On Thursday, the Marine Corps launched its first-ever Marine Coastal Regiment — a new unit that may already be worrying US near-colleagues.
“Opponents don’t like this concept at all,” General Eric Smith, the assistant commander of the Marine Corps, told reporters during a briefing on Monday. “They don’t like the fact that units are very mobile, that they have a low signature and the opponent doesn’t know where these things are.”
The new 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment will be headquartered out of Marine Corps Base Hawaii and is based on the current 3rd Marine Regiment.
Designed from potentially thousands of hours of war games, the new unit will become the flagship formation that will see the Corps enter the post-Global War on Terror era.
Standup of Marine littoral regiment will usher in new equipment in Pacific theater
But not everyone is sold on the new concept or buying the total confidence of the Marine Corps for fear that these units could hit potential enemies.
“It was as if they had entered the minds of our adversaries,” Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel and current senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told the Marine Corps Times.
“I think it would be more correct to say, ‘In our war games, the Chinese player finds it very difficult to track down these platoons,’ Cancian said.
Go unnoticed
The new Coastal Regiment will consist of three elements: a Coastal Combat Team ― consisting of one infantry battalion and one missile battery that can potentially sink ships, a Coastal Defense Battalion and a Combat Logistics Battalion.
The coastal combat team will be able to deploy in larger-sized platoon elements, depending on the mission, ranging from 75 to more than 100 Marines, Smith told reporters.
The Marine Corps wants to use those teams to create and occupy forward-thinking expedition bases widely scattered across the coastal areas of future combat.
Those Marines can launch cyber-attacks, spot targets, and possibly even sink or destroy large enemy ships.
Despite its firepower, the Corps hopes that the unit’s small size and dispersed nature will keep it undetected by enemy sensors for an extended period of time, while the unit’s mobility will allow it to run unscathed once the enemy stumbles upon it.
Ultimately, the corps will have three coastal regiments, all stationed within III Marine Expeditionary Force, Smith said Monday.
The Marine Corps has been experimenting with the formations and tactics the regiment will beg for since the release of Marine Corps Commander Gen. David Berger’s Force Design 2030 in 2020.
Smith said it was those tests that showed how concerned the enemy is about the new formation of the Marine Corps.
“We’re talking about an organization of 75 Marines … who are naturally mobile and have the capacity to shut down a network to attack an enemy warship and then disappear and move again,” it said. Smith. “Opponents hate that because they don’t have effective control over the opponent’s plan.”
Smith said he couldn’t provide details on how that information was collected or assessed because it was classified.
‘It’s all very sensible’
The Marine Corps’ reluctance to publicly provide data on Force Design 2030 testing has led some to be skeptical of the Corps’ claim that potential adversaries are trembling in their shoes.
“The Marine Corps states that the war games support their concept and maybe they do, but it’s not evident,” Cancian said.
But not everyone is equally pessimistic.
Dakota Wood, a retired Marine and current senior researcher for the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, told the Marine Corps Times, “It’s not 100% guaranteed, but I think a lot of intellectual effort went into it.”
“I think these newly derived solutions will be applicable to a range of tactical scenarios,” Wood said.
Cancian agrees that the Marine Corps needs to modernize and shift its focus to nearby threats like China.
But the retired Marine pointed out that this was the first major introduction to the Marine Corps war-fighting concepts during peace since helicopters were introduced between World War II and the Korean War.
While the Corps has gone through significant changes since the late 1940s, most of those changes stemmed from weaknesses exposed on battlefields and were tested almost immediately in the fires of war.
Force Design 2030, on the other hand, has been developed and tested through simulations and field exercises that allow the Marine Corps to make its own assumptions about the enemy’s capabilities.
“It’s very good that the Marine Corps is leading them,” Cancian said. “It’s all very sensible, but no one from the outside has any view of it.”
Wood acknowledged that it’s possible that confirmation bias makes its way into the Marine Corps analysis process.
He noted that it is important for the Marine Corps and outside observers to constantly question these studies and experiments to ensure they hold up. But from his standpoint, the Marine Corps seems to be heading in the right direction.
While he didn’t provide much detail, Smith said the Corps is constantly listening to small unit leaders who take Marines through these exercises to find out what works and what doesn’t.
“We’re constantly adjusting the exact size of an infantry battalion, the exact number of missiles a unit must carry, to match our logistical capabilities, the exact signature they will put,” Smith said.
“Those things are constantly moving, but our main direction hasn’t changed at all and every bit of analysis we have comes back and says, ‘The opponents don’t like what you’re doing at all,'” Smith said.
