As you take the Marine Corps down to the mandated level of 182,000 personnel, what are the real-world consequences of these cuts? Where do these cuts occur?

We had begun back in 2010 … what we called our Force Structure Review Group [FSRG]. The FSRG took what we thought – we the Marine Corps, the joint force – would be the future of combat, and the task was to design the Marine Corps for post-Afghanistan. When the Marine Corps comes out of Afghanistan, what would it need to look like to meet the needs of the nation? So we put the best and brightest colonels, lieutenant colonels, young general officers together, and they worked very, very diligently over an initial period of about six months [to develop an “initial force” mix] and then another period of almost a year to take that initial force and analyze it across doctrine, organizations, training, materiel, leadership, personnel, and facilities, to see what the force needs, and how do we get there? So, we did that. The FSRG came up with a force of 186,800 Marines. And that is the force that we were going to draw down to, exclusive of any direction by anybody to draw down.

In other words, we knew we didn’t need a Marine Corps with 202,000 personnel post Iraq/Afghanistan. The reason we grew the force was to provide a deployment-to-dwell ratio that provided that our Marines and their families would not get burned out. We were attempting to achieve at least a 2-to-1 dwell-to-deployment; in other words, you’re home at least twice as long as you’re deployed.

And then, in the summer of 2011, the Budget Control Act happened. We saw the handwriting on the wall as we built the presidential budget for [fiscal year 13, which includes [plans and projections for] fiscal years 13 through 17. In the process of [doing that, we were evaluating] how much money we thought would be available, and then ultimately became available in “top line” [spending, and], looking at what the Budget Control Act was going to do, and other things, it was determined inside this building that the maximum size of the U.S. Marine Corps that could be afforded was 182,100 Marines.

We took that force and went back through the Force Structure Review process, and wargamed it against all of the things we thought we might have to do as a Marine Corps. The commandant then went to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff [JCS], and said, “Given the new Defense Strategic Guidance, I can meet the Defense Strategic Guidance given this 182,100-person Marine Corps. However, I feel like I’m taking the maximum risk I can in meeting all of the things you want me to do at 182,100 Marines.” His “going in” position was: I need the 186,800. But – and as will happen from here and beyond – the Marine Corps will provide the absolutely most ready, the most capable Marine Corps that the nation will afford, and right now that’s a 182,100-man Marine Corps.

 

Can you give us a sense of what a reduction in end strength of 20,000 Marines means in real-world terms to the Corps? What kinds and numbers of units and systems does it give up?

During the past decade, we grew from 24 infantry battalions to 27 infantry battalions. And infantry battalions are [to us what] aircraft carriers [are to the Navy]. I mean, that’s the base around which the rest of the Marine Corps kind of lives. [So] as we draw that force down to 182,100 personnel, we are not going to break faith with our Marines. So we’re going to draw down in a different direction. I say in a different direction because today’s force isn’t simply the force we started with when we started growing [after 9/11]. We’ve added new capabilities. We’ve expanded at Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command [MARSOC]. We’ve expanded at Marine Corps Cyber Command. We’ve retained critical enablers after 10 years of war. We actually learned some lessons about the critical enablers. You know, in the old parlance we used to say, “Ah, that guy’s in a high demand-low density MOS [Military Occupational Specialty].” Well shame on the Marine Corps leadership that commits to still have high demand-low density anything. So what we’re going to have is high demand-right density, and we’re retaining a whole host of enablers. So, when you look at the combat formations of the 182,100 Marine force, we’re actually a little smaller than we were. In other words, we going to end up with 23 infantry battalions instead of the 24 we started with. We’re going to have slightly smaller numbers of fixed-wing and rotary-wing squadrons. But we’re going to have this robust enabler capability with a great MARSOC and cyber components, and we feel we’re going to be best set to be the right force for the future.

 

As part of the 2012 “Defense Strategic Guidance,” the Department of Defense (DoD) announced a policy shift in the military’s focus to what is known as the “Pacific Pivot.” Can you explain it from the point of view of the Marine Corps?

What it said was, we’re going to rebalance [our force and focus] to the Pacific. The beautiful thing for the Marine Corps is we’re already there. Now, we weren’t there in the numbers we wanted to be. We weren’t there in the level of support, doing the things that the new strategy wanted us to do. We had to figure out a way to finance that and resource that because it’s not just about money; it’s about people and training and that sort of thing.

But just to give a little context, over the course of the past 10 years of the conflict, we have three Marine Expeditionary Forces in the Marine Corps, as you are well aware. Two of those Marine Expeditionary Force Headquarters traded off going to the fight, whether it was Iraq or Afghanistan. And one of those Marine Expeditionary Forces remained solely focused in the Pacific: the III Marine Expeditionary Force in Okinawa. We had four battalions in III MEF [until] 2003, [when] we determined that we could no longer support having all four of those battalions [there] because of the deployment-to-dwell issue I talked about. But we did retain one infantry battalion there at all times, as they were the ground combat element for the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit [MEU(SOC)]. So we’ve had that [one MEU(SOC) out in the Pacific, along with our in-theater aviation and logistics elements]. We had the Marine Expeditionary Force – all the elements of the MAGTF [Marine Air-Ground Task Force] –  forward deployed. When the decision was made in January 2012 regarding the new Strategic Guidance, in April of that year we had the first Marines respond to that guidance. The second battalion of those original four started its deployment with Fox Company to Australia, followed in June of that year by the balance of that battalion to Okinawa. In January of this year, we’ll send the third battalion of that build-up and then before the end of FY 14 – and it will depend upon how things go in Afghanistan – we’ll not only have that fourth infantry battalion in place out in the Pacific, we’ll complete the build-up of artillery and engineer units, [along with] other capabilities that will go there. In addition to that, we’re moving our V-22s, AH-1s, and UH-1s forward into Hawaii, and we already have V-22s deployed to Okinawa. It took some work to make that happen, but they are there and doing well.