War on the Rocks – U.S. Special Operations Command should take a keen interest in the modernization efforts of the Marine Corps. They serve as a live-action case study for dramatic organizational change — the sort of change that Special Operations Command may now be expected to enact. The public dialogue among relatively junior marine officers also exemplifies the bottom-up driven debate about the future of the service that the special operations community should seek to emulate. Finally, the Marine Corps’ new concept is likely to require significant special operations support, and the two commands should craft a symbiotic relationship as they compete and prepare for conflict.

1945 – James Holmes writes that the Marine Corps is about to replace its eight-week Rifleman Course for junior infantrymen with a seventeen-week Infantry Marine Course. Some of that extra time will go to . . . chess! 

US Marines – Western conceptions of the international struggle among nations (and other political actors) often use binary war or peace labels to describe it. The actual truth is more complicated. Actors on the world stage are always trying to create a relative advantage for themselves and for their group. Sometimes this maneuvering leads to violence, but the use of violence to achieve goals is more often the exception than the rule. Instead, most actors use other means in their competitive interactions to achieve their goals. The competition continuum encompasses all of these efforts, including the use of violence.

USNI News – The Marine Corps is about to revolutionize infantry training, more than doubling the length of initial training for enlisted infantry Marines and weighing consolidation of its core grunt specialties into a single, all-around infantry warfighter.

War Zone – When it comes to austere operations, the F-35C shows it can do much of what the F-35B can and more as the Marines gear up for a fight in the Pacific.

Defense News – The U.S. Marine Corps is looking to equip its infantry units with a man-portable, swarming loitering munition that experts say is part of its shift toward countering China with a light and deadly seaborne infantry force.

USNI News – Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. David Berger has laid out an idea that, if the Marines are going to pursue their strategy of establishing these EABs to do things like rearming and refueling, air defense and offensive strike, they may as well also help the Navy by searching the local waters for enemy submarines.

Naval News – BAE Systems has delivered the first 8×8 wheeled Amphibious Combat Vehicles (ACV) to the United States Marine Corps’ 1st Marine Division at Marine Corps Base, Camp Pendleton, California in early November.

Task and Purpose – One thing that’s constant through most military organizations is reverence for tradition. The flip side of that, though, is a fear of change

War on the Rocks – The U.S. military is ignoring the fact that someone must lose the much-talked about high-end fight against peer competitors. It might be the U.S. military that loses, and it would then have to retreat, withdraw, or evacuate in the face of enemy fire. U.S. Marine Corps planners working on the service’s new keystone concept of expeditionary advanced base operations should bear this in mind as withdrawals have received short shrift in various official documents on amphibious missions.

USNI News – The Navy and Marine Corps are eyeing a 200- to 400-foot Light Amphibious Warship that would carry about 75 Marines, store as much as 8,000 square feet of kit and cost not much more than $100 million apiece.

Naval News – The U.S. Army has now decided to purchase the U.S. Navy’s Tomahawk cruise missile and the dual-role Standard SM-6 Anti-Air and Anti-Surface/Ship missile and use both for the Long Range Precision Fires (LRPF) priorities. These two U.S. Navy shipboard missiles, now U.S. Army truck-mounted, can also act as Anti-Ship missiles for the U.S. Army or the U.S. Marine Corps.  The Maritime Tomahawk can be used, and the radar-guided Standard SM-6 has an incorporated Surface-to-Surface/Anti-Ship targeting capability, although its 140-pound warhead is much smaller than the 1,000-pound warhead on the Tomahawk missile.

The Diplomat – Alongside exploring conventional options, the Marine Corps must also think out-of-the-box when it comes to meeting EABO logistics requirements.

USNI News – This week a squadron of Marine F-35B Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters wrapped up nearly two months of training aboard the U.K. Royal Navy HMS Queen Elizabeth (R08), paving the way for U.S. and U.K. fighters to operate interchangeably when the British aircraft carrier leaves on its first deployment.

Marine Corps Times – The first shipment of amphibious combat vehicles hit the fleet Nov. 4, according to the Marine Corps.

War Zone – Marines could find themselves searching for and attacking enemy submarines, as well as indirectly supporting other anti-submarine operations.

Marine Corps Times – The Marine Corps wants in on the submarine-hunting game, according to Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger, including the role of helping the Navy identify, track and even sink submarines.

Defense News – With the U.S. military locked in on what it sees as a long-term competition with the People’s Republic of China for ascendency in the Indo-Pacific region, two services seeking to pivot away from heavy ground conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are looking toward missiles as a ticket to relevance in a potential future conflict.

Forbes – On Sept. 20, the U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Navy showed off one tactic that could be critical to the plan. Marines slipped ashore on an uninhabited island near Guam. They picked a target on a military bombing range and relayed the coordinates to a Navy cruiser. Minutes later, a Tomahawk cruise missile slammed onto the range.

Naval News – Peter Ong reports on the Land-Based Anti-Ship Missile (LBASM) options on the table for the USMC and US Army ground forces to use against threatening enemy ships, with the latest from Virtual Modern Day Marine Expo 2020.

Defense News – The way the United States military has had forces arrayed in the Pacific for the last 70 years must change to meet a new threat environment, the US Marine Corps’ top general said Wednesday, arguing that the force must be in more places and spread across a wider area.

Military.com – Marine Corps modernization officials said Tuesday that the service has completed testing of its new amphibious combat vehicle, or ACV, and will begin fielding the replacement to the older amphibious assault vehicle next month, ahead of schedule.

Breaking Defense – The Marine Corps is moving quickly to develop a new kind of infantry unit to challenge Chinese claims on small islands in the Pacific, while the Navy is developing new and smaller ships to move and supply them once they deploy.

Defense News – The U.S. Marine Corps is moving as fast as it can to field a new class of light amphibious warship, but it remains unclear what it will do, where it will be based or what capabilities it will bring to the fight.

Defense News – The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps both say they need expanded surveillance capabilities for a potential fight with China, but the Marines have cut bait on a big, ship-based system that some analysts say would make a big difference for both services.