Source: Washington Post
by George F Will
“Today, for a number of senior Marines — including 22 retired four-star generals — the fight is intramural. It concerns the U.S. Marine Corps’s future. And its understanding of itself, which is rooted in the past century, in major battles in major wars: e.g., Belleau Wood (1918), Iwo Jima (1945), the Tet Offensive (1968), Fallujah (2004). The Corps’s intensely practical, and perhaps perishable, elan is at stake in the heated debate about how Marines fit into the nation’s security strategy. In March 2020, the USMC announced Force Design 2030, a 10-year plan to reconfigure the Corps and shrink it by 12,000 (currently there are 174,500 Marines) to conform to a national defense plan primarily — too much, critics of Force Design contend — focused somewhat on Russia but mostly on China.” (11/15/24)