A Marine Corps Hollowed Out
With the firing of the Army Chief of Staff, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth almost completely purged all the Biden era service chiefs save one, and that is the one who should have been fired first. Marine Corps Commandant General Eric Smith has proven himself unfit for the office. Of the fired general and flag officers (GO/FOs) sacked, several were seen as DEI hires and one was apparently purged for being too close to a former Secretary of Defense who was a DEI advocate. OK so far. Pentagon chiefs have a right to leaders who fully support their agendas. However, they should not tolerate being lied to. That is exactly what Smith did.
Smith held a press conference on January 15th, 2025, in which he assured the nation that he the Marine Corps had never embraced DEI, all this while his staff was desperately dismantling the Corps’ considerable DEI infrastructure and trying to erase DEI from its websites.
One thing has not changed, and that is the tenacity and courage of the young Marine Corps rifleman.
I am not sure how he kept his job. Perhaps he told the secretary that he was only following the orders of his predecessor who was an enthusiastic DEI practitioner. That would hold water if it had not been for the fact that Smith had been in office for more than a year before 2025 and made no effort at change in that time. He may have fooled Hegseth and the president, but he did not fool thousands of active duty and non-active members of the Marine Corps family. If the War Secretary held a command climate survey of the Corps today, he would find Smith to be under water.
Unfortunately, that may not be Smith’s greatest failure. When he became commandant in 2023 many in the Marine Corps family hoped that he would reverse the decision by his predecessor to do away with the Corps’ tanks, heavy engineers, and school-trained snipers in order to build his missile-oriented “Force Design” concept that stressed small, missile-firing units aimed at China’s navy in the South China Sea. Instead, Smith doubled down. This was a surprise to none of us who have followed the Corps closely in the past six years. Smith was hand-picked by his predecessor as a loyal acolyte who would faithfully carry out his master’s bidding. His predecessor, General David Berger, confidently predicted in 2019 that large scale amphibious operations were no longer possible given the present missile threat.
Now marines are faced with the possibility of attacking Iran’s Kharg Island by the kind of amphibious assault that Berger deemed impossible. That battle would not only mean an amphibious landing, but an advance inland over urban terrain. Since Hue City in Vietnam, marines had become experts in urban combat. In the 1990s, their warfighting Lab at Quantico worked hard to develop tactics and equipment for fighting in built-up areas that paid off handsomely in the battles for Fallujah and Ramadi in Iraq, but the things that proved critical since Vietnam were the use of tanks, heavy engineers, and skilled snipers.
During its Urban Warrior experiments, the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab worked with marine aviation to develop precision weapons that would take out a room rather than a whole building. These helped to reduce civilian casualties in Iraq. They also reportedly helped the Israelis lower civilian deaths in Gaza and South Lebanon, but the Israelis don’t get much credit for that in mainstream media. These weapons were mostly delivered by attack helicopters, which Berger also reduced. Fortunately, there are still enough left to help today.
At the risk of getting bogged down in tactical details, marine infantry would advance on a target building behind the tanks. The highly accurate tank guns would suppress fire from the defenders while snipers would act in a counter-sniper capacity watching the flanks and rear. Heavy engineer bulldozers were used to level particularly troublesome structures and clear supply routes of rubble. All of those are now missing from the Marine Corps inventory. Smith could have begun fixing that in 2023, but he punted betting that his predecessor was right. I sincerely hope that he doesn’t have to be proven wrong with the blood of today’s young marines.
One thing has not changed, and that is the tenacity and courage of the young Marine Corps rifleman. Given a mission, he will accomplish it or die trying no matter what tools he is given. It is too late to fire Smith, but we can only hope that his successor will try to repair the damage that Berger and Smith have done. Hopefully, the current pause due to the ceasefire will lead to negotiations that will negate the need for a Kharg operation. This will give the next commandant time to prepare for Berger’s “impossible” operation.
READ MORE from Gary Anderson:
The Mirage of Airpower Supremacy
We Should Learn From the Present War, the Chinese Will
What Next After the Bombing Stops?
Gary Anderson retired as Chief of Staff of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab
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