Does America need to maintain the Marines?

Great Debates
101

Marines are special infantry. Sure, they can have a special mission or whatever. But are people seriously saying that all army units have the same weaponry and missions?

Also, this warm branch brotherhood sound weird to me. Don’t army regiments in the US hate each other? If a bunch of drunk black and red berets meet in a bar, are they going to punch each other less bitterly than Saddam’s guard?

In addition to Alessans benefits I’d add common recruitement: if who goes to marines was decided by boot camp personnel and not by recruiters sirene talent, the elite marines could potentially get better soldiers.

I think the US system has worked way better than the Nazi one, but same problems are always lurking when having many types of infantry organizations. It has to lead some competition. On regimental pride level this is beneficial, but inside staff its detrimental.

102

I just find it odd that you have an Airborne battalion on a hill in Afghanistan, and on the next hill over, you might have a Marine battalion with the same mission but with a different chain of command, different doctrine, different training, different equipment, different weapons and different uniforms. It just doesn’t make sense.

103

If the Navy took over the function, they’d probably develop a amphibious force and end up exactly where they are with the USMC.

God help the USMC if the Army ever got hold of them.

104

America needs to maintain the Marines because they are older than America itself, and they know it.

The Corps is an organization with a very particular and tenacious philosophy: all warrior, all the time. If Uncle Sam stops giving the orders, they don’t just become peaceful citizens: they look for other ways to be warriors.

I say keep 'em inside the tent, not peeing anywhere until we grant Head Call.

105

Yeah, that Drew Carrey really has been racking up a head count.

106

An individual SEAL can probably do what an individual Marine could do but so can a Ranger or Air Force Scout, but there are only about 1000 Seals and 2000 rangers, there are 200,000 Marines. If you want to get into a pissing contest about which sub-sub-subgroup has the most badass people then fine btu even if we got rid fo the marine corps, we would have to recreate their function somewhere else.

107

SEALs and other Special Forces units have a very different set of missions than the Marines, specifically in regard to counterterrorism, covert or deniable operations in low intensity conflicts, and psyops. It isn’t a question of which is “more badass” than the other, but the training, mission, and TOE of different operating units to support a range of missions.

The US Marine Corps is, for lack of a better term, a beachhead force intended for quick, semi-autonomous operations at or behind enemy lines. Because they are associated with the Department of the Navy, they can perform some types of operations that the Army cannot legally perform, and their support from within the Department of the Navy and their general TOE provide a more integrated logistical capability. The Army is historically a larger, less mobile but larger and more functional force, intended to maintain a long-standing presence in military excursions. While the Army has become more focused and is certainly capable of amphibious landing operations, the Marines are still a more responsive force, and with a mission specifically focused on combat operations, as opposed to logistics, infrastructure support, strategic intelligence gathering and interpretation, et cetera.

It would make more sense to recombine the Air Force with the Army than to deprecate the Marines.

Stranger

108

I will have to have a long talk with my brother about this when he comes home again, but I have always been under the impression that the Marines were essentially shock troops, designed to hit and hit hard, establish that beach head (beach not necessary, but the principal remains) and hold it until the Army could reinforce and bring up the heavier gear.
The problem is that his idea, and this doctrine, was refurbished for WW2, and we have not been fighting a WW2 style war in some time. And we may never again.

So, since there are no islands to land on, the Marines are being used in the same essential fashion as the Army. Eventually this will lead to a changing of Marine Corps doctrine, I am sure, but I have no idea what that will be.

One downside to this is that because the Marines are being used as Infantry, they are “having” to develop their own support vehicles and equipment, to maintian their sense of “otherness” in regards to the guys fighting a few blocks over. MRAP’s, for example, were originally a Marines thing, but have since been co-opted by the Army as well.

We are eventually going to have to tear down our OOB’s and rebuild them from the ground up for the modern battle field.

109

This has already happened, at least twice since WWII.

The Marines are not infantry; they are a lightweight combined arms force, incorporating air power, light armor, artillery, and amphibious capability along with mechanized and conventional infantry, designed from the ground up to require minimal logistical support. That techniques and equipment adopted by the Marines are eventually used by other services does not mean that the Marines are obsolete, any more than Xerox PARC should be disbanded in favor of Microsoft and Apple. The Marines often utilize evolutions of older but well-proven equipment in favor of the larger and more elaborate weapon development programs in the Army and Air Force. As a result, they have fewer novel issues with equipment design flaws or logistical hiccups, and deploy using battle proven plans and procedures.

Stranger

110

I don’t think that there’s “hatred” between different regiments. (I was Navy, so take my opinion with a small grain of salt.)

With the Marines, they rotate to a new duty station after every few years, so no deep and abiding love for a regiment (as opposed to individual coworkers, whom they may make life long friendships with) developes. I assume the Army and Air Force also rotates its folks around.

(The purpose of duty station rotation is to provide an individual service member with a broader experience to learn from, as well as making their own possibly unique experiences available to others, making for more well rounded people.)

Also, having a change of scenery might be better for morale. :slight_smile: I can’t imagine serving 16+ years on the same ship.

111

Doh! Thanks!

Nah, you give me too much credit. I’m clumsy, not subtle.

112

Ther’re not THAT different. If you replaced a marine with a Seal, you probably wouldn’t miss a beat. I can’t think of anything a Marine can do that a Seal cannot do. SEALs, Delta Force, Rangers, etc. have MORE training than regular marines its not really different training is it?

The point is that you couldn’t train 200K Seals because there aren’t 200K soldiers that would make the cut without diluting the capability of a Seal team. Same for Delta Force, Army Rangers.

I agree that general assessments of badassery are silly considering that there are different ways to measure badassery. Still I think its easy to say that special forces are generally more badass than regular forces.

I don’t think it makes sense to deprecate either the Air Force or the Marines.

113

As usual Stranger is right on. I will take issue with your statement that the Marines tend to rely more on tried and true equipment vs whiz bang equipment though.

The fucking Osprey is a colossal balls up, although I’m not entirely sure if that wasn’t forced upon them or not.

114

It absolutely IS different training. Fighting covertly with six other guys is a lot different than fighting a major battle with hundreds. Rangers are probably the closest on your list to Marines and they’re completely different.

Here’s the story, based on 5 years of experience in the Army:

The weight/height chart you linked to is what you have to weigh in order to bypass the body fat percentage requirement, which is the real standard. For the weights given, an acceptable body fat percentage is presumed. If you weigh over, you get “taped”, or measured around the neck and waist. Those measurements, combined with your height and weight, are good enough for the Army at calculating body fat percentage. (I’m pretty sure females are measured elsewhere, I think arms and thighs?) For 17-22 year old males, the standard is 20%, and it goes up a couple of points every few years as you get older. If you “bust tape” as it’s called, you get counseling and go on remedial PT. Then you have to get weighed and taped again several weeks later.

The thing is, this can go on for a while before the Army will initiate separation, depending a lot on the commander’s discretion and whether the soldier is making progress or is valuable in other respects (such as being really good at his job). Another thing to consider is that there’s usually one junior NCO in charge of weighing and taping, with the soldier’s squad leader or some other witness to confirm the measurements. If they like you and want you to stay with the unit, or if you’re about to deploy and they need bodies to fill out the roster, they can tell you to suck in your gut, pull that tape really tight, and really fudge the measurements. You also sit your head low on your shoulders and puff your neck out like a frog, and they hold the tape really loose. This way you can get very fat people to come out with unbelievably low body fat measurements. There’s also the possibility of outright lying on the forms, recording whatever numbers correspond to an acceptable body fat percentage.

The guy in the linked pictures is an extreme case, but I saw several soldiers in the same BMI stratosphere when I was in.

115

As a general rule, the Marines tend to use older equipment (the AH-1 Cobra versus the AH-64 Apache, the LAV-25 rather than the problematic M2 Bradley FV, et cetera) and battle-proven strategies. As a mindset, a Marine is a rifleman first and a specialty second, which gets them a reputation for being dumb as a box of rocks (a sometimes not inaccurate representation) but also trained with the mindset of being a warrior rather than a broom-pusher. The V-22 Osprey was forced on the Marine Corps (and Air Force) after the Army backed out despite initially boosting the program as a cross-service multi-functional transport.

Stranger

116

So are you saying that if you dropped a Ranger or Delta Force guy into a marine unit to do what marines do, they wouldn’t have the training to accomplish their mission?

117

You’re missing the point. It isn’t about the individual training of the soldier or marine; it is the function of the unit, and what their TOE and their distribution of MOS. Army Rangers are an advance fighting force; their job is to drop in behind enemy lines, disrupt logistical lines, and provide advance recon for a succeeding major infantry or combined arms assault.

The Marines are similar in that their job is to drop, swim, or roll into the maw of the enemy to secure entry points and provide deep reconnaissance, but they do so with less logistics and planning, potentially for an extended period of time. Although the Marines necessarily specialize in amphibious entry, there hasn’t been much call for this in recent conflicts, and so their mission overlaps some with Rangers and other Special Forces. However, the Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) is an almost completely self-conatined unit both in terms of logistics and fire support, and so can get on station and maneuver much more quickly than the more logistically complex integrated units like the 75th Ranger Infantry Regiment, which is dependent upon Air Force support for transportation and air support.

Units like 1SOFD-D and Navy DEVGRU (colloquially but inaccurately known as “Delta Force” or “SEAL Team Six” respectively) are known as Special Mission Units that obtain special training, weapons, and equipment and are specifically tasked to counterterrorism, deep penetration extended reconnaissance and sabotage, and a variety of deniable and covert operations. While these are drawn from the ranks of Rangers, UDUs, Marine Force & Division Recon, et cetera, they have peculiar training and support. You may be excused for thinking them all to be interchangeable between units and with standard Airborne and other elite conventional forces as the same mentality exists at the command level, often leading to these units being inappropriately deployed for the wrong kind of conflict. (See Pete Blaber’s The Mission, The Men, And Me for a devastating account for how this philosophy resulted in hideous miscalculations during Operation Anaconda.)

And if you drop a Ranger or SEAL into a Marine unit, he’s going to get chewed up and spit out, regardless of his battlefield skills, which highlights a point, to wit that military units are not trained, equipped, and deployed as a mob of individuals; each unit is a fighting element which moves, fights, and dies all of a piece. The Marines have a particular function, and while many techniques and functions of the Marines are duplicated in other services, no service integrates a self-contained fighting element like a MEU that can be deployed with the same degree of speed and decisiveness.

Stranger

118

I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said so far. I’m not an expert on this stuff and it sounds like you are at least an amateur buff of this sort of stuff (I knew that DEVGRU was Seal Team 6 but thats about the outer edge of my knowledge) but I was responding to the point that some of these elite special forces couldn’t do what Marines do, not as a group but on the individual level.

How so? What is it that he will not be able to do?

I definitely don’t think different special forces are interchangable but I do think that you can take a Delta or Seal and plop them in a Marine Platoon and they will be able to do anything the other marines are doing.

119

Which is the point. I have no doubt that a Delta or DEVGRU operator could keep up with a Recon Marine, both physically and mentally, and has well more than the basic weapons and battlefield skills that a marine has. However, the Marines (moreso than any other service, IMHO) are tasked, trained, and equipped to operate as a self-contained complete battle unit at the MEU level. Doing this takes more training and is more expensive, and also requires a very strong NCO corps and esprit de corps mentality that maintains the skill set. It isn’t really feasible to maintain the other forces in this fashion, nor is it really suitable to do so.

The Marines are also warriors first, and their MOS second. “Every Marine is a rifleman (even the women)” isn’t just a motto; it is damned close to reality. While it is quite possible in some technical MOS to get to the O-5 or even O-6 level without commanding a front-line battle unit in the other services, I don’t think it is possible to promote above captain in the Marine Corps without having rotated through command a battle unit in infantry, armor, artillery, et cetera. This doesn’t make the Marines better for any job; they aren’t set up for protracted logistics or a lot of quasi-diplomatic operations. if you want to come in and set up logistical operations in preparation for some nation-building exercise, there is no one better than the Army to roll in, inflate a tent city capable of supporting 50,000 people, and start handing out candy and soda before the dust settles, there is no one better than the US Army, and they can take down and haul out just as quickly. But if you want an expoding pizza hand delivered to Central Ethnicstrifia in thirty days or less, you call the Marines, because while the Army is still negotiating two hundred C-17 flights and submitting their AF 1199s, the Marines are on the ground, plowing through enemy territory, and bragging to one another what they did to each others’ mothers before deployment.

What an individual soldier, sailor, or marine can do is not at issue. Individual skills and competencies only come into play at the squad level. The ability of a unit is based upon its TOE, its distribution of MOS, and the roles it has trained to perform. Nobody else does specifically what the Marines do, nor are the other services institutionally capable of taking on that type of role as their main function in life.

Stranger

120

This is the old “walking robot” debate, where people debate endlessly about the “need” for a specific military technology when the actual argument amounts to “I think we should fund it because it is really cool.”