While the U.S. Marine Corps’ new Pacific-based littoral regiments have received outsized attention as they add new weapons specialized for long-range fires and drone warfare to formations, the ground forces continue to remain at the heart of the fight, according to a new strategy document published Wednesday. And they are transforming to prepare for the next war.
Ground Combat Element 2040, which outlines the service’s warfare vision and planning for the next decade and a half, doubles down on the Corps’ self-identity as a force specializing in island and coastal regions, such as the Pacific, even as a new conflict in the Middle East continues.
Discussing the document with reporters ahead of its release, Marine Corps director of Strategy Planning and Policy Lt. Gen. Jay Bargeron reaffirmed previously announced plans to add a fifth infantry company focused on reconnaissance and fires.
Bargeron also described a transformation of the anti-armor missile gunner military occupational specialty into a “precision strike” Marine role as units receive new weapons, including loitering munition attack drones, and the training to go with them.
“What I’m trying to do is bring precision strike capabilities down to the lowest level,” Bargeron told reporters. “That’s a great example of using advanced technology to enhance the lethality of Marines that are already doing that job.”
This change, he said, would also include increasing the manning of crew-served weapons, plussing up the number of 60mm and 81mm mortars within each infantry battalion and building in an additional heavy machine gun platoon.
“This is really about buying back or ensuring we have the right firepower and staying power in those ground combat units to do things like seize and defend a piece of ground when it’s necessary,” Bargeron said.
The 23-page strategy document emphasizes the “evolving character of war,” one that will increasingly force Marines to maneuver within targeting range of their adversaries. This approach, the document notes, will ramp up the need for effective camouflage and concealment measures and drive the use of autonomous and robotic systems as a first line between enemy weapons and human fighters.
“By deploying distributed, low-signature, expeditionary forces in close proximity to an adversary, the GCE can disrupt the enemy’s targeting cycle and enable sustained operations,” the planning document states. “This approach also reduces the need for high-signature, vulnerable fixed bases, allowing for more flexible and resilient operations.”
Bargeron noted that increased concealment measures would include greater adoption of multispectral camouflage and self-monitoring of heat and frequency signatures.
The aim, he said, is “trying to hide in plain sight and spectrum that’s out there — all to make ourselves more difficult to target.”
Bargeron referred to the three Marine littoral regiments, noting that they do belong to the ground combat element but don’t replace conventional infantry functions.
“They don’t replace the [ground combat element’s] foundational purpose, and that’s to locate, close with, and destroy the enemy, or to repel his assault by fire in close combat,” he said.
“That brings us to … the core of the military problem,” Bargeron continued, “and that is the need to develop GCE formations that are capable of succeeding against those peer-level ground combat units and remain resilient enough to operate effectively when our advanced technology is degraded or denied to us.
“So the GCE 2040 framework is built upon a central idea: modular, task-organized, multi-domain force that combines dispersed operations, lethality, information dominance and resilient command and control.”
Defending against hostile attack drones, Bargeron said, remains “one of the biggest holes in our swing,” and a key focus for development.
The Marine Corps, he said, had recently purchased 400,000 pieces of a special segmented 5.56 ammunition that can be fired from existing M27 service rifles. That’s part of a new multi-part organic counter-small UAS system, he said, of which the service plans to purchase 300 by the end of this year, with updated training to go with them.
Along with the fielding over the next few months of Organic Precision Fires-Light, which equips Marines with portable loitering “kamikaze” drones, these developments will significantly increase the power and autonomy of small infantry units, Bargeron said.
The fielding of OPF-Light and OPF-Medium, a larger anti-armor loitering munition, he said, will transform the traditional 0352 anti-armor gunner MOS into a “precision strike Marine” role. There are currently no plans, however, to make a formal title change.
“That will put in the hands of the squad-level Marines the ability to find and strike targets out to, I think, 20 kilometers,” he said. “That’s something that Marines — rifle, squad, platoon, company — would have had to depend on artillery somewhere else, mortars somewhere else, aircraft somewhere else to talk onto the target.
“So, in the hands of the individual Marines, to be able to strike targets like that, I think that will be dramatic.”
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