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A series of untoward events muddied the shining reputation of the Marine Corps in the 1980s—although not nearly so much as sometimes reported. In any event, the Marines are emerging from the muck and murk with a clearer sense of who they are and what they can do.
During a typically hectic session of the Defense Review Board, former Secretary of the Navy James Webb and Marine Corps Commandant Alfred Gray rose and left for Arlington Cemetery. Their departure was explained by the fact that the date was 23 October, four years from the day 241 Marines were killed in their barracks in Beirut by a suicide terrorist with a 5,000-pound truck bomb.
The trip to the cemetery for a memorial ceremony was a return to the warrior mystique that both men instinctively honor first. As Secretary of the Navy, Webb, himself a Marine war hero, and General Gray, a veteran of the Korean and Vietnam wars, seldom missed an opportunity to manifest their allegiance to what poet Stephen Crane described as “a mysterious fraternity borne of smoke and danger of death,” the Marines.
Ultimately, James Webb may be remembered more for his abrupt departure in February than for his contributions during the 11 months he served as Secretary of the Navy. However, his inability or unwillingness to continue laboring within the sprawling Pentagon bureaucracy was the flip side of his strong affinity for the fighting men themselves. And for the Marines, that affinity was probably more important than bureaucratic tenacity. Moreover, Webb’s philosophy is reflected in his choice of General Gray as commandant, and will be advanced by Gray now that Webb has returned to his earlier calling as an author.
Asked where Gray is taking the Corps, Brigadier General Michael Sheridan, director of plans at Marine Corps Headquarters, says, “The Marines are evolving back to what they should always have been.” This evolution home entails an emphasis on the Marines themselves, their training, their discipline, and their capacity to serve as a
force in readiness during a variety of possible crises. The strict association of the Corps with Iwo Jima-like amphib*' ous assaults is currently viewed as confining and out ° step with what the Marines have for some years bee” called upon to do. “The challenge is to keep the tail frofl1 wagging the dog,” says Webb. “The Marine Corps is the keeper of the keys [for] amphibious doctrine, but it lS much more versatile as a force in readiness.”
There are only so many beaches left to storm, after al • Meanwhile, the world is infested with a variety of troub e spots where the Marine Corps may be called upon to he P protect American lives and American interests. The Web philosophy—and General Gray is in solid agreement^ has been greeted in the Marine community as forward looking. “The last big opposed landing took place a Inchon nearly 40 years ago,” says retired Major Genera Fred Haynes, now an LTV Corporation vice president- “The Marines should serve more and more as an al purpose force in readiness.” .
In addition to setting the course for the remainder of th|S century and beyond, the new guidance will close tne strange best-of-times/worst-of-times chapter that was the Marine Corps in the Reagan years. Gains for the leather necks during the 1980s are readily visible. There wefe funds to support an across-the-board modernization, 111 eluding the first deliveries of the landing craft air cushi°n (LCAC) high-speed amphibious craft. There was a resur gence of positive sentiment towards the uniformed mu 1 tary and an influx of better educated recruits. ,
But the Reagan years produced other, distinctly pain'11 images of the Marines. For instance, Lieutenant Colone Oliver North, in uniform, grabbed the nation’s attention while describing his possibly illegal plan to supply Nicaraguan contras and his decision to misinform the Coi^ gress about it. Marine security guards were dragged to a11 from inquiries into their sexual ties, and informati°n leaks, in Moscow. And there was Beirut.
Of the various body blows dealt the Marine Corps in n\ 1980s, the Lebanon disaster is the toughest to reboufl from. Ollie North, whether he ultimately is mythology as a scoundrel or a headstrong hero, is a singular persona ity whose exploits on behalf of the contras had nothing 1 do with the Marine Corps. The sex-for-secrets scandal.1 turns out, was overblown, and if there are enduring queS
tions over the mess, they’re aimed not at the Marine security guards, but at the Naval Investigative Service for its ham-handed management of the affair.
Beirut still smarts, however, perhaps because the disaster now seems both foreseeable and avoidable. Webb, who was in Lebanon as a journalist in September 1983, remembers a senior Marine officer telling him, “We’re sitting ducks here.” A sign in the Marine area advertised “The Can’t Shoot Back Saloon.” An officer who was assigned to the operation remains bitter about the U. S. insistence on the strictly observed neutrality of the peacekeeping force, despite the fact that by the fall of 1983 many factions on the ground had begun to see it as a partisan army. “It is pretty hard to loiter, without shooting back, when everybody is shooting at you,” this officer says. It is hard for any soldier, and a painful affront for a Marine trained in offensive war-fighting tactics.
Gray, and Webb before him, made it a priority to pull out of this confusion a clearer recognition of who Marines are and what they can do. Gray is already something of a Marine icon in his camouflaged utilities, gripping a camouflaged coffee cup. The imagery suggests he’s more part of a fighting force than a Washington bureaucracy, and those who know him say this message isn t accidental.
“General Gray wants to maintain a force that is capable of dealing with crises and projecting power ashore any-
where in the world. He is not mesmerized by NATO Central Front,” General Haynes says. ^ .
General Gray’s emphasis is on training. “We’re goi®e back to training every Marine in matters of infantry, said at a recent breakfast meeting with Washington repo ers. Recruits will take on more combat training. This w* include work on hand-to-hand fighting skills, weapons ,r ing, field craft, and survival techniques. Then all Marines will spend additional time in concentrated infantry training before going on to a specialty.
The focus on warfighting holds at all levels. In Deceit1 ber, when 30-odd Marine generals came to Washingt°*j for officer selection boards, General Gray altered the usu- format. “We didn’t have the normal conferences where the staff briefs everybody on how busy they are,” he sai ^ “We spent each of three mornings playing a war game-
Still, the Marines need to refine the sorts of warfighting they see themselves undertaking in the future. The M rines’ oft-noted flexibility has its basis in history and in t Corps’s legislative charter, which fixed its force structur and assigned roles and missions to carry out amphibm assaults and “such other duties as the president may a rect.” The charter put an end to a succession of °P® campaigns to abolish the Corps, but it left the leathernec ■> vulnerable to misbegotten missions such as the Lebano operation.
Nonetheless, flexibility is endemic to the Marine cha^ acter and an element in the Corps’s standing as a force i readiness. “The Marines don’t have a role except to malleable enough to do what comes on the horizon. Lieutenant General Victor Krulak once said. In 1903, example, Marines escorted a group of diplomats over 3 miles of desert to sign a friendship agreement in Ad Ababa with the rulers of Ethiopia. Along the way, 1 were forced to quell a mutiny by the travelling part- camel drivers.
In an effort to spell out the Marines’ future role m°dj clearly, General Gray has set up a warfighting center Quantico. Just before leaving the Pentagon, Webb voice’ high hopes for the project. “A1 Gray has done a treme dous thing,” he said. “He’s pulled together the faS,s burners of all ranks—captains up through colonels. He created this warfighting center with people from units a over the world, and is forcing them to look at doctrm j tactics, and weapons. . . . There’s going to be some g°° stuff that comes out of that.” ; ^
One issue the group is likely to address is the tug-o’"vV between light, mobile equipment and firepower. “How you fit the M-1 tank and the big howitzers into a tradit>° of light, moveable forces?” asked Webb. In a recent mte view, General Gray said the Corps needed to be ‘ dS enough to go where they must, yet heavy enough to w once committed.” ^
Still some of the Marines’ current heaviness stems fr° ^ the budget politics of the 1970s, when the Marines orderf heavy artillery and armored vehicles. After the costly ia ures in Vietnam, the United States renewed its interest in terring the Warsaw Pact in Europe, but recoiled at the Pr°^. pect of equipping for more Third World excursions- you weren’t prepared to fight in NATO’s central reg10 ’
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c wasn t a dollar for you,” recalls General Sheridan. U °day, the post-Vietnam hangover has lifted, and the
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f. ° to unravel. After being forced to withdraw a tactical ,§hter
P°st-World War II network of basing rights is begin-
atially has frozen; others revolve around the symbol-
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a big American military presence that smacks of a
nited States is looking beyond central Europe. The Ma Pi m 'lave a ro'e >n Europe. It isn’t concentrated in the da Gap, but on the flanks. The United States has prepo- a °ned equipment in Norway, so the Marines can support aaval campaign in the Norwegian Sea.
Meanwhile, world trends bode well for a force that is and that operates from a maritime base. Amerilj- wing from Torrejon Air Force Base, Spain, the n>ted States is about to begin more or less simultaneous •j'u'11Paigns to hang on to installations in Portugal, Greece, arrkey> and the Philippines. Some of the battles revolve °und foreign assistance, which a tight-fisted Congress 1Sth of
vestige and rankles nationalist sentiments. In nei- ifv CaSC Can tkie Reagan administration do much to moll- Jhe concerns of host countries. f0nder the worst-case scenarios Pentagon strategists are oy?e^ to Ponder» U. S. bases could fall like dominoes (lQer tkle remainder of the century. The Philippines, which uses the largest overseas installations, is threatened by a munist insurgency; moreover, the country’s latest sntution tries to slap restrictions on nuclear ships.
Austere times may loom ahead, but the Marine Corps has been taking delivery of major new equipment for several years that leaves it in good stead for now. The versatile F/A-18 is the mainstay of the fighter and heavy attack force; the light armored vehicle offers unprecedented tactical ground mobility; and the landing craft air cushion promises to break the shackles of a 10-knot ship-to-shore movement that have existed for nearly 50 years.
There could be new limits on the U. S. installations in the Azores. Panama, where the U. S. Southern Command resides, is becoming a swamp of corruption and anti-American violence. In any event, the 1979 Canal Treaty mandates that all U. S. bases there close by 1999.
As the basing-rights battles play themselves out, there will likely be a higher premium placed on the Marine air- ground task forces, which travel on Navy ships with 30 days’ worth of ammunition, food, water, and weapons. Under Marine plans, a task force could quickly be dispatched to crisis scenes with tanks, light armored vehicles, howitzers, surface-to-air missiles, and helicopters. ‘‘We bring our own logistics with us,” says General Sheridan. “We don’t have to count on basing rights ashore.” In addition to immediate supplies, there are ships bearing tons of spare parts for Harriers, F/A-18 fighter planes, and Marine helicopters.
Senior Marine planners are wary of pushing much more prepositioning of supplies and equipment on land. They reason that if this approach is carried too far, it would limit the Marines’ much-valued flexibility. However, there is strong support for the notion of maritime prepositioning, and in today’s world, there will likely be more of it.
Webb, in a National Press Club address that provoked a hostile salvo from Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci, noted that “static defensive positions have drained both our economic and military resources.” Later he empha-
and
chart a more independent course and fashion doctrine
sized that the Navy and Marine Corps “can affect world events quickly and decisively.”
The talk, and the condemnation it drew from within the Pentagon, reflected Webb’s relative isolation during his last days as Secretary of the Navy. But the content of the controversial speech resonated with a similar message contained in the final report of a long-term strategies commission chaired by former Defense Under Secretary Fred Ikle and arms strategist Albert Wohlstetter. This report, entitled “Discriminate Deterrence,” concluded that the United States has devoted an exaggerated level of money and attention to the apocalyptic possibility of a superpower confrontation in Europe. It urged that greater attention be given to Third-World conflicts.
“Conflicts in the Third World are obviously less threatening than any Soviet-American war would be, yet they have had and will have an adverse cumulative effect on U. S. access to critical regions, on American credibility among allies and friends, and on American self-confidence,” the report states. “If this cumulative effect cannot be checked or reversed in the future, it will gradually undermine America’s ability to defend its interests in the most vital regions, such as the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean and the Western Pacific.”
Despite the grumblings from the Pentagon, Webb, in retirement, is certain not to water down his message. Indeed, he may draw a wider audience for being a maverick who resigned instead of a team player who decided to hang in and support “the program.” “We’re on the threshold of a completely new way of dealing with the world,” he says, adding that this should involve a full “shakedown of roles and missions.” With that in mind, he adds, the Pentagon shouldn’t bow to the political expedient of asking all the services to take more or less equal whacks from the budget axe. “I believe we are a maritime nation and we need to emphasize what our sea forces can do,” he says.
Politically, an expanded emphasis on naval power will be a tough sell, however suitable it might be as a global strategy. For the last five years, there’s been a smoldering perception that John Lehman’s Navy squeezed more than its share out of the buildup, to the detriment of the Army. Moreover, the deep cuts of the 1987 budget season only grazed the Navy in relation to the other services. By Navy calculations, it lost $136 million from requested monies, while the Army lost $3.4 billion and the Air Force, nearly $10 billion.
Budget pressures will also make it hard for the Marines to bring in a new generation of weapons to fit an updated vision of themselves. The V-22 tilt-rotor Osprey is a good example. The plane, designed by Boeing and Textron, can carry 24 troops 200 nautical miles at 250 knots, broadening the Marines’ capacity to mount surprise operations over a significant distance. However, the Army, strapped for cash itself, recently stunned the Corps by pulling out of the project, a move which is certain to raise the cost of each aircraft. Marines are worried that because of cost pressures, they’ll end up buying fewer of the Ospreys than are needed to support the Corps.
Another pressure point is an envisioned armored gun system that would be light enough to transport easily, but big enough to kill tanks. In today’s budget squeeze, it wi be difficult for the Marines to fund the system alone, but equally hard to prod the Army into sharing the burden. “The Fort Knox mentality is that the tank destroyer 's second best—buy a tank,” says Peter Wilson, an analyst at Rand Corporation.
Overall the timing isn’t ideal for the Marine Corps to weapons to go along with it. “What Gray is going to confront is the fact that the budget envelope is shrinking, says Mr. Wilson. Nevertheless, General Gray gains sorne comfort from the fact that much of the Marines’ modernization is already locked in. Infantry divisions are receiving M249 squad automatic weapons, the Mk-19 grenade launchers, and the M252 81-mm. mortar. The Marine Corps last year began procuring the TOW-2A missiles, the most lethal version of this anti-tank weapon. The Drag°n antiarmor weapon got launched on an improvement pr°' gram. Meanwhile, the first deliveries of M1A1 tanks are slated for fiscal year 1990, and F/A-18 aircraft are working their way into the Corps.
The new system that seems both secure and significaIlt to the Marines’ future is the LCAC. Initial tests at CanT Pendleton have drawn rave reviews. The craft is said to be fast and surprisingly quiet. Able to travel at 40 knots wit a payload of 60 tons, the LCAC preserves and updates the Marines’ hold on amphibious operations. “You’ve got t(j start an operation from much farther out so you don’t ge blown out of the water,” says a Marine planner at Quan tico.
Future weapons procurement will be closely linked to the work on doctrine and tactics, and will emanate n° from Marine Corps Headquarters at the political epicenter- but from the Marine Corps Combat Development Con1 mand, at Quantico, which General Gray is revitalizing aS the “crossroads of the Corps.” The newly formed Marin®. Corps Research, Development and Acquisition Con1 mand, also at Quantico, will attempt to identify military requirements and satisfy them with a minimum of red tape and delay. Ironically, General Gray’s inclination to stan apart from official Washington plays well in Washing*011^ The Marines hold immense good will as an elite fight'1’" force, not as budgeteers and politicians. To the extent they stick to that identity, they’ll continue to draw fairly broa support.
The renewed emphasis on tactics and training, and the focus on the warrior is restoring esprit to Marines the'1’ selves after a long season of episodes that bruised the' legendary pride. For this, General Gray seems to be t right leader. A Marine Reserve officer recently chatty with a security guard stationed in Paris. Early into t conversation the young Marine praised Gray’s app°'n,, ment, saying “there’s a real Marine as commandant-^
A graduate of the University of Virginia, Mr. Carrington has been "'*;l the Wall Street Journal since 1980, following earlier experience a reporter and editor at McGraw-Hill Co. For the past three years he been the Pentagon correspondent of the Journal's Washington burea He has written one book, The Year They Sold Wall Street (New Wr Houghton Mifflin, 1985).