“The Corps wants to shed weight from the past 10 years, get back on ship, and back to what we used to do,” Lt. Col. Mike Cancellier, director of the Force Protection Integration Division (FPID) of the Marine Capabilities Development Directorate, said. “The Corps needs to maintain a level of training and development because IEDs are here to stay and we need to be prepared for the worst case scenario in terms of chem/bio.”
The Command & Control Integration Division (C2ID), meanwhile, is assessing the increasing need for fast battlefield communications at all levels, from headquarters to individual Marines, as well as how to keep ever-growing amounts of data from overwhelming not only those systems, but the warfighters themselves. From a 2012 perspective, those demands created equipment shortages at the squad level, even as the need for every warfighter to have personal communications capability intensified.
“The challenge is to maintain inventory as our budgets decrease,” Capt. John Pico, capabilities integration officer for tactical radios, said. “As we go through those cuts, we have to look at what’s the right table of equipment for each unit – one-for-one or issue at the higher echelons and let them plus-up a unit as required by each mission. Trying to strike the right balance is one of our biggest problems.
Soldiers from the Canadian Army, Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry Regiment, 2nd Battalion, and a Marine from 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment move in as a fireteam to clear a roof top during a Marine Operations on Urban Terrain exercise at Marine Corps Training Area Bellows on July, 6, 2012. Approximately 2,200 personnel from nine nations participated in RIMPAC 2012 as part of Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force 3, Combined Force Land Component Command. The CFLCC conducted amphibious and land-based operations in order to enhance multinational and joint interoperability. RIMPAC 2012 was the 23rd exercise in the series that began in 1971. U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Tyler Main
“MOUT [Military Operations in Urban Terrain] requires a lot more radios down to the individual level, while rural fights have a greater emphasis on power and range. So reducing the weight of batteries and radios, with longer patrols and less time between resupply, is a goal. Having enough batteries for every radio for multi-day patrols can weigh down the Marines pretty quickly.”
While the Marine Corps represents only 8 percent of the annual defense budget, it provides 15 percent of all active ground maneuver brigades, 11 percent of all fighter/attack aircraft, 18 percent of all attack helicopters, and seven scalable and flexible Marine Expeditionary Units forward-deployed around the world on 22 amphibious ships. With Amos anticipating austerity budgets through the remainder of this decade, maintaining that capability will force increasingly difficult decisions.
In public comments shortly after the November election, the commandant reported the demand by theater commanders for Marine Corps resources “exceeds by about a factor of four what we can provide on a daily basis. We don’t have enough ships. We don’t have enough forward-deployed forces to be able to satisfy the appetite of the combatant commanders.”
In his 2012 Posture Statement to Congress, Amos emphasized the “real danger” of force reductions and budget cuts not tempered by real-world needs.
“History has shown that crises usually come with little or no warning; stemming from the same conditions of uncertainty, complexity and chaos we observe across the world today. Regardless of the financial pressures placed on governments and markets today, crises requiring military intervention undoubtedly will continue tomorrow,” he warned. “In this environment, physical presence and readiness matter significantly. Since the 1990s, America has been reducing its foreign basing and presence, bringing forces back home. This trend is not likely to change in the face of the strategic and budget realities we currently face. There remains an enduring requirement to balance presence with cost.
“The United States remains a maritime nation that relies heavily on the oceans and waterways of the world for the free exchange of ideas and trade. The maritime commons are where 95 percent of the world’s commerce flows, where more than 42,000 commercial ships are under way daily, where most of the world’s digital information flows via undersea cables and where half the world’s oil travels through seven strategic chokepoints. To secure our way of life and ensure uninterrupted freedom of navigation, we must retain the ability to operate simultaneously and seamlessly while at sea, ashore, from the sea, in the air and, perhaps most importantly, where these domains converge – the littorals – not only in the Pacific, but throughout the world.”
This article was first published in Defense: Winter 2013 Edition.