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Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series of three articles on the U.S. Marine Corps. The first article was published on June 16, 2025, and the second article was published on June 19, 2025.

Commandant Eric Smith clearly articulated his vision for the future of the Marine Corps: While retaining focus on the China threat, the service will recenter on global crisis response. This means getting more marines — and more of their combat gear — on ship and deployed around the world. Smith believes marines should be America’s premier 9-1-1 force, just like they were before the “Global War on Terror.” But as I pointed out in the first two parts of this series, he faces some daunting challenges. Recentering the Marine Corps on crisis response will require more than just “re-bluing,” or getting marines back on globally deployed Navy ships.

Recentering on crisis response demands on-hand combat power to respond to at least any mid-range crisis, including land war. It means rethinking the Force Design approach to ground combat power and finding creative workarounds to the lack of available amphibious shipping. It requires some rebranding of the stand-in force and of the Marine Corps more broadly. Much of this recommended recentering is more about changing missions and altering perceptions than about buying gear.

Recentering also opens up some great opportunities. Marines can take charge of mostly abandoned mid-range irregular warfare missions like counterinsurgency and partnered, combat unit to combat unit foreign internal defense operations. And recentering allows the Marine Corps to take on out of area, high risk competition missions against China, Russia, and other adversaries — these missions fit almost perfectly within the Marine Corps’ existing capability set.

All change has a cost. In early 2024, then-Lt. Gen. Karsten Heckl was asked how the Marine Corps would balance Force Design and crisis response. He replied, “Whenever anybody uses the term ‘balance’ I automatically start thinking about money.” Maintaining this fiscally responsible mindset is essential to the success of any proposed service-wide change: The cheaper the change, the more feasible it will be. My proposed changes are designed to be no- or low-cost, or at least relatively low cost compared to large programs in other services.

Rebalancing to Crisis Response

Gen. Smith argues that the Marine Corps has let its afloat crisis response capability “atrophy.” I and many other marines would agree. The Marine Corps probably hit its stride on crisis response from the mid-1970s through the 1990s. In 1986 the Marine Corps started describing itself as “America’s 911 force,” or emergency on-call force in readiness. It provided crisis response primarily from its omnipresent rotations of Marine expeditionary units, each of which could put ashore a Marine combined arms task force centered on an infantry battalion of nearly 1,000 marines to fight for at least 15 days without reinforcement.

I described these units in the first part of this series. Working from ships, marines conducted most of the nation’s noncombatant evacuation and humanitarian crisis response missions through the 2000s. And they assaulted enemy objectives from the sea in the 1991 Gulf War, bombed targets in Kosovo in 1999, seized ground in Afghanistan in 2001, interdicted pirates off the African coast from 2007-2008, and executed counterinsurgency missions in Iraq throughout the 2000s. Even when operating from single Navy ships, the Marine expeditionary units presented a constant, looming threat that contributed to global competition and deterrence.

By the mid-2000s special operations forces had eaten into the Marines’ crisis response mission. With the Marine Corps’ infantry tied up in Afghanistan and Iraq, amphibious ship availability waning, and efforts to deploy Marines from forward land bases sputtering, Special Operations Command and then the Army picked up the slack. Army leaders have said “yes” to every emerging crisis response mission in the past decade, including in Sudan and Afghanistan. Together, special operations and the Army are now the crisis response forces of choice for national leaders.

But neither Special Operations Command nor the Army have the proven, ready, no land base required, combined arms crisis response capability extant in a Marine expeditionary unit. As long as they can be made physically present (more on this below), marines are still the best option for arguably most global crisis response missions.

At least for now, Marine capacity to fulfill these missions is hobbled by lack of available amphibious shipping to get task force assets where they need to be. I address amphibious shipping below. The Marine Corps’ strategic communications team has already done exactly what was needed to shift the narrative towards crisis response. For example, they moved the done-deal Force Design to a sub-tab on the service’s home page and put crisis response and combat readiness narratives front and center. This 9-1-1, “we do windows” mindset should be amplified at every opportunity.

Re-embracing Irregular Warfare

Following the difficult counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the American public and probably most political and military leaders lost interest in irregular warfare. But irregular warfare — including counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism, stabilization, and foreign internal defense — is a constant and unavoidable necessity if the United States plans to retain its network of global partnerships, its freedom of movement, and its global economic interests. Even now, Americans are supporting low-profile counter-insurgency and counter-terror wars in Syria, Iraq, parts of Africa, the Philippines, and elsewhere.

Irregular warfare is ill-defined and therefore hard to prepare for or to champion. A little-read but important annex to the 2018 National Defense Strategy described irregular warfare as a combination of capabilities and mindset that is particularly well suited to global great power competition. An irregular mindset is a trained and practiced inclination to apply all soft and hard aspects of military power in discrete combinations to deter, shape, and if necessary to defeat adversaries in any context.

Two groups in the American armed forces have this culturally embedded mindset and the capabilities: special operators and the Marines. Together, they have made an excellent irregular warfare team. However, the Marine Corps can operate at a scale of mass above special operations forces and can bring its own self-contained fires and logistics to bear. In contrast, special operations units sometimes (though less frequently now) rely on other forces for support. Marines have a long history of effective irregular warfare operations and are well practiced at integrating with, supporting, or being supported by special operations teams.

I recommend the Marine Corps make a strong bid to be the U.S. military’s mid-scale irregular warfare service of choice. It can do so by explicitly changing the way it describes its capabilities and by matching the new descriptions with some low-cost but substantive investments. Narrative can be shifted within service doctrine and orders, within joint force plans, and with targeted congressional engagement. Marines can still work closely with special operations teams while also taking the low-cost, minimally sustainable lead on standing joint capabilities requirements like counter-insurgency. It will not take much effort to stand back up and sustain a few relevant training and education programs. And if Marine leaders can dig back into the Irregular Warfare Annex, they will find that the Secretary of Defense empowers them to resource, train for, and reimagine irregular warfare in great power competition. This is open running ground.

Reimagining Competition “Out of Area”

Presently, the Marine Corps has focused its capabilities on the China pacing threat around an area generally circumscribed by the nine-dash line, an imaginary delineation of control implied by the Chinese Communist Party. With Task Force 61/2, some efforts have been made to extrapolate the stand-in force capability to other theaters. However, China remains the pacing threat for the Marine Corps and the nine-dash Line remains the focus of attention for the Department of Defense.

But China is also a global power with extensive global economic interests and dependencies. It has purchased, leased, or otherwise imposed itself along the coastline from the western reaches of North Africa through an arc into Southeast Asia. Thus far, these investments and interests have gone mostly unchallenged. China has not had to deploy significant military forces to sustain its Belt and Road program, nor has it had to fight a deployed war. And it has relatively limited capacity to do either.

China is strong along its coastline but gets weaker and weaker the further its forces operate from its homeland sensors, maritime, air, and missile forces. In fact, none of America’s adversaries have a meaningful global power projection capability. So this out of area dynamic also applies to Russia, Iran, North Korea, and other adversaries. Competing with adversaries out of area is an excellent way to apply the great power competition aspects of irregular warfare, to stretch adversaries and, if necessary, to defeat them where they are at their weakest.

Therefore, while the Marine Corps must respond to the joint force requirements within the nine-dash line, they should also make a strong bid for the out of area competition mission. Littoral regiments and Marine support units on Okinawa have the core demand covered in the East and South China Seas. That leaves well over 100,000 other marines available for competition against the same pacing threat out of area.

Out of area competition directly overlaps with forward deployed crisis response and other specific irregular missions like mid-scale foreign internal defense. While risks, authorities, permissions, and directives for these kinds of missions will have to be managed by the White House, combatant commands, and embassies, a special operations capable Marine expeditionary unit or littoral regiment is perfectly aligned to engage in aggressive partnered exercises, freedom of movement operations, demonstrations of force, and other competitive actions targeted at China at a scale that special operations units could not achieve. It is this combination of forward presence, greater risk acceptance, scale, and ready combined arms capability that may help change Chinese (and Russian, etc.) calculus for global power projection and economic control.

Rebuilding Combined Arms Fire Support

I argued in my new book and the second installment in this series that the Force Design reduction in cannon artillery and air-delivered fires had reduced Marine Corps combat power even by the service’s own definition. As long as the Marine Corps fields a potent, combined arms, ground combat fighting capability it will need low-cost, repeatable firepower with the kind of deep magazines that at present only mortars, artillery, and air-delivered munitions can provide. This gap needs to be filled so Marines can maximize their chances to survive and win in ground combat.

Maybe when a full inventory of advanced missiles and strike drones is fielded this fires calculus will change. I do not believe it will, but at least for now the requirement for organic fires stands. This could take the form of more legacy 155mm howitzers and F-35 fighter-bombers. Better yet, the Marine Corps could further cut the outrageously expensive F-35 program, transition its standing air-to-air combat mission to the Navy, and buy quantities of cheaper, lighter, and easier-to-acquire 120mm mortars and a propeller-driven “missile sled” aircraft like the Harvest HAWK or a smaller attack aircraft — yes, even straight-line flying light propeller planes can operate on the modern battlefield. Either way, non-long-range rocket, non-drone fires need to be brought close to pre-Force Design levels to be meaningful, particularly in the dangerous gap period between the divestiture of artillery and the maturation of advanced fires.

Reconsidering Mobile Protected Firepower

Similarly, the Marine Corps needs to revisit its decision to jettison its heavier mobile protected firepower capability. It is safe to assume the big, heavy, and increasingly dated M1 Abrams tank is not coming back. However, as I argued in the second article of this series, the Amphibious Combat Vehicle that now provides firepower to marines fighting ashore is inadequate for ground combat against even a competing middleweight force. Given that the Marine Corps is still a warfighting organization and that heavy, direct firepower still provides significant advantage in war, the Marines need a better organic option.

Some have examined the idea that if marines deploy to a major war they can receive tank support from Army units, just like they did in Fallujah in 2004. However, this reliance on the Army exposes the Marine Corps to two vulnerabilities: It removes tanks from routine ground combat training, making it less likely that marines will fight effectively with tanks even if the Army provides them. And there is no guarantee the Army will be there when needed. A Marine task force is designed to be a self-contained fighting force. It needs to have its own reliable, organic mobile protected firepower or it risks losing battles.

I recommend establishing an experimental mobile protected firepower battalion. This would be a dedicated, perhaps mixed active-reserve, unit that would test, train with, provide training on, and as needed fight with some mix of new vehicles that would supplement the Amphibious Combat Vehicle with heavier fires and survivability. Plenty of options exist including the Swedish CV90120. One could imagine an urban combat engineering vehicle designed specifically to smash its way through walls and buildings, or in more open terrain to flatten bunkers with large caliber explosive rounds. Experiment-driven investments in new or even second-hand vehicles could be made thoughtfully and at reasonable cost.

Reinforcing the Need for Amphibious Lift

In the original Force Design 2030 plan, then-Commandant David Berger identified the need for a fleet of amphibious vessels that would be smaller than the larger Navy amphibious ships, more stealthy, easier to sustain, and ideally far more numerous. These vessels, now called Medium Landing Ships, were intended to move the stand-in force into position and to sustain it in combat. A smaller-vessel acquisition approach would also directly reinforce crisis response flexibility, increase reliable forward presence, and open up a range of new deployment and employment options for Marines operating in places like the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, Baltic Sea, and in other littoral spaces.

Marine leaders rightly argue that the smaller landing ship alone would not allow Marines to sustain a combined arms task force afloat. There will be a continuing need for large-deck amphibious ships into the foreseeable future. The first step here is for Marine leaders to fully jettison the going-in Force Design implication that the so-called mature precision strike regime rendered large-deck amphibs all but unsurvivable in modern warfare. It certainly has made naval operations around the nine-dash line far more dangerous. But as I argued in “A Corps Confounded,” Marines cannot simultaneously argue that amphibious vessels are all but irrelevant and that the Navy needs to maintain a ready fleet of at least 31 irrelevant ships. Amphibious vessels are less survivable near China but still functional and relevant around the rest of the world — out of area — if operated intelligently. New Marine crisis response narratives have this right. The last vestiges of the more extreme Force Design language need to be cut.

Marines need but do not have a constantly present amphibious fleet. This gap is central to the exigent threat to the Marine Corps. At least through early 2025, the Navy has not provided adequate shipping to put Marines where they need to be. So Marine leaders need to increase efforts to adapt. They need to consider more frequently deploying aboard allied amphibious vessels like the French Mistral-class ships. Commercial ship options should be considered. Marines might even team with the Army’s robust, joint-support amphibious fleet at Fort Eustis, Virginia.

In the long term, however, the Marines need full Navy commitment. Some progress towards rebuilding already been made, but it may be inadequate given pending ship retirements. By focusing on out of area great power competition and other irregular warfare activities, the Marine Corps directly increases the working need for active afloat units outside the Indo-Pacific theater. They can use these missions to further influence reluctant Navy leaders to get the amphibious fleet back online, with a mix of medium- and large-deck ships. This can all be fed into a national-level effort to reinvigorate the American shipbuilding industry: Medium Landing Ships and large-deck amphibious ships have a lower barrier to manufacturing entry and per-unit cost than comparable surface combatants.

Rebranding the Stand-in Force

In the previous article in this series I wrote that I found the term “stand-in force” uninspiring and uncharacteristically passive. I understand my opinion is worth one symbolic vote. So, I’m using that vote here to argue the Marine Corps should help reinvigorate popular support by overtly embracing the middleweight force offensive and defensive combat missions. A more characteristically aggressive approach can also help better situate the Marine Corps as a force of choice at the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and across other global commands. Marine leaders should rename the stand-in force concept and recenter it on its most aggressive, most compelling subordinate mission set: seizing and defending advanced bases.

On its face, the Marine littoral regiment, which is the primary formation specifically designed to serve as the core component of stand-in forces, looks to some like it has a passive mission. It stealthily deploys small teams capable of launching missiles, drones, and loitering munitions against enemy ships and aircraft — emphasizing reconnaissance and counter-reconnaisance, precise targeting, and disrupting adversary operations to support broader military objectives. One could easily imagine just about any special operations team from any service doing similar work. What a small special operations team cannot do is violently force its way ashore against even a modestly sized conventional defending force. Nor does it have the organic defensive fires to defend any ground it seizes from a similarly capable attacking force. Marines have the organic capability to do both.

These missions (e.g., conducting offensive and defensive operations, seizing key maritime terrain, etc. ) are buried in a tentative supporting manual for the littoral regiment. They are compelling and, at least in my view, more realistic than pseudo-stealthy platoon-level operations. They open up the possibility of taking terrain away from the Chinese, or the Russians, or another adversary, and holding it for follow-on operations. These more aggressive, violent, combat-focused missions justify the need for a combined arms Marine unit centered on infantry, even for the stand-in-force concept.

The good news? Marine littoral regiment units are already practicing these operations.

I recommend retiring the term “stand-in force” and adopting a term more benefitting the aggressive culture of the Marine Corps — perhaps something like an expeditionary assault force. Whatever term is chosen, it needs to clearly convey the Marine Corps ability to project amphibious combined arms combat power into the enemy’s area of control, and to violently take and hold the enemy’s terrain. All other existing Marine littoral regiment missions would remain unchanged.

A Corps Recentered

All force designs have desired outcomes. In my view, recentering should produce a Marine Corps Americans both need and want. A recentered force delivers on its promise to support the joint force in a prospective war with China within the nine-dash line; makes itself better available for global crisis response; is recommitted to full spectrum operational readiness; and aggressively forces itself into areas and missions intentionally designed to throw adversaries off balance, deny their advantages, and position Marines to win in ground combat. Marines do not seek to replicate either special operations forces or the Army. Marines execute critical mid-scale, irregular warfare missions that no small team of operators could ever hope to accomplish. And Marines defeat small- to mid-sized adversary ground forces alone, or team up with the Army to defeat them en masse.

I fully acknowledge that all recommendations from outsiders are inevitably going to be somewhat or significantly ill-informed or practicably unachievable. Everything I have written in this article series is necessarily imperfect. But we are five years into Force Design. It is time to move on from ugly attacks and defensive groupthink to focus on practical solutions to what look like potentially existential problems for the Marine Corps. I look forward to the professional discussions to follow. I am particularly interested in the responses to the Marine Corps Association’s Rapid Response Essay Contest, which offers an opportunity for authors to propose their design for the Marine expeditionary unit of the (near) future.

Ben Connable, PhD, 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