In response to the Chinese Communist Party’s global military expansion, the U.S. military is adjusting the Marines’ strategic tactics to make amphibious assault from sea to land a core priority. The new Marine mission includes conducting reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance of Chinese Communist forces from waters close to the Chinese coast and working closely with regional allies to deter Chinese Communist coercion.
U.S. media “Washington Times” 21 said, Marine Corps Commandant General David Berger (David Berger) 20 in the U.S. Army magazine wrote that the U.S. military is developing and adjusting the strategic tactics of the Marine Corps, and seek to work closely with local allies to deal with future military conflict with the Chinese Communist Party.
The new Marine mission will include reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance of CCP military activities from waters close to the Chinese coast and working with regional allies to deter CCP coercion. From international waters, the Marines would operate ashore for short periods of time with local allies and partners, thereby reducing the need for heavy ground forces or large land-based aviation units.
During a conflict with the CCP, Marine Corps forces in the engagement area, according to the article, will have a continuous presence in key waters and will seek to deter and counter non-lethal acts of coercion and other malicious activities by the CCP against U.S. allies, partners and other interest groups.
The Chinese Communist Party’s rapidly developing long-range precision strike missiles and weapons make it easier to attack land bases, Berger said. And large U.S. naval vessels are now vulnerable to new Communist anti-ship ballistic attacks, so a light, self-reliant, highly mobile maritime expeditionary force would be close to and take up positions off China’s coast.
Berger noted that the maritime expeditionary force would be an indispensable force for military commanders, providing vital support for finding and tracking high-value targets such as the CCP military’s reconnaissance platforms, reconnaissance forces, and other CCP command, control, communications, computer, network, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting systems.
In addition, Marines floating at sea would more readily target these systems with missiles and other weapons, and provide cues for naval and other military forces to form highly lethal naval and combined firepower kill chains.
The article argues that the new mission will be controversial among the Marines and the U.S. military as a whole because it appears to go against the traditional role of the Marines as an amphibious combat force, but it is necessary to realign the Marines’ tactical strategy in the face of a potential war with the Chinese Communist Party.
In October and November 2020, U.S. exercises with the Navy’s Seventh Fleet stationed in Japan saw Marines and Japanese soldiers simulate the capture of two islands near Okinawa, practicing the installation of mobile artillery rocket launchers that could be used to target enemy ships.
At the time, Berger requested more powerful weapons for the Marines, including Tomahawk cruise missiles against enemy ships.
Gen. Kyle Ellison, deputy commander of the 3rd Marine Expeditionary Force in Okinawa, said the Marines are working with the Navy and the Japanese Marines to experiment with ways to fight in a decentralized force with a broad battlefield.
“It’s not easy, it’s complex, and it takes practice,” he said. “We’re doing it every day.”
In December 2020, the U.S. and Japanese militaries conducted their annual computer simulation exercise, which included coordinating a decentralized Marine Corps command and control center during a conflict.
On Jan. 3, the Wall Street Journal reported that Dakota Wood, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington, D.C., said the situation has been fundamentally altered by the Communist Party’s development of advanced weapons such as hypervelocity missiles, unmanned aircraft systems and robots.
The report said the Marines are preparing for a larger and more sophisticated enemy than extremists in the Middle East and Afghanistan, which has been the focus of operations in recent years, in response to Chinese Communist military forces, including military satellites, cyber warfare capabilities, artificial intelligence and more.
The U.S. diplomatic and security journal The National Interest revealed in March that the U.S. Marine Corps is undergoing a massive transformation from a “Second Army” to a naval power projection extension in the Pacific, one part of which is preparing to hunt Chinese ships and aircraft carriers.
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