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Originally posted by jljones:With the Marines, unless you are born into into it like I was, the other services have a lot more to offer, because they are all a lot bigger with more opportunity. I'm having a hell of time trying to talk my boy into this mentality. He wants to be fourth generation, but frankly Army SF has so much more to offer him.

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Originally posted by esdunbar:
Out of curiosity, why can’t the marines recruit pilots? Seems to me flying something like an F35 for the marines would be a cool and attractive job. Beats flying a cargo plane full of rubber dog shit out of Hong Kong for the Air Force no?

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Originally posted by RHINOWSO:
10 hours a month in these aircraft is barely safe, much less exciting and tactical.

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Originally posted by jljones:
The marines have long fucked the goat when it comes to mission shifts, particularly those who keep trying to claim "going back to our roots" type shifts.

They tried it with MARSOC, and their resistance from joining JSOC. We saw how that worked out.

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Originally posted by CPD SIG:
MARSOC

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Originally posted by Gibb:
I've always felt the Marines had a job, and they did it well. That job to me has been lost in trying to compete with the Army for occupation missions. Not what the Marines do, but it sounds like this may be a plan to get back to being an actual separate, specialized force.

Now I've been out for over 20 years, so I'm going off of second hand info from guss I've talked to coming back from Iraq/Afghanistan.

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Originally posted by apprentice:

Just as a taxpayer totally on the sidelines, I've wondered about why there always seems to be so much overlap in duties between the branches of service.

Does it all come down to chasing a yearly budget?

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Originally posted by Valpo Fz:


When I read that they were going to HQ the first littoral regiment in Japan I knew it was a joke.(So probably using 4th Marines as the HQ) Its is almost impossible to do real training in Japan because of the restrictions. Live fire is wildly restricted, maneuver areas are small and not conducive to the 3 things you need to practice to be effective in combat, moving, shooting and communicating. The last really strong Commandant that we had was probably Gen Krulak.

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Originally posted by jljones:

They tried it with MARSOC, and their resistance from joining JSOC. We saw how that worked out.

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New Corps formation: Marine littoral regiment may be how the Corps fights future battles

Todd South January 29

Major changes seem to be coming for the Marine Corps’ force structure, as the commandant and his top leaders have given a range of new design possibilities.

There’s reconfiguring the Marine Expeditionary Unit for new types of missions, and ways to change the Marine Air-Ground Task Force to better fit the needs of the force. Commandant Gen. David Berger has talked about small teams of Marines taking out ships in hotly contested areas.

But recently an entirely new formation was mentioned that could cause its own ripples across the force: a Marine littoral regiment.

“It’s looking at creating the Marine Littoral Regiment and how that’s going to resource and help make (Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations) successful,” said Maj. Gen. Mark Wise, deputy commanding general of Marine Corps Combat Development Command.

The term came up in a panel discussion at the Surface Navy Association annual symposium in Arlington, Virginia, on Jan. 15, when Wise was answering questions about how the Corps would go about building new formations to fight better alongside the Navy.

The Marine littoral regiment is “a structure that the Marine Corps is looking at to support” expeditionary advanced base operations, the command later confirmed to Marine Corps Times.

“The concept is still in its infancy and critical aspects are still being fleshed out on how it will be staffed, organized, used, etc.,” Capt. Sam Stephenson, spokesman for MCCDC, wrote in an email.

The Marine Corps’ current force design conversations and planning will help develop the littoral regiment concept, Stephenson said.

If the past few months of public appearances by Berger and his top generals are any indication, a littoral regiment would likely find itself in the III Marine Expeditionary Force, headquartered in Okinawa, Japan, and consist of small teams of Marines armed with a host of unmanned air, ground and maritime assets along with long range fires and air defense systems.

[...]

“We may need to get smaller, trade some parts we’ve had for a long time but are not a good fit for the future,” Berger said.

He looked to reduce or eliminate money going toward manned anti-armor ground and aviation platforms, manned and traditional towed artillery that can’t shoot hypervelocity rounds and short range mortar systems.

All other efforts are leaning into conducting sea control and sea denial operations from the sea and maritime terrain, he said.

To make that happen, the commandant said that he wants low cost, lethal air and ground unmanned platforms, unmanned long range surface and subsurface vehicles, mobile, rapidly deployable rocket systems, long range precision fires, loitering munitions across the echelons, mobile air defense and counter-precision guided munitions capabilities, signature management, electronic warfare and expeditionary airfields.

And it appears, the Marine littoral regiment may be the formation for many of those new capabilities and manpower.

An administrative message publicized recently hints at where the best Marines ― and possibly a new type of regiment ― could find its home: in the III Marine Expeditionary Force.

“Commanding Generals, Commanding Officers, Senior Enlisted Leaders, and mentors of every rank should actively mentor and identify our highest quality NCOs, SNCOs, and officers for duty in the Pacific,” Berger wrote in the Jan. 14.

The message further emphasized his “renewed focus” on pushing priorities to III MEF to counter a rising China in the Pacific.

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Marines’ Force Design 2030 May Allow MEUs Tailored for Different Geographies, Adversaries

By: Megan Eckstein
April 2, 2020 8:15 PM

The Marine Corps’ new force design may allow East Coast expeditionary units to look much different than West Coast or Japan-based units, a nod to the complex but different environments they’ll operate in and threats they’ll face in the future.

Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. David Berger recently released his Force Design 2030 plan, which calls for the creation of new Marine Littoral Regiments, as well as redesigned Marine Expeditionary Units (MEUs) that would be optimized for the Expeditionary Advance Base Operations concept that has driven much of the Marines’ planning in recent months.

The overarching idea of the force design is to embrace what is unique about the Marine Corps and divest of capabilities that are already resident in the joint force, Berger told reporters this week. If the service is to act as an expeditionary and amphibious crisis response force, rather than a second land army, then it needs to change how it equips and organizes itself. In the case of heavy tanks, short- and medium-range artillery, bridging companies to support sustained land campaigns and more, Berger wrote in his report that he is confident the Army has the right capabilities and that the Marine Corps does not need to duplicate that.

However, he notes he is not confident in the MEUs and Marine Littoral Regiments, which would be the formations most responsible for carrying out EABO – a concept that was reinvigorated in 2016 and signed out in 2018, and that falls under the Littoral Operations in a Contested Environment (LOCE) concept, the Marine Corps offering that pairs with the Navy’s Distributed Maritime Operations concept.

[...]

Last year III MEF Marines tested out a couple pieces of EABO in live exercises. In one, according to 31st MEU Commanding Officer Col. Robert Brodie, reconnaissance Marines conducted a high-altitude jump onto Ie Shima island near Okinawa, paving the way for a raid force being flown in to seize the island. Once the island was secured, CH-53E heavy-lift helicopters flew in fuel bladders and ordnance to conduct a forward arming and refueling point (FARP) operation with the F-35B Joint Strike Fighter jets that were experimenting with how they could contribute to island-hopping operations in the Pacific.

Later last year, a similar operation was conducted to establish a FARP for the KC-130J cargo and tanker plane – which is much larger than the F-35 and needs a more established runway, whereas the F-35B variant has short takeoff and vertical landing capability. Though setting up a FARP for the larger fixed-wing plane is more complex than for the F-35, in this exercise the KC-130Js were used as part of a casualty evacuation exercise that smaller planes couldn’t have conducted.

Shortly after the FARP set-up and CASEVAC exercise, the Marines tested another scenario, taking a beach from an amphibious ship and pushing the HIMARS rocket system ashore by LCU surface connectors. They simulated firing the HIMARS using data from an F-35B flying overhead, “demonstrating the capability for long-range precision fire support during expeditionary operations,” USNI News reported at the time. “This was the first time that a HIMARS insert by LCU has ever been completed in the Indo-Pacific region after a simulated amphibious raid, rehearsing naval expeditionary combined-arms maneuver from amphibious shipping.”

Berger said these exercises showed the artillery fly-in capability and the FARP capability, but that EABO could also call for small teams to move in and out of a piece of land to conduct intelligence collection, logistics, command and control, or other missions.

“We have to experiment with all of that to find out what the best way to build those forces are, and what kinds of equipment they need, all in the mindset of, they have to be capable but they also have to be able to displace, to be able to move, and we can’t make them so big and heavy that they can’t get out of their own way,” he told USNI News during the roundtable.

[...]

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Originally posted by RHINOWSO:
Yes, that kind of thing IS cool if they let you do it. But all services have been having retention issues due to the pre-C19 economy of airlines hiring and the fact that flight hours are WAY down in the military (USAF even more so --> https://www.military.com/daily...got-worse-2019.html).

People joined up to fly, not barely maintain currency. Used to be every pilot coming out of the military after 8-10 years would have 1500-2000 hrs of flight time. Now I see people with just over 1000 hours, like 100-150 per year. But you still have to go to work and experience death by a million paper cuts via the latest guidance / tasking / or some other non flying bullshit. 10 hours a month in these aircraft is barely safe, much less exciting and tactical.

So people have chosen to either not sign up or have been voting with their feet by leaving at the first available opportunity.

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Originally posted by wingfoot:
Kind of sad to see my old CH-53 squadron HMH-462 is getting the axe. There probably is a bit to much redundancy but I sure hope this does not come back to bite us.

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Originally posted by brywards:
My son just commissioned in the USMC last month, so this thread caught my attention.

From a defined mission capability standpoint, the reduction in heavy equipment and enduring land-based mission-oriented units makes sense...on paper. But history has taught us that what makes sense on papers drafted at HHQ by careerists far removed from the front line is rarely cleanly executed on the battlefield.

The duplication of missions and buildup of associated equipment is largely due to mistrust between the services that the other service charged with mission "X" will be there when the call comes in. The prime example I can think of is the air missions like CAS and CSAR. Give all the airplanes to the Air Force and helos to the Army...surely they'll remember the Marines on the ground when prioritizing missions, right? Nope...never have. So give the Navy some planes and helos to cover their Marine buddies...they'll remember to cover down, right? Nope..."We need the planes for fleet defense (and to get in on the ground attack mission so the AF guys don't have all the fun), and the helos will be on standby to rescue downed pilots."

History will only repeat itself...I just hope it doesn't cost too many Jarhead lives in the process.