Braxton Taylor
The Marine Corps in 2025 is about halfway through its decade-long, top-to-bottom modernization plan, trying to balance that with staying ready for its core mission as the Defense Department’s crisis-response force, which is “is wicked hard to do,” Gen. Eric Smith, the service’s commandant, told Defense One in March.
This is particularly true as the service stares down the barrel of a full-year continuing resolution, keeping the budget flat as the Marine Corps stands up new units, upgrades aircraft and procures new missile systems.
“I would say everything is in danger of slipping,” Smith said, as the Corps sits about halfway through its decade-long march to a new force design.
The Marine Corps has a big shopping list: adding new radars to its F/A-18 Hornets, upgrading survivability of MV-22 Ospreys, and buying the Navy/Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System, the AN/TPS-80 Ground/Air Task-Oriented Radar, and the Medium Landing Ship, to name the major players.
“All that starts to slip when there’s a continuing resolution,” Smith said.
While the continuing resolution hamstrings new spending, the entire Defense Department is reviewing its latest budget proposal to look for $50 billion it can shift to Trump administration priorities like border security and a missile defense “Golden Dome.”
The administration proposes to cut funding to diversity programs, climate change initiatives and “excessive bureaucracy” to make that number—about 8 percent of the existing $850 billion budget. However, estimates of spending on diversity and climate change total only about $540 million.
“I would hope that, you know, when the 8-percent cut drill comes around … we’re not the droids they’re looking for,” Smith said. “Everything we do is about war fighting and lethality. It’s all we know; that’s who we are.”
Smith also points out that the Marine Corps has passed its financial audit two years in a row, the only Defense organization to have done so. He’s hopeful that shows “we’re good stewards of the tax money.”
The administration has signaled it would like the Pentagon to finally pass a financial audit, having failed all seven it’s completed.
“There’s no secret to it,” Smith said, adding that the other service chiefs have asked him for tips, and it really comes down to keeping track of everything they buy. “You can’t go back and recreate records that don’t exist. If you didn’t account for something when you received it, you can’t go back and make up a record for it.”
Staying ready
It’s going to take more money to keep the Marine Corps ready to respond quickly to global threats—its main mission, and one it does hand-in-hand with the Navy and its amphibious ships, which have seen dismal readiness rates in recent years.
A new Navy maintenance plan aims to get readiness up to 80 percent for all ships, but improving efficiency for shipyard availability can’t happen right away, especially as yards struggle to hire enough workers.
“The Navy is attempting to get the ships in and out on time,” Smith said. “But right now, that’s not happening. The amphibs are going in and they’re staying in.”
Some of that has to do with funding, he said, but it’s also the result of combatant commanders extending deployments for amphibious ready groups and the embarked Marine expeditionary units, throwing off maintenance schedules.
“They are the most sought after item by the combatant commanders, after carrier strike groups and submarines,” he added. “When an ARG-MEU gets extended, then the very, very tightly woven shipyard plan comes apart.”
But the Corps continues to plug along. This summer, units will be testing out new handheld counter-drone systems.
“One of the things that is apparent to all of us is that unmanned aerial systems are a threat not just to infantry Marines, but to all Marines,” Lt. Gen. Eric Austin said at the Sea-Air-Space conference outside Washington, D.C.. “We’re currently going to field the prototypes of counter-UAS capabilities for dismounted Marines, and we’re excited to get that out with some of our next deploying units in order to protect them on the move.”
Formations are changing the way they operate, the head of Training and Education Command said, for a new fight where they won’t have air dominance.
“It has been a long time, maybe since World War II, since a member of an infantry squad on the ground actually had to look up or over his shoulder do anything other than clear an aircraft hot, or call in a medevac or something like that,” said Lt. Gen. Benjamin Watson.
In March, the 12th Marine Littoral Regiment, the service’s second unit dedicated to operating in shallow, coastal waters, reached initial operational capability with the addition of a littoral combat team.
That makes two littoral regiments operating in the Indo-Pacific, at a time when the Marine Corps’ footprint is changing.
Nine thousand Marines began shifting bases in December from Japan to Guam and other parts of the Pacific, as part of a 2012 agreement with the Japanese government. Under the agreement, roughly 4,000 will eventually relocate to Guam, with another 5,000 to Hawaii and other locations to be determined, dropping the total of Japan-based Marines down from 19,000 to 10,000.
Moving farther away from China as the Defense Department focuses more attention on deterring war with that country is going to be tricky, Smith said.
“You know, there’s a saying: virtual presence is actual absence,” he said. “So what I know is, you must be present to win.”
Marines will still travel to Korea and the Philippines and Australia as they have been, he added, but it’s going to require more time and a lot more use of their transport planes.
“We’ll continue to exercise with those allies and partners. We just have to have the ability to get there,” he said. “And we can only self-deploy on our C-130s so much. And then we fly the wings off of them.”
Making and keeping Marines
Still, the commandant is cognizant of making sure Marines continue to get those training opportunities—and plenty of deployments.
“Whether you’re with an MLR or whether you’re with a MEU, you’re still going to be out for six months at a time,” he said. “So Marines just want to do what they signed up to do. They didn’t sign up to sit around the barracks. They signed up to deploy.”
Smith wants to fulfill that promise, he said, as the service feels the strain of a recruiting crisis, along with the rest of the military.
“Well, you actually can’t recruit your way out of this crisis,” he said. “You can only retain your way out of this. And so we’ve got to be able to pay our Marines what they deserve, give them bonuses, give them job satisfaction, job security.”
Though the Corps hasn’t missed its recruiting goal since 1994, and is the only service save the Space Force that has made its goals in every of the last five years, it has still struggled like the other services, Smith said.
“What I would say the biggest challenge we have is we’ve got to make our recruiting numbers again,” he said, which means pushing to bring in just under 33,000 new Marines after barely squeaking past a 30,500 goal in 2024.
“We don’t have an easy time in recruiting,” he added. “We make mission because we require our Marines to make mission, because we don’t fail.”
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