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One year ago, the top Marine announced the first official steps of a major Marine Corps overhaul to shift to a Navy-centric warfighting role that would see many changes.
The most noticeable? The elimination of Marine tanks.
And the Corps moved fast. By summer 2020, the hulking behemoths of ground combat were being loaded on train cars and rolling away from the storied 1st Tank Battalion at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms, California. Other inventories soon followed. And by the end of 2020, an official Marine Corps message allowed both armor officers and enlisted to end their contracts a year early.
At the time of the initial overhaul announcement, the Corps had 452 tanks at its disposal. By December 2020, 323 had been transferred to the Army. The remaining tanks were scheduled for transfer by 2023, which included tanks in overseas storage and aboard maritime prepositioning ships, according to Marine Corps Systems Command.
Commandant Gen. David H. Berger has said that should armor be needed by Marines, he would look to the Army to provide that capability.
At the annual Modern Day Marine Military Expo in September 2020, Berger emphasized that the Army’s job is to be big, heavy and lethal while Marines must be light and expeditionary.
“Army is huge,” he said. “We need a big Army. They win our wars. The Marine Corps doesn’t win the wars. We win the battles.”
But the heavy emphasis specialization has some retired Marines and others in defense circles questioning the change might be an overreach that would diminish the Corps’ versatility — a selling point for the service for much of its modern existence.
A combination of recent concepts and a series of war games, experiments and more than a decade of push to return to naval warfighting led to the force design overhaul expected to take place over the next decade. Those sweeping changes began in 2020 with the divesting of tanks, reduction of cannon artillery in favor of longer-range missiles and a shakeup of how the infantry is used.
Those changes are leading to an entirely new formation, the Marine littoral regiment, which will hold infantry, artillery, logistics and an anti-air battery.
The moves are to enable small units of 75 Marines down to a squad-sized element to disperse themselves across vast distances but at key chokepoints to help the Navy knock out enemy ships.
- further read here
www.marinecorpstimes.com
The most noticeable? The elimination of Marine tanks.
And the Corps moved fast. By summer 2020, the hulking behemoths of ground combat were being loaded on train cars and rolling away from the storied 1st Tank Battalion at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms, California. Other inventories soon followed. And by the end of 2020, an official Marine Corps message allowed both armor officers and enlisted to end their contracts a year early.
At the time of the initial overhaul announcement, the Corps had 452 tanks at its disposal. By December 2020, 323 had been transferred to the Army. The remaining tanks were scheduled for transfer by 2023, which included tanks in overseas storage and aboard maritime prepositioning ships, according to Marine Corps Systems Command.
Commandant Gen. David H. Berger has said that should armor be needed by Marines, he would look to the Army to provide that capability.
At the annual Modern Day Marine Military Expo in September 2020, Berger emphasized that the Army’s job is to be big, heavy and lethal while Marines must be light and expeditionary.
“Army is huge,” he said. “We need a big Army. They win our wars. The Marine Corps doesn’t win the wars. We win the battles.”
But the heavy emphasis specialization has some retired Marines and others in defense circles questioning the change might be an overreach that would diminish the Corps’ versatility — a selling point for the service for much of its modern existence.
A combination of recent concepts and a series of war games, experiments and more than a decade of push to return to naval warfighting led to the force design overhaul expected to take place over the next decade. Those sweeping changes began in 2020 with the divesting of tanks, reduction of cannon artillery in favor of longer-range missiles and a shakeup of how the infantry is used.
Those changes are leading to an entirely new formation, the Marine littoral regiment, which will hold infantry, artillery, logistics and an anti-air battery.
The moves are to enable small units of 75 Marines down to a squad-sized element to disperse themselves across vast distances but at key chokepoints to help the Navy knock out enemy ships.
- further read here
Goodbye, tanks: How the Marine Corps will change, and what it will lose, by ditching its armor
Commandant Gen. David H. Berger has said that should armor be needed by Marines, he would look to the Army to provide that capability.
www.marinecorpstimes.com
