstrom
In the years between Amos and Gen. David Berger, Gens. Joseph F. Dunford, Jr. and Robert B. Neller struggled to shoehorn the Marine Corps into the increasingly narrow operational guidance driving Pentagon plans and budgets: How could the Marines, at low cost, make a relevant contribution to the anticipated China war along the nine-dash line in East Asia?
Experimentation flourished, and the expeditionary advanced base operations concept emerged. It can be hard for the layperson to keep track of what all these concepts mean, so I will briefly explain: A small, cost-effective, mobile, hard to detect Marine unit can operate within range of enemy weapons. There, it can spot targets for coordinated attacks, support other military forces, and prevent enemy movement through coastal waters and shorelines. It seems that Neller tried to push through this concept but was thwarted by some of his generals and executives. An internal bureaucratic revolt was slowing innovation.
Berger took over as commandant a year after the near parallel release of the 2018 National Defense Strategy and Sen. John McCain’s 2018 statutory demand for the services to explain how they would reorient towards great power competition. Working from these directives, Berger picked up Neller’s experimental concepts and made a strong bid to reshape the Marine Corps for the war in China’s backyard. Given his narrow wiggle room within the remaining budget, he appears to have felt the need to be decisive where he could. He immediately cut all the service’s tanks, slashed its artillery, cut three infantry battalions, and chopped away at the F-35 to pay for what would become the stand-in force, an evolution of Neller’s expeditionary advanced base operations.
I outline my concerns with Berger’s analytical approach and with the stand-in force as it is currently envisioned in Ground Combat. Briefly, it looked thinly sourced and methodologically shaky. Even if Force Design had been perfect, Berger was not always the best salesperson. A number of simple structural and rhetorical fixes could have made his plan far more palatable than it turned out to be for many high-ranking critics. But I have no interest in trying to reset the clock. I am put off by the explosive and often unseemly public debate that ensued. In the next two installments of this series, I accept the stand-in force with some modest recommended improvements and move forward to address broader concerns.
Do Americans Still Want a Marine Corps?
Cultural factors compound all of the aforementioned challenges. Most articles describing existential threats to the Marine Corps paraphrase Lt. Gen. (ret.) Victor H. Krulak: America doesn’t need a Marine Corps, America wants a Marine Corps. He followed this thought by itemizing all the ways in which the Marine Corps’ capabilities — infantry, amphibious operations, aviation, etc. — could be easily replicated by the other services. In other words, there was no tangible need for the Marine Corps to exist. Its true value was intangible. Krulak wrote (emphasis in the original), “We exist today — we flourish today — not because of what we know we are, or what we know we can do, but because of what the grassroots of our country believes we are and believes we can do.”
My doctoral research focused on the intersection between the Marine Corps and American popular culture, particularly between World War I and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan when the Marine Corps was deeply embedded in the American zeitgeist. I found that in all the books, films, and television shows, marines were America’s tough guys of choice for about a century. Many Americans love tough guys. So at least through the 1990s, Americans wanted a Marine Corps even if they couldn’t always explain why they needed one. But those halcyon days are gone. The iconic battle at Iwo Jima was fought nearly 80 years ago, Khe Sanh in Vietnam 56 years ago, and even Fallujah in Iraq was over 20 years ago. Collective memory in the 2020s is marked by the latest daily TikToks, not by distant historical battles.
While it is impossible to prove the Marine Corps is less centered in the American mind than special operations forces, something has clearly changed. Even before American culture was atomized by social media, special operators had already eclipsed Marines as America’s tough guys. Big studio SEAL movies like Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Lone Survivor (2013), and American Sniper (2014) are far more likely to influence young Americans today than Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) or even the Marine Corps movies of my late teenage years, Heartbreak Ridge (1986) and Full Metal Jacket (1987). The last big studio movie really featuring U.S. marines was the 2011 sci-fi flop, Battle of Los Angeles.
Anyone who believes hard-to-measure cultural shifts don’t matter or are overblown might be more sobered by what is happening in Congress, where service budgets are made and broken. Only 36 percent of the 25 marines who ran for Congress from both parties in 2024 won their contests. In 2025, the 119th Congress has 15 former marines in both houses. That is about half as many as in 1995. By comparison, this Congress has seven SEALs, two more than in the last Congress. No SEAL lost his 2024 race. The tiny active duty SEAL community of about 2,500 sailors comparatively has over 3,000 percent more congressional representation than the approximately 175,000 marines presently on active duty.
A Brewing Storm
What does this all mean? In my interpretation, it means that responding to technical, tactical, and manpower demands from the White House and Congress is a necessary but insufficient step to reverse the existential slide. As the Marine Corps edged away — and was pushed away — from its traditional crisis response mission, both special operations forces and the U.S. Army stepped in to pick up difficult-to-recover core purposes. And over time, as collective memory of the Marine Corps’ greatest era continues to fade, once ephemeral existential fears — folding the Marine Corps into the Army, shrinking it to the point of irrelevance, or doing away with it altogether — are likely to solidify.
In the next installment, I seek to bring this into the operational present. I look into and then beyond the nine-dash line, beyond the stand-in force, and beyond the chaotic and thus-far unproductive public debate over the future of the Marine Corps.
Ben Connable, Ph.D., is a retired Marine officer, executive director of the Battle Research Group, adjunct professor at Georgetown University, adjunct principal research scientist at the Center for Naval Analyses, and the author of Ground Combat: Puncturing the Myths of Modern War.
Image: Lance Cpl. Charis Robertson via DVIDS
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