Why we need the Marine Corps
Article by Ed Palm in the Kitsap Sun
Why we need the Marine Corps
“Reason not the need!” Shakespeare’s King Lear thunders when his daughter Regan questions the need for a retired king to be accompanied by 100 knights. Scores of currently serving and former Marines will be echoing Lear’s lament once they catch wind of an article recently reprinted in Military.com from the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings magazine.
Retired Navy Reserve commander and intelligence analyst Norman R. Denny has a plan for how to absorb the Marine Corps into the Army and Navy. In essence, he is calling for Marine air to be incorporated into the Army and the Navy and believes the Air Force could provide needed close-air support. The Navy’s own police force could be augmented to replace the Marines currently serving as security forces on Naval installations. The Army, in turn, could create its own amphibious corps.
To make the transition somewhat palatable, Denny would allow Marines to retain their dress blue uniforms and the eagle, globe and anchor emblem. He further suggests people could enlist to be Army Marines and that they could still go through boot camp at Parris Island. He further recommends retaining the informal title “gunny” for the Army’s Marine E7s. But a four-star commandant of the Marine Corps would no longer be necessary. A three-star corps commander would suffice.
Closing major Marine installations, moreover, would save money, as would eliminating a separate chain of command and reducing the number of general officers.
Denny, of course, is hardly the first to propose eliminating the Marine Corps. In the early 1950s, President Truman, along with Generals Eisenhower and Marshall, saw no need for a separate light infantry. Fortunately, what Truman termed a “propaganda apparatus” second only to Stalin’s kicked in. Denny credits that talent for self-promotion and the Korean War with “prematurely truncat[ing]” serious discussion of disbanding the Marine Corps. What Denny fails to acknowledge is that the Corps’ victories in World War II were still fresh in the public’s mind and that the successful Inchon landing and the battling retreat of the “Frozen Chosen” in Korea had bolstered Marine legend and lore. Truman and his generals had to retreat.
Denny buttresses his case by quoting then Marine Brig. Gen. Victor Krulak, who in 1957 went on record admitting that the country doesn’t need the Marine Corps, but for reasons that “transcend cold logic, the country wants a Marine Corps.” The Corps is indeed a point of pride for America. That is why Marines guard our embassies throughout the world. Denny, however, has taken Krulak’s comment out of context. It is part of the introduction to Krulak’s book “First to Fight” (1984) in which he establishes how the Corps earned the respect and admiration of Americans — not just for their victories but also for their resourcefulness, insight, and daring. One example of that insight and daring — as Krulak relates and as I experienced — was their Combined Action Program in Vietnam. It was essentially an enlightened gesture of dissent against Gen. Westmoreland’s attrition strategy. The Corps could see that large-scale search-and-destroy operations would ultimately prove self-defeating and that the best hope for victory was winning the hearts and minds of the people. Toward that end, the Corps stationed squads of Marines in the countryside to train and patrol alongside village self-defense units called Popular Forces.
And Marines have more than held their own since Vietnam. One measure of their fighting spirit was reported in the “Small Wars Journal.” By 2013, the Corps, which represents only 15 percent of our active-duty military, had suffered 27 percent of the casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Marines, however, are not ones to rest on their laurels. What Denny doesn’t acknowledge is how the Corps is going back to the future in redefining its role and mission. As the Corps explains in a position paper titled “Marine Corps Vision and Strategy 2025,” it will remain sea-based and expeditionary but with lighter, highly maneuverable units capable of engaging in major-power warfare. They intend to even the odds against the troops and armor of larger forces with new high-tech shoulder-fired missiles deployed at the platoon level.
So much for reasoning the need, but there is a humanly redemptive sense in which I believe we still need the Marine Corps.
I grew up in a single-parent working-class home in a bad neighborhood. I had no prospects for college. I seemed destined for a life of industrial-strength monotony, and the Corps at the time was the only avenue to distinction open to me. The Marines shored up my flagging self-respect and self-confidence, and I’m sure it has done likewise for countless young men, and now women, who have been put down and underestimated by the authority figures in their lives. In the words of the poet, “I took the [road] less traveled by, /And that has made all the difference.”
https://www.kitsapsun.com/story/opinion/columnists/2022/01/07/ed-palm-why-we-need-marine-
corps/9134474002/
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