Rather than destroying it, Berger’s vision will save the Marine Corps from itself

The Commandant of the Marine Corps, General David Berger, faces fierce opposition, allegedly from all living retired Marine four-star generals.

His offence? To operationalize comments from his predecessor, Commanding General Robert Neller, who observed in 2017 that the Corps was no longer “organized, trained, or equipped” to fight against a conventional peer or near-peer enemy.

Berger’s Force Design 2030 describes its vision to “adapt, stay relevant, and outwit our adversaries,” whether they be Islamofascist irregulars or members of the communist Chinese People’s Liberation Army.

Its opponents seem to want the Corps to remain a leaner, smaller version of the US military.

To his supporters, Berger is a courageous visionary fighting to retain a central role for the Marine Corps in future combat anywhere in the world. To his many detractors, he short-sightedly focuses on a single threat, deliberately dismantling the foundations upon which the Corps’ philosophy and professional success rests.

Organizational change is difficult because it challenges these shared values ​​— the “principles, goals and standards [considered] have an intrinsic value” that the members of the organization have accepted and internalized.

As historian and Marine Corps veteran Allen Millett noted in the book “The Culture of Military Organizations,” “[t]he Marine Corps… wants to be a community of “family” members bound by loyalties. »

It follows that members who renounce these values ​​endanger not only themselves, but the whole “family unit”; the survival of the group requires that the offender be publicly rejected and ostracized.

The tone of retired Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper’s attack on Berger’s plan takes exactly this approach. He argues that, if Berger’s reforms take hold, the Corps “will become something unrecognizable to the legions of Marines who preceded it.”

In his book “Leading Change,” John Kotter recommended eight steps to turn proposed changes into lasting transformations. Arguably, Berger failed to include the second step, “creating a guiding coalition,” by failing to involve all retired Navy general officers interested in the project.

Putting aside for a moment the difficulties of reaching consensus on such an important plan using a committee of dozens of people, retired Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold observed that “it was clear that the course had been set and the council [from beyond a small circle] was not necessary or accepted.

What Newbold and others, including former Secretary of the Navy and U.S. Senator James Webb, have conveniently downplayed is that, far from triggering the changes on an unsuspecting Corps or an inattentive Congress, Berger and its supporters have done a remarkable job of communicating the need for change. and rationales for specific decisions.

At its core, opposition to Force Design 2030 appears to stem from a perception that Berger’s plan challenges the culture of the Corps and is “antithetical to the Marine Corps’ sense of identity.”

Although to date only two authors have invoked former commander General Alexander Vandegrift’s 1947 “No Bended Knee” speech before the Senate Armed Services Committee, such allusions permeate the accounts of Berger’s opponents. , who lament the alleged loss of the Corps’ status and reputation as “a cohesive, all-encompassing ‘ready force’ that can go anywhere and fight anyone at any level, with the exception of a nuclear war.”

Despite retired General Anthony Zinni’s prediction that Berger’s plan to “convert the entire Marine Corps into a single employment concept” is wrong, an identical decision is what created the very foundation on which the current identity of the Corps.

During the 1933-34 academic year, students and faculty at the Marine Corps Staff College developed brand new doctrine, aligned with War Plan Orange, to prevent the Corps from becoming merely an adjunct to the Army. . In doing so, those Marines of long ago set the same precedent that Berger is following now.

This is exactly what the Department of Defense and federal law expect of him.

Title 10 of the federal legal code states that the Marine Corps “shall be organized, trained, and equipped to provide combined arms fleet marine forces, together with supporting air components, for service with the fleet in seizure or the defense of forward naval bases and for the conduct of land operations which may be essential to the continuation of a naval campaign.

Note that the code does not specify the composition or specific capabilities of combined arms formations to be included.

Finally, it must be recognized that each of Berger’s retired Navy general officer opponents has a career path that matches that of his contemporaries in the U.S. Army much more than his Navy background. Since the Korean War, the Marines have fought in a way that has made the Corps indistinguishable from the United States military.

The United States Marine Corps has not conducted an operationally significant combat amphibious forcible entry operation since September 15, 1950, when the 1st Marine Division (and 7th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army!) landed in Inchon, Korea.

The United States does not need and cannot afford two armies of identical capabilities.

Berger’s plans are to restore the Corps to its traditional maritime focus and identity, a move that, like the raising of the American flag on Mount Suribachi in February 1945, “will ensure the survival of the Marine Corps for the next 500 years.”

Berger took to heart US Army General Eric Shinseki’s warning that “if you don’t like change, you’ll hate insignificance.”

It is time for his detractors to do the same.

Tom Hanson is a retired Infantry Army Colonel with over 28 years of service. He obtained a doctorate. He holds a doctorate in history from The Ohio State University and is a professor of military history at the US Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies.

The opinions above are his own and do not reflect the position of the School of Advanced Military Studies, the Army University, or the United States Army.

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