The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps face a critical shortfall in amphibious readiness, with only twelve operational ships available for global crises. For the past five years, the US Congress has largely neglected this issue, and the ongoing challenges within the Navy and Marine Corps have been either ignored or superficially addressed.
During the Iraq invasion, the Marines deployed a corps-sized force, however, they can now only muster a regimental combat team, which lacks tanks and heavy engineering capabilities, making it nearly ineffective in modern large-scale conflicts, such as those against the Houthis or potentially Iran…
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Why the Marines Can’t Fix the Houthi Problem
The lack of Navy/Marine Corps readiness to face this crisis is a self-inflicted wound. At the present time, the nation has no 9-1-1 force in readiness.
Once he becomes frustrated with the fact that Houthi missiles and drones are still flying. President Trump will likely ask why. Eventually, someone will have to tell him that it will likely take a ground incursion to eliminate them. They will also probably tell him that it will take a ground incursion to root out the launchers and command and control installations. Given the geography of the region, this will mean a massive amphibious raid from the sea. When the president says “make it happen,” someone will have to tell him that the United States no longer has the capability to do that. I would not like to be in the room when the President asks, “Why the hell not?”
How did this happen? General David Berger decided that the Marine Corps needed radical change to keep up with the times when he became commandant in 2019. He believed that the Marines needed to concentrate on a potential war with China in the South China Sea (SCS) to assist the Navy in maintaining sea control in the region. He envisioned Marines armed with anti-ship missiles on islets and shoals in the SCS sinking Chinese ships to maintain American sea control. He called these units “Stand-in forces” and gutted many of the combat-ready units of the Corps to form them. The overall rubric for this Marine Corps overhaul is called “Force Design”.
To afford the missiles to make his vision a reality, General Berger undertook a program he called “divest to invest.” In doing so, he got rid of all the Marine Corps tanks, heavy engineering capabilities, and significant portions of its combat aviation and artillery. Without these assets, the Marines would never have been able to conduct legendary events such as the breakout from the Chosin Reservoir, Hue City, Desert Storm, and the urban fight for Fallujah. He also released the Navy from the number of amphibious ships needed to keep a constant Navy/Marine Corps presence worldwide.
Along the way things went badly wrong with Force Design. First, none of the countries in the region envisioned to host these small missile-armed forces has shown any desire to do so. That includes the Republic of the Philippines, our closest regional ally. Equally disturbing is that the new class of Navy ships vital to supporting Force Design proved unexpectedly expensive. After five years, not a single keel has been laid; there is not even a contract in place. None of the missiles has been made operational.
This may be a blessing in disguise because hypersonic technology has rendered obsolete the missiles the Marine Corps is trying to procure. The Stand-in forces have been created, but they remain paper tigers. For the first time in its storied history, the Marine Corps under Berger had to tell the President and Secretary of Defense that it could not accomplish missions to support NATO in the Ukraine crisis, a civilian evacuation of Sudan, and an earthquake relief operation in Turkey; all this due to a lack of shipping.
For the foreseeable future, the Corps cannot support a war against China or a major conflict in any other region. Nor can it give immediate support to the evacuations and pop-up humanitarian operations that have been its peacetime bread and butter for 80 years.
The Lack of Marine Corps Readiness
For five years, Congress has been asleep at the switch. The drip, drip, drip of Navy/Marine Corps failures has been largely ignored or papered over. The Biden administration never realized the problem. If the administration and Congress started tomorrow, it would take at least a decade to get the Corps back to where it was in 2018 before Berger came on the scene.
Despite these failures Berger’s successor — General Eric Smith — has stubbornly refused to admit that he has a problem. During the invasion of Iraq, the Marines fielded a corps-sized contribution. Today, it could barely produce a regimental combat team, and that would be light infantry devoid of tanks and heavy engineers, virtually useless in a modern war on a large scale incursion such as that needed against the Houthis.
The Army might be able to reinforce the Marines with armor and heavy engineering assets, but someone will have to tell the president that it will likely take months to train those forces in the art of amphibious landings to ensure we do not have an interservice debacle such as the bungled 1979 Iranian hostage rescue raid. Just as troubling, the General Berger-induced lack of amphibious shipping will mean that the Navy has to abandon readiness off the Gaza coast and in the Western Pacific to scrape together amphibious ships for the Gaza operation.
The lack of readiness in the Navy/Marine Corps to face this crisis is a self-inflicted wound. At the present time, the nation has no 9-1-1 force in readiness.
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