Inside the Marine Corps’ first-ever littoral regiment

MARINE CORPS BASE HAWAII—”Hold right, clear left.”

Four Marines in helmets and flak jackets are stacked outside a rusty metal building covered in faux brick and wood. The first enters the doorway with his rifle at the ready, followed by the other three, while 2nd Lt. Alex Willbanks observes inside. 

Other than the color of the camouflage, the scene is virtually indistinguishable from Marine pre-deployment training at the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. But instead of a traditional infantry unit preparing for a counterinsurgency fight in the desert, these Marines are part of the Corps’ first-ever littoral regiment, getting ready for a potential future war in the Pacific. 

Back in 2008, Willbanks was one of the young enlisted Marines just learning how to clear a room before he deployed to Afghanistan with 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment. Now he’s back as an officer in the two-year-old 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment, passing on his hard-earned knowledge to new Marines. 

“The MLR is still rooted in infantry tasks, but has a new flavor to it,” Willbanks said after a morning of training at the base’s Military Operations on Urban Terrain, or MOUT, facility here. “It still does the same things that every other unit would do, but now we’re looking at the Indo-Pacific region and deploying up there, as opposed to what we did in” the Global War on Terror.” 

The 3rd Marine Regiment became the 3rd MLR on March 4, 2022, in a ceremony that created the first of three such units prescribed by the service’s Force Design 2030 transformation effort. A second MLR is now being formed in Okinawa, with a third planned for Guam. 

Unlike the Corps’ traditional infantry regiments, which are composed of a headquarters company and four infantry battalions, the 3rd MLR has a headquarters element and three subordinate commands: 3rd Littoral Anti-Air Battalion, Combat Logistics Battalion 3, and Littoral Combat Team 3. 

The Force Design concept, including the design of the MLRs, faced criticism from a cadre of retired general officers early on, who said the changes would weaken the Marine Corps and take focus away from the infantry. 

Willbanks said he understands some of the criticisms, but noted that “Marines are still doing the same things that they did before, even looking at peacetime, going into Desert Storm and everything. Like, everyone at some point was training to do a certain thing, and then we pivoted immediately to direct ourselves at what the new threat was…I think everyone’s going to have their own preference of what they think the Marine Corps should be doing. But I think at this time, from my understanding, we’re doing what is needed.”

Across base, on a grass sports field across the street from a rocky beach, Staff Sgt. Dylan Greene and the rest of Banjo Company—part of the Littoral Combat Team—are rehearsing for fire team attack training. 

“The basic skills have not changed at all,” Greene said. 

As the unit moves closer to its planned deployment next summer, the Banjo Company Marines will begin integrating with the scout platoon, signals intelligence, electronic warfare, and small drone operators. 

“When we go on the next deployment, we’re going to be pretty disaggregated, seizing key maritime terrain, providing the sensing capability and things like that,” he said. And unlike in Afghanistan and Iraq, “The most challenging thing is going to be [that] we do not have air dominance. I would argue we don’t even probably have air superiority, just because of near-peer, and also just going to be like signature management.”

Greene said there have been a lot of discussions about how to manage not just electromagnetic and radio signatures, but other types of signatures as well., He pointed out the unit’s new camouflage netting, which is smoother than the previous version and provides a “nice thermal screen” for people standing underneath if a drone flies by. 

Up a steep hill from the sports field, on a training range inside a crater, 1st Lt. Seth Benscoter and Chaos Company’s 2nd Platoon are practicing basic infantry skills. 

“Buddy fire and movement, being able to shoot at the target—the guy in front shoot at the target, and the guy behind him sort of see what’s going on, assess how the rounds are making it downrange, and then when he’s ready, he moves, so on and so forth until they are able to get close,” Benscoter said. 

The skills are the same that any infantry unit might practice—MLR Marines refer to traditional infantry regiments as “legacy units”—but as the deployment training cycle continues, “it’ll get more complicated,” he said. 

Asked about how the unit is adapting to the shift in focus from land battles to working with the Navy for amphibious operations, Benscoter said he thinks that’s something the entire Marine Corps is working through. 

“We haven’t done that, aside from [Marine Expeditionary Units] in a very, very long time, and actually affected an amphibious assault at a larger scale,” he said. “I think it’s not, it’s not really just the LCT and the MLR that’s working through that, but it’s kind of the entire Corps’ priorities.” 

Back at the MOUT facility, Willbanks is underscoring the importance of fundamentals. 

“I can’t tell you the answer to everything…you have to be postured and ready to pivot at a moment’s notice,” he said. “There are some standardized ways and practices to do these things, but at the end of the day, you have to rely on your instincts.”

A contractor who served 14 years as a Marine helicopter pilot overhears the conversation and jumps in: “Just because you can see some guys in an open desert from eight miles away doesn’t mean you’re going to find anything in a triple-canopy jungle in the middle of the Philippines, right? Like, it doesn’t translate sometimes, and you need to be ready to solve that problem.”

The contractor, Brent Kreckman, said the MLR Marines are “building those little building blocks, like how to break down the door and clear the room, that they can then go, ‘Well, how am I going to apply this there? And how do I avoid the small drone problems? How do I avoid booby trap problems?’ And they get to solve a new problem set” without the bias that some of the older Marines have. 

That ability to take initiative is trained into them, Benscoter said. 

“The NCOs in the infantry, and even the more junior guys, they’re trained to critically think and to not just follow orders, but to seize initiative,” he said. “I think the best part of the Marine Corps is that no matter what the mission is, no matter what the time period, the technology, whatever, our whole goal is to be ready when we’re called on. And I don’t think that culture’s going anywhere.”