by Micaela Burrow, Discern Report:
- The Marine Corps is under fire from retired officers who say that outgoing commandant Gen. David Berger’s radical restructuring plan will undercut both national security and the service’s fundamental character.
- Berger’s plan calls for smaller, lighter and more technologically-adept units he says will better assist the U.S. in a fight with China.
- “Their ‘debate’ is indeed a cultural issue, not a war fighting issue,” Brian Kerg, a fellow at the Marine Corps University’s Kulak Center, wrote in a social media statement.
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The U.S. Marine Corps is facing fire from high-ranking retired officers as the outgoing commandant passes on responsibility to implement his radical changes to new leadership, according to experts and a review of arguments by current and retired Marines.
A secretive group of retired Marine Corps generals, including two previous commandants, renewed a years-long assault against what they characterized in multiple articles as dangerous narrow-mindedness underlying Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger’s plan to revamp the force, of which the latest update was released on Monday. As Berger is slated to depart by the end of this year and be replaced with his second-in-command, the service will face new struggles amid new leadership and political pressures, where the stakes could mean failure in a conflict with China, according to an expert and the retired officers.
“There is an intellectual civil war going on in the Marine Corps,” Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Corps Reserve colonel and senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
In 2020, Berger unveiled a new vision for the Marine Corps, Force Design 2030 (FD30), hinging in part on assumptions China would pose the greatest threat to the U.S. in the coming decade and the Indo-Pacific would serve as the major theater of conflict.
Opponents said the plan risks national security by limiting the force’s ability to address different kinds of threats worldwide, violating protocol and undermining the Marine Corps ethos.
Aware of the mounting information campaign against FD30, Berger shaped the 2023 update to address some of those concerns.
