– War on the Rocks – Military planning documents rarely draw more than a yawn in Washington, but the new Marine Corps Commandant’s Planning Guidance is proving an exception. Crafted by newly appointed Gen. David Berger, it lays out a striking new vision for the Corps — and jettisons a sizable number of long-held Marine articles of faith along the way.

– USNI News – Two months after new Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. David Berger released his commandant’s planning guidance, the Marines charged with plotting how the service will operate in the future showed a glimpse into how the new guidance is shaping their work.

– USNI News – Autonomous control systems developed for the Pentagon’s Sea Hunter unmanned ship could also help keep Marine Corps logisticians out of harm’s way during future amphibious landings.

– War on the Rocks – The Commandant’s Planning Guidance has the potential to radically transform the Marine Corps into a naval expeditionary force that is prepared to operate inside actively-contested maritime spaces in support of fleet operations. Core to Gen. Berger’s vision is the insertion of forces inside an adversary’s weapons engagement zone to provide sea denial and sea control by countering anti-access/area denial systems. Strangely absent from this new guidance, however, is a critical aspect of the Marine Corps ― security cooperation and foreign security force advising.

– War Zone – The bold vision of a USMC that is far less dependent on the lumbering “Gator Navy” comes with a sacrificial offering of the force’s most sacred cow.

– Traditional Right – The new Marine Corps Commandant, General David H. Berger, has issued his Planning Guidance, which gives his commander’s intent for the next four years. As I wrote in my last column, it is a positive, even exciting, document that offers hope the Marine Corps can reshape itself to do what its doctrine of maneuver warfare requires. That said, it also raises questions in several important respects.

– Traditional Right – The new Marine Corps Commandant, General David H. Berger, recently issued his Planning Guidance, a document which states his commander’s intent and sets the direction the Marine Corps will take over the next four years. In this case, it is a remarkable statement which, if turned into effective action, could finally transform the Marine Corps into a military that can do maneuver warfare instead of just talk about it.

– Breaking Defense – Concerns over a new Okinawa airfield, and how to get Marines across vast swaths of ocean, are complicating American plans to spread forces across the Pacific.

– Breaking Defense – The Marine Corps plans to roll out a new modernization plan late next month, putting meat on the bones of the ambitious guidance handed down by new Commandant Gen. David Berger in July that sought to light a fire under the Corps to reorient itself away from traditional ideas of amphibious warfare and COIN.

– War on the Rocks – In the final analysis, expeditionary advanced base operations is a concept designed to exploit geography and contribute to winning a hard war against a nation with military capabilities approaching those of the United States. It gives the American military its best chance to win such a conflict. But, vastly more important, if the United States is prepared to implement this concept, it presents the nation with the best possible chance of deterring a future conflict and preserving the peace.

– Breaking Defense – The Army’s experimental Multi-Domain Task Force tested new tactics for Pacific conflict, hand-in-glove with the Marines, Air Force, and Australians.

– Breaking Defense – “It would be illogical to continue to concentrate our forces on a few large ships,” the new USMC Commandant writes in his new guidance, setting decades of planning on its head. So what’s next?

– USNI News – The deployment of a High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) platoon to Australia has helped the Marine Corps reach the 2,500-Marine presence in Darwin that U.S. and Australian leaders promised in 2011.

– USNI News – Instead of a using an almost-million-dollar Navy missile, Marines splashed a hostile Iranian drone on Thursday for about the cost of a couple of gallons of gas.

– USNI News – New Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. David Berger outlined his largely naval priorities for the Marine Corps, and he’s willing to shed some key tenets of the Marines’ amphibious force planning in recent years – including the demand for 38 amphibious warships to support a 2 Marine Expeditionary Brigade-sized forcible entry force.

– War on the Rocks – Integrated command and control among blue and green forces is essential to ensure lethality. Achieving better integration among the organizations and information systems of the military services will foster a decisive temporal advantage in the maritime domain, a critical requirement for speed and agility in combat against near-peer rivals.

– Defense News – Landing vertically in hot environments is a challenge for the F-35B

– USNI News – The Navy is committed to upgrading its amphibious ships to support the Navy and Marines’ new way of operating and to leverage the power of the F-35B Joint Strike Fighter, but it’s still unclear when dollars will start flowing to pay for these upgrades to communications and command and control systems.

– CIMSEC – The ship-to-shore movement of an expeditionary assault force was—and remains—the most hazardous mission for any navy. The value of real-time ISR and IPB is difficult to overstate. It is this ability to sense the battlespace in real time that will spell the difference between victory and defeat. For this reason, it seems clear that the types of unmanned systems the Department of the Navy should acquire are those systems that directly support naval expeditionary forces that conduct forcible entry operations.

– CIMSEC – The need for continuous logistics resupply for Marines on the beach will not disappear in any future warfighting scenario. Demonstrating how unmanned surface vehicles such as the MANTAS T38 can rapidly and reliably resupply Marines on the beach should be a Navy-Marine Corps priority.

– Stars and Stripes – “This is a strategic flight that shows we can deploy to any location throughout the western Pacific at any time. We are capable of self-deploying and aggregating to a crisis, natural or man-made, and provide combat power to assist our allies in the region.”

– War on the Rocks – This article seeks to contribute to a dialogue that has endured for years and has especially increased ahead of the upcoming change at the top level of the Marine Corps. We will offer a single core attribute for the Marine Corps, tied directly to the National Defense Strategy and its contact and blunt layer requirements. Next, we will explain what we believe should be the Corps’ distinguishing attributes that give us our naval purpose. Finally, we will describe the enduring attributes the Navy-Marine Corps team can continue executing in support of the new strategic guidance.

– USNI Proceedings – Starting with Brute Krulak’s “Chowder Society” in the 1940s, every generation of Marines has faced challenges to the relevance of its amphibious capability.
It’s time to break out the chowder bowls again.

– USNI News – The Japan-based 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit is already considering how next year’s arrival of new amphibious assault ship USS America (LHA-6) will affect operations in the forward-deployed amphibious force.

– USNI News – The Marine Corps is learning how to incorporate its new F-35B Joint Strike Fighter jets into its island-hopping concept of Expeditionary Advance Base Operations, with the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit rehearsing this concept recently in the Pacific.