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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.
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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.
“The first two pages of the update seek to refute the generals’ criticisms, portraying FD 2030 as global, combined arms, force in readiness,” Cancian told the DCNF.
In December, retired generals, part of a mostly anonymous group that goes by “Chowder II” in reference to the 1946 Chowder Society that saved the Marine Corps from extinction, published a series of articles in the National Interest detailing their opposition to FD2030. It’s unclear exactly how many members Chowder II has, but they include former commandants Gen. James Amos and Gen. Charles Krulak.
“The retired generals want a more traditional design that applies globally and uses combined arms, whereas FD 2030 is targeted at the Western Pacific and China and centers around missile units,” Cancian explained.
Berger ditched all of the service’s tanks — its “maneuver” element — and slashed the number of infantry Marines and artillery units to fund experimentation and investment in island-defending “Stand-in Forces” and “Expeditionary Advanced Based Operations,“ accordingto a CSIS analysis. That means it will be less suited to conduct simultaneous infantry, artillery, armor and close air support operations, a foundational component of the force’s mission and structure as required by law, Krulak and former Marine and commander of U.
