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Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of three articles on the U.S. Marine Corps. The first article was published on June 16, 2025.

In just over 20 years, the Marine Corps has gone from being America’s reliable middleweight force in readiness to more of a secondary, general purpose backup force. Today, marines are more likely to find themselves assisting special operations teams and U.S. Army crisis response task forces than spearheading operations. Without meaningful change, a dangerous question resurfaces: “Why do we need a Marine Corps?”

In the first article in this series, I argued that there is an opportunity to reverse this slide. My research shows that broadly shared and influential assumptions about modern warfare are flawed. War has evolved but it has not dramatically changed. Therefore, some capabilities divested in the initial phase of Gen. David Berger’s force design plan should be recouped.

And while special operators and Army units have seized the lead on crisis response, the Marine Corps is still the only force that has the baseline capability and organizational culture to field on-call, fully integrated, combined arms units to respond to everything from noncombatant evacuation operations to large-scale amphibious assault. With some changes, the Marine Corps is the best organization to spearhead global competition against China outside of the so-called nine-dash line. It is also the ideal irregular warfare force in readiness.

In this bridging article I address the flaws in the core assumption driving defense-wide force innovation and design. The character of war is not changing dramatically. Indeed, my view is that the very concept of war having a discernable, universal character is flawed.

Current Perceptions About the Character of Modern War

Common perceptions of the so-called character of modern war are too often influenced by unfounded histrionics. Popular culture is breathless about the impact of drones, precision munitions, AI, and other technologies on the conduct of warfare. Over-the-top videos and articles proliferate, with titles like “The Missile That Changes Everything!,” and “This new advanced drone is insane!” An article claims that with advances in AI, the “central psychology of war will disappear.” It would be easy to dismiss all this out of hand if it were not reiterated in only slightly less hyperbolic terms by senior military officers and institutions.

While paying lip service to the vague notion that war has some kind of enduring if ill-defined nature, senior U.S. military leaders have repeatedly stated and written that the character of modern war is changing so dramatically that it puts at risk every existing military concept and capability. Joint Warfighting cemented these highest-echelon views: “In 2023, we are witnessing an unprecedented fundamental change in the character of war.” In other words, war as marines might experience it in the mid-2020s and beyond would little resemble iconic battles like Iwo Jima, Khe Sanh, or Fallujah. Failure to embrace dramatic change would therefore be disastrous.

Other senior leaders have been more circumspect. But these broadly held maximalist beliefs about the changing character of war clearly influenced the original Force Design 2030. While then-Commandant David Berger may not have bought into all of the hyperbole, he seemed to argue that fundamental changes in the character of war was moving the standing Marine force towards obsolesence. He wrote: “I am convinced that the defining attributes of our current force design are no longer what the nation requires of the Marine Corps.” This was not just Berger’s thinking: It resulted in part from nearly two decades of often contentious debate within the Marine Corps. Still, his central rationale for change stemmed from the perception that increasing range, accuracy, and availability of precision-strike munitions would effectively preclude traditional assault-from-the-sea-style amphibious warfare operations.

There are several problems with this argument as originally written, each of which I address in my new book, Ground Combat: Puncturing the Myths of Modern War. Most importantly, the core of this argument builds from an empirically unsubstantiated description of modern warfare. Broadly held assumptions about modern war emerged from a recurring but mistaken belief that shocking discontinuities, or revolutions in warfare, periodically render standing capabilities obsolete.

On close examination, the concept of a revolution in warfare dissolves into unprovable opinion. It provides no solid ground for the strategic theories or force designs we now embrace. Fed by illusions and vague ideas, current arguments for wholesale military transformation are distorted and detached from reality. But there is a clear, evidence-driven rationale to sustain both a robust amphibious combined-arms force and the more technical elements of Force Design — including the stand-in force — in some form. Both advocates and critics of Force Design have made relevant points that drive towards a reasonable middle-ground solution.

War As It Is

In the new Ground Combat Database I provide a large set of coded battle data describing 45 cases from World War II through 2002, and then 423 more modern battles and skirmishes fought between 2003 and the end of 2022. This modern set includes the major battles fought by the United States and its allies and partners in Iraq and Afghanistan; over 150 battles fought in civil wars in Syria, Libya, Sri Lanka, Mali, Yemen, and Myanmar; other counterinsurgency fights in places like the Philippines, Kenya, Pakistan, and Nigeria; and the war in Ukraine from 2014 on.

Collectively, these battles describe land war — including amphibious operations at places like Al Faw, Iraq; Kilali, Sri Lanka; and Mariupol, Ukraine — as it has actually been fought, not as it has been imagined. It turns out that global ground combat from 2003 on has been functionally similar to war as it was fought in 1942. Of course, missiles make ship-to-shore operations more dangerous. Drones and some other precision munitions, both of which were employed in World War II, have recently proliferated to smaller states and irregular forces. And it is clear that drones have had a significant impact on some battlefields. However, given war’s many idiosyncrasies, extrapolating from Ukraine or any other single case (e.g., Nagorno-Karabakh, 2020) is unwise.

Drones and advanced technologies like AI should not be discounted, of course. But even the real evidence of drone proliferation and battlefield value does not justify the technophilic and technophobic exaggerations now used to characterize modern warfare. It is possible for two things to be true at one time: New technology can be proliferating quickly and the most common aspects of land warfare can remain generally consistent. Across 423 modern battles, including 61 from Ukraine, old-school tanks were employed by at least one side in 69 percent of cases; manned aircraft and artillery were used by at least one side in 82 percent of cases; armed or armored light vehicles by at least one side in 96 percent of cases; and infantry were employed by both sides in every case.

War As It Is in Ukraine

Prima facie learning from the more recent and widespread employment of AI, ground robots, and smaller aerial drones in Ukraine is stimulating more eager acceptance of technophilic and technophobic characterizations of modern warfare. Some evidence is indeed compelling. Since at least mid-2022, a daily firehose of drone compilation videos, frontline testimonials, and volumes of provable, concrete evidence of drone strike successes have influenced many U.S. military experts and senior leaders to argue for an immediate reshaping of America’s ground forces for advanced drone war.

Possibly tens of thousands of drones from both sides in the war in Ukraine are lost each month to countermeasures, drone–killing drones, high winds, or technical failures. And while drones fly overhead, fighting continues apace on the ground. In Ukraine and on other global battlefields, actual ground combat remains generally consistent with World War II-era combat. Infantry and armor move to contact, assault, ambush, and defend. Soldiers kill each other with rifles, machineguns, rockets, and grenades, very frequently at intimate ranges. Brutal knife fights like this one (exercise caution before viewing) still occur. Together, infantry weapons, mines, unguided rockets, artillery rounds, mortars, and manned air-delivered munitions almost certainly have caused a preponderance of modern battlefield casualties from 2022 through mid-2025. All the factors that constitute combined arms combat as described by the Marine Corps in the original 1989 version of its core doctrinal publication, Warfighting, are as relevant in 2025 as they were towards the end of the 20th century.

So, there is a provably dichotomous reality in which advanced technology use meshes with 20th -century-style ground combat. This dichotomy challenges essentialist concepts like the transparent battlefield. Belief that movement of any kind on or behind the front line in modern warfare cannot be hidden from drones is unsubstantiated. Surprise is difficult in Ukraine but often achieved — see, for example, Kursk 2024. And drone countermeasure technology and proliferation are in their infancy — a rebalancing should be expected. This cycle of measure, countermeasure, counter-countermeasure, and so on, is an enduring feature of warfare.

It is a logical fallacy to assume that trends of any kind are irreversible, and it is unwise to bet on a future military force predicated on the idea that drones, or AI, or any other technology has or will indelibly change either the character or nature of warfare. Those kinds of forecasts have been made repeatedly since at least the end of the 19th century and have repeatedly failed to come true. While the forms of weapons, equipment, and technology change over time, their functions in land warfare remain generally consistent: Find the enemy, launch things to destroy him or force him to quit, and move to, seize, and hold terrain. War does not revolt — it evolves unevenly in function even as its form remains fairly consistent over time.

Working from this evidence-driven, tempered, evolutionary, and long-term view of at least land warfare, the idea of a flexible, full-spectrum, middleweight Marine Corps is appealing.

Force Design As It Is

This all brings us back to Force Design. Berger’s plan set in motion two important alterations to the structure of the Marine Corps, one additive and one broadly reductive. It added — or to be fair, adapted — the stand-in force in the form of a new Marine littoral regiment while sharply reducing service-wide combined arms combat power. Together these two changes feed into the unresolved conceptual change that underwrites the recommendations I make in Part 3 of this series.

A Marine littoral regiment is a highly modified version of the standard Marine infantry regiment. Revolving around a single infantry battalion, the new regiment is designed to break down into discrete platoon-sized teams with attached anti-ship and anti-air missiles, advanced sensors, cyber, and other high-technology capabilities. Its central purpose appears to be to deter and deny adversary operations in the littoral space, which generally equates to an area from the shoreline out to roughly 200 nautical miles. Platoons that effectively compose the stand-in force are designed to operate stealthily in order to survive what is described as a “mature precision strike regime.”

Critics of the Marine littoral regiment and the stand-in force question the ability of these units to remain unseen and to survive in a high-threat environment. I share those concerns. In a conflict with China, it seems likely that the Chinese will either ignore these platoons because they do not pose a significant threat, or they will find and destroy them because they do pose a threat. However, Marines are likely to die in any wartime scenario. Even if they are spotted and are killed, they may still have helped deter and deny maritime space to some extent. In this way, the stand-in force is a highly risky but reasonable capability in a Chinese context. Risk is probably no higher than in a combined arms ground fight with a People’s Liberation Army Ground Force unit.

It is not clear, however, that the Marine littoral regiment would be broadly useful outside of the Far East Asian maritime context. Successful operations and exercises in the European theater under Task Force 61/2 show that some of these concepts and capabilities could be applied against a Russian threat. But no aspect of Force Design has really been tested in combat. Some advanced missiles and other technologies that underpin the stand-in force remain on the drawing board or are still undergoing experimental testing. This is all normal for a new, experimental design. But hard, lingering questions about capability and mission alignment counsel against broader extrapolation and force change.

A less tangible but equally relevant concern with the Marine littoral regiment is the lack of a compelling mission statement. Historically, the mission of a Marine infantry regiment has been unflinchingly direct: Locate, close with, and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver, or repel the enemy’s assault by fire and close combat. While even that wording is now a bit fuzzier, the mission of the Marine littoral regiment appears to be to “persistently operate” in a support role to the Joint Force, providing a menu of possible missions it might undertake. Nebulous language like this exacerbates concerns over the regiment’s purpose and, therefore, over the larger purpose of the Marine Corps. This is one of several issues that can be addressed with easy, no- or low-cost adjustments.

Reduction in the service’s combined arms combat power is a greater concern than the adoption of a modified regiment. Paying for Force Design out of hide required steep cuts in weapons, equipment, and personnel. Tanks were eliminated, cannon artillery was reduced by more than two-thirds of its existing strength, planned investment in the F-35 program — a huge and controversial budget hog — was also reduced, and three infantry battalions were cut. A new amphibious combat vehicle with a light 30mm cannon was acquired to simultaneously replace aging amphibious assault vehicles, light armored vehicles, and tanks.

All of these cuts objectively reduced both the quantity and quality of firepower and ground footprint the Marine Corps will be able to contribute to a joint combined-arms fight. According to Marine Corps doctrine, combat power is the total destructive force a unit can bring to bear on an enemy at a given time. By this standard, reducing available artillery, armored direct fire systems, and air-to-surface fires without commensurate and proven replacements reduces at least ground combat power within any task-organized Marine fighting unit.

Unresolved Dichotomies

These combat power cuts helped pay for Force Design, but they also amount to self-inflicted wounds. They created an enduring set of dichotomies that drag down arguments for sustaining the Marine Corps as a service. While the Navy has moved to acquire four new amphibious ships, central concepts in Force Design and weakened combat power in the Marine air-ground task force challenge the core rationale for an amphibious fleet. Why build and sustain a fleet of ships designed to fight in an environment that renders those ships irrelevant? Why maintain amphibious ships and large combat divisions to support an assault the Marine Corps seems to be avoiding? And how can the Corps simultaneously cut manpower to pay for Force Design while also seeking out more global missions that require more troops?

Acquisition of the amphibious combat vehicle exemplifies this confusing mix of arguments and capabilities. Force Design applies the concept of a maritime, or ship-on-ship, missile-on-ship precision strike regime to ground combat. In this mindset, anything that moves on the modern battlefield can be seen and destroyed by precision strike. As the Ground Combat Database shows, this all incorrectly assumes that weapons like first-person video drones will render heavy, armored vehicles irrelevant, and that traditional weapons like direct fire cannons will have little use in modern warfare.

But the amphibious combat vehicle is a big, highly visible, lightly-armored vehicle. It will carry 13 marines behind what will necessarily be a light (read: thin) protective shell. It appears to have no built-in counter-drone systems. Its 30mm cannon will not provide beyond-line-of-sight firepower and is more likely to annoy than kill an enemy tank. That matters because main battle tanks were used in nearly 70 percent of the ground battles I reviewed, and they remain in common use in 2025 on every major battlefield including in Ukraine, Syria, Gaza, Yemen, Sudan, Lebanon, and Myanmar. China may have more than 7,000 tanks in service.

If the Marine Corps intended to avoid ground combat entirely, then the amphibious combat vehicle might be useful for bringing Marines ashore for stealthy advanced base operations. But it is not at all a stealthy platform, so it seems ill suited for that role, too. This poor fit scales up to service level. Simultaneously applying Force Design while retaining a large but weakened combined arms force suggests the Marine Corps is trying to have it both ways with a force that may be unready for either way. All the dichotomies above culminate in a central problem with Force Design as it was intended and as it has been applied: The Marine Corps as it exists in 2025 is inexplicable.

Risks of An Inexplicable Force

In my last article, I argued that the Marine Corps was losing the battle for public relevance. If it is true that America does not need a Marine Corps, and that the Marine Corps only exists as long as it inspires popular support, then the Marines need a clear, straightforward, and inspiring justification for existence. While the stand-in force may indeed be a viable tactical concept, the broad — even if unfair — impression of a stand-in force of small teams of missile, cyber, drone, and radar technicians hiding on remote islands is entirely uninspiring.

Effective concept language conveys both practical intent and broader purpose. “Stand-in force” is intended to mean a force that stands to fight within (stand-in) the Chinese missile danger zone instead standing off safely out of range. But that meaning is not immediately clear and its vagueness is not compelling. Even when the meaning of “stand-in” is clarified, the idea of standing in unintentionally conveys an un-marine-like inertness that sharply contrasts with the hyper-violent task of locating, closing with, and destroying the enemy with fire or repelling assaults with close combat. When various efforts to end the Marine Corps in the 20th century surfaced, Marine leaders could always count on some impassioned public support to help save them. But no American is going to scream bloody murder for more stand-in forces.

On the other end of the spectrum, the Marine Corps has retained a large combined arms combat force that has little artillery and no tanks, works from ships that the Marine Corps itself sometimes (but, confusingly, not always) argues are barely survivable in modern warfare, and (in some of its public-facing documentation) embraces a bleeding-edge understanding of combat that, if true, would obviate its own existence.

And selling the Marine Corps on its warfighting capabilities is difficult when arguments for Force Design remain predicated on the idea that the Marine Corps is not America’s second land army, even when it clearly has been and continues to be a three combined arms division-capable second land army that is also amphibious. A Marine Corps predicated on seemingly irreconcilable dichotomies is not a Marine Corps that America needs or necessarily wants.

A Viable Middle Ground For a Middle-Ground Force

The good news is that a middle ground always lies between any dichotomy, and the middle ground is all the more viable when the dichotomies are exaggerated and repairable. Critiques in Part 1 and 2 of this series are intended to strip away presently unhelpful debate over Force Design to get to some positive recommendations.

In my next article in this series, I will offer clear, viable options for existing amphibious assets. Some positive adjustments to Force Design are already underway. A special operations capable Marine expeditionary unit was rebuilt in an effort to wedge the Marine Corps back into the global crisis response mission, embracing its historic middleweight role. The Marine littoral regiment can fight if needed, even if it is not yet up to intended capability. And we can consider “stand-in force” a stand-in name for what could be an even more aggressive, and therefore more compelling, actualization of the expeditionary advanced base force concept. A hint to effective rebranding sits in plain sight in the littoral regiment’s existing mission set.

More importantly, the heart and soul of the Marine Corps — its infantry battalions — remain strong, capable, and available. Since war has not fundamentally changed, strong, capable infantry have not been rendered irrelevant. In fact, infantry were the most consistent component in all 423 cases in my study: As I noted above, both sides employed infantry one-hundred percent of the time in all cases. No ground was taken or retained without infantry fighting onto an objective or holding fast. Past is not prologue, but longstanding and unaltered trends in ground combat suggest the United States will need reliable Marine combined arms infantry for the foreseeable future.

Ben Connable, Ph.D., is a retired Marine officer, executive director of the nonprofit Battle Research Group, adjunct professor at Georgetown University, adjunct principal research scientist at the Center for Naval Analyses, and the author of Ground Combat: Puncturing the Myths of Modern War.

Image: U.S. Marine Corps