U.S. MARINE CORPS
Gen. James F. Amos, commandant of the Marine Corps, pins Cpl. Kevin B. Walker of Weapons Company, 1st Battalion,
8th Marines, with the Purple Heart medal during an award ceremony in Musa Qala’eh, Afghanistan, Dec. 25. Walker was
awarded the Purple Heart after receiving shrapnel and a concussion from an improvised explosive device blast while on
patrol. During the ceremony, Amos awarded seven Marines with the Purple Heart and told each of them to be proud to
wear such a distinguished award.
You’ve heard the term “low-density, high-demand”
skill sets, what we call our “military occupational specialties” in the Marine Corps. We have these low-density,
high-demand assets, which means they’re deploying
back to back. They’re gone seven months, they’re home,
in many cases less than seven months, and we turn them
right around and send them back because we’ve got
nobody else.
We said, “Why don’t we take those things that are low
density, high demand and change them to right density,
high demand, instead of making it always hard on a few?”
Let’s deepen the bench on things like signals intelligence,
human intelligence. We fixed explosive ordinance disposal. When we began, we were woefully short of those and
they were truly the ultimate low-density, high-demand
asset. Unmanned aerial vehicle squads. We fixed that.
We end up with, in my estimation, a more capable
Marine Corps. We have taken “individual augments,”
where each service is required to provide so many lieu-
tenant commanders in the Navy, majors in the Marine
Corps, lieutenant colonels in the Marine Corps, master
sergeants, and we’ve had to provide that now in num-
bers of thousands. What we’ve done now is we’ve said,
“OK, if this is the kind of environment we’re going to
operate in, let’s change the force structure within the
Marine Corps so we have more lieutenant colonels and
more majors and more master sergeants.”
With the cancellation of the Expeditionary Fighting
Vehicle (EFV), you’ve had to regroup on procurement plans for armored vehicles like the Amphibious Combat Vehicle (ACV), the Marine Personnel
Carrier and the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV).
What are your procurement plans in the near term
for vehicles? Is the Corps retaining the Mine
Resistant Armor Protected vehicles (MRAPs)?
AMOS: We need a replacement for our utility vehicle,
the Humvee. We have about 23,000 Humvees right
now in a variety of different kinds, everything from the
old canvas-backed ones when we crossed the border
into Iraq in 2003 to the up-armored ones, the enhanced capability vehicles. Those are going to need to
be replaced and that’s where the JLTV was, hopefully,
going to reside. I’m not sure it’s going to. Right now, it’s
a very expensive vehicle and it’s a heavy vehicle, and
we’re not going for heavy vehicles.
We’ll have a little over 2,000 MRAPs. We’ll take very
good care of those MRAPs, and when we need heavy
armored vehicles, we plan on using those. There is a
replacement out there. It would be nice if the JLTV
