Marines in air-ground task forces and in detachments
onboard Navy and Coast Guard ships.
Employing Marines from a wider variety of ships is a
method to increase capacity and capability and, in some
ways, is a return to the past, said Col. Douglas King, Joint
Coordination Branch, Marine Corps Combat Development Command in Quantico, Va., in an interview.
“We envision routine employment of smaller MAGTFs
(Marine Air-Ground Task Forces) and detachments of
Marines from a variety of platforms to meet increased
demand,” he said, adding that the strategy “re-emphasizes
our enduring relationship with the Navy, it formalizes one
with the Coast Guard and makes the case for sea power
as the United States’ asymmetric advantage.”
The Future of War
A major challenge in crafting the strategy was addressing a divergence of opinion within the Navy toward the
future of war, with the traditional emphasis on an
open-ocean, “blue-water” capability under challenge.
“There’s an internal debate within the Navy about
transformation,” Walling said. “One side argues that we
are unlikely to face a conventional naval threat of the kind
we faced in World War II or the Cold War, based on big,
massed fleets, sometimes called third-generation warfare.”
Walling said this side cites fourth-generation warfare, based on non-state actors — guerrillas, terrorists
— who will attempt actions similar to the bombing of
the destroyer USS Cole, which was attacked by suicide
bombers in a small boat while harbored in Aden,
Yemen, in October 2000. This faction says “that’s
where the new threats are going to come from, therefore we need a new kind of navy that is designed to
fight in the littorals,” and advocates more capability to
fight in rivers and along the coasts — known as
“brown-” and “green-water” capability.
“What I see in the document is some effort to adapt
to brown- and green-water challenges,” Walling said.
“There also is recognition that one of the worst things
that could happen to the United States would be to
lose its ability to control the sea by surging and massing fleets in such a way that no one could prevent us
from doing so.
“The nature of the United States as a superpower
means that we have to be prepared for a range of conflicts, on the high seas against a peer competitor, but
also in the littoral,” he said. “But there is the problem
of limited resources. You’re never going to get all the
resources you need. You’re going to have to establish
some sort of priorities here.”
Walling sees the new strategy as: “Strive for the best
by building alliances and coalitions as much as possible, but also prepare for the worst, when you may not
have many allies to rely on.”
Left Unsaid
Some maritime analysts were disappointed in the new
strategy document more for what it did not say than
what it did.
“I expected a lot more,” said Norman Polmar, a naval
analyst and consultant in Alexandria, Va., who cited the
war on terrorism, the Navy’s commitment of more than
10,000 individual augmentees to Iraq and Afghanistan,
the size of the current fleet and the higher-than-anticipated cost of the new ships under development as
notable omissions. “I expected strategy that would lay
out how we’re going to cope with all of these issues.”
Polmar also questioned the utility of the 1,000-ship
navy in high-threat scenarios, such as a confrontation
with Iran.
“If we need ships to blockade Iran, how many of our
allies do you think will commit to that?” he said. “If
Iran develops nuclear weapons and continues some of
the bellicose statements they’re making, and if the
president of the United States orders a conventional
weapons strike against certain Iranian targets, which
allies can we count on? And until we know that, how
do we know what our requirement will be? So a 1,000-
ship navy doesn’t help us very much against Iran.”
Polmar also is skeptical of the plan to add detachments of Marines to more ships.
“We’re so short of Marines now,” he said, noting the
commitment in Afghanistan and Iraq, the increasing
commitment to guard embassies and the assignment of
Marines to U.S. Special Operations Command. “Now
they say we’re going to put them on ships? We tried
that a few years in the ’90s and it did not work at all.”
Robert Work, vice president for Strategic Studies at
the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary
Assessments in Washington, also expressed some surprise with the nature of the strategy document.
“This is what I would call a maritime strategic concept, or vision, on the importance of seapower. It is not
in any way, shape or form true operational strategy,” he
said. “It doesn’t tell you how you’re going to employ
the fleet. Instead, it provides a general list of things
that naval forces do for the nation.
“The concept does a good job in explaining the
importance of cooperative action, and I applaud that,”
he said. “All of the ideas of trying to harness a concert
of democratic maritime powers and trying to forge
these maritime partnerships is extremely smart and a
good way to go.”
Work finds the document vague on its central theme.
“It says that preventing wars is as important as winning wars,” he said, but it “doesn’t really say anything
about how the Navy-Marine Corps team is going to help
us win the war we’re in right now, and it doesn’t really say
which wars the Navy is most interested in preventing.”
