USNI Proceedings – As the Marine Corps faces new challenges, it should heed lessons from the past on guiding innovation.

War Zone – A recent exercise on and around the Japanese island of Okinawa featured U.S. Marines armed with FIM-92 Stinger shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles riding in rubber rafts. This offers a look into how the Marine Corps might incorporate short-range air defense capabilities into their new distributed and expeditionary warfighting plans.

USNI News – The Marine Corps’ 20-year odyssey to replace its 1970s-era amphibious vehicle has hit more than a few roadblocks, but after months of operational testing, the service says the new Amphibious Combat Vehicle program is on its way to joining the fleet in earnest.

USNI News – Ongoing testing and experimentation are proving the Marine Corps can be more lethal even while being lighter and more maneuverable, as the service evolves to support littoral operations under its Force Design 2030 plan.

Marine Corps Times – Throughout the next decade the Marine Corps may create as many as three Marine littoral regiments, all based in the Pacific to keep a continued presence to deter China.

USNI Blog – If Light Amphibious Warships are sailing, Light Amphibious Warship protection is needed.

Marine Times – The reviews are in for the Marine Corps’ newest amphibious vehicle and they are not good.

USNI News – The Marine Corps plans to officially form the new unit designed to execute its island-hopping strategy in the Indo-Pacific next fiscal year.

USNI News – The Navy and Marine Corps are quickly seeking new ideas that allow Marines to support the Navy in sea control and other maritime missions, including the rapid acquisition of a light amphibious ship and a movement toward using Marine weapons while at sea.

Sea Power – The U.S. Marine Corps general in charge of the U.S. Navy’s expeditionary warfare directorate said the Navy is looking at options to increase the lethality of its amphibious warfare ships with a containerized weapon system.

National Interest – James Holmes says the U.S. Marine Corps sensibly asked for Tomahawk cruise missiles for its strategy to fight the Chinese Navy in case of war. Why then did Congress say no?

USNI Proceedings – The amphibious ships that transport the U.S. Marine Corps to hostile shores have undergone major changes over the past 80 years. In World War II, the fleet transformed from a force of hastily converted civilian commercial vessels to an armada of thousands of mass-produced ships and boats in a matter of months. The Cold War saw amphibious ships change radically to incorporate new landing craft technology, while post–Cold War types consolidated and grew larger. Today’s fleet is on the cusp of yet another transformation, with planners again eyeing small ships to survive war with a near-peer competitor in the Pacific.

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.