United States Marine Corps Organization and Missions

Sea Power, Jan 2004

The Marine Corps in 2004 is transforming doctrine, forces, and equipment to face future challenges, even as the service operates from a wartime footing. Building on the successful techniques for amphibious warfare that helped to win World War II, the Marine Corps is maturing its present concept of expeditionary maneuver warfare from the sea, including lessons from Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom from 2001 through 2003. Harmonizing with the Navy's Sea Power 21 vision for modern naval warfare, the Marine Corps has developed its own vision for building, projecting, and maintaining persistent combat power into the 21st century.

The 33rd Marine Corps Commandant, Gen. Michael W. Hagee, former commanding general of the I Marine Expeditionary Force and an instrumental figure in the planning of 2003 's Operation Iraqi Freedom, last year told Sea Power: "My goal is to prepare the Marine Corps to project force wherever it is needed, from the sea; to be ready to go more quickly, and, once we are on the battlefield, to increase our flexibility and adaptability."

During Operation Iraqi Freedom, the I Marine Expeditionary Force and the 1st Marine Division, as part of a joint U.S. Army and British combined arms force, projected more than 75,000 Marines through Kuwait in fewer than 60 days, roughly half the time it took to build a comparable force during Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm in 1991.1 MEF pushed through Iraq from a Kuwaiti Naval base to Tikrit, 100 miles north of Baghdad, 600 miles inland in total, in 26 days, destroying almost five Iraqi divisions and four Republican Guard divisions along the way.

Despite the militarily successful campaign against Saddam Hussein's forces, Hagee and other senior military planners took note of the challenges presented by denial of access from friends and foes alike during the buildup to Operation Iraqi Freedom.

"Every country has to determine what is in their best interests," Hagee noted. "In some cases, their best interests are not going to support what the coalition wants to do. We should have the capability to project power ashore regardless of whether we have access or not. We cannot do that today because we don't have all of the platforms that we need."

In the Department of Defense, the competition for resources to fund the acquisition of new platforms and capabilities has never been sharper than it is now, during the global war against terrorism. The combined Navy and Marine Corps budget for fiscal year 2004 includes $114.6 billion, up $3.5 billion from FY 2003. For the Marine Corps, 62 percent of its portion of the FY 2004 budget goes to manpower, 22 percent to operations and maintenance, and 4 percent to research and development of new platforms and systems.

The Marine Corps' share of the Department of Defense budget is about 6 percent overall, funding 12 percent of the nation's active forces, including 23 percent of the active ground-forces divisions and 20 percent of all active U.S. ground-maneuver battalions. The Marine Corps also maintains 14 percent of the military's overall tactical aviation capability, including 20 percent of active fighter and attack aircraft squadrons, and 17 percent of the DoD's attack helicopters. The Marine Corps provides about one-third of the DoD's active ground combat service support capabilities.

Hagee is quick to point out that the most important asset reflected in the Marine Corps' budget remains its people. The Marine Corps personnel profile for 2004 shows a ratio of one officer for every nine enlisted, and one civilian employee for every 10 uniformed Marines. In 2004, there are more than 170,000 Marines on active duty. Of that total, more than 114,000 were in the operating forces and more than 30,000 were deployed around the world. The Marine Corps Reserve force includes 39,000 personnel. The Marine Corps is the most youthful of the armed services, with an average age of 23, seven to nine years younger than the average age of other military forces. The Marine Corps also has the highest percentage of enlisted personnel in the grades of E-3 and below, about 48 percent, compared to 26 percent for the Army, 25 percent for the Air Force, and 22 percent for the Navy. The Marine Corps' force structure is organized so that at any given time approximately 68 percent of Marines are on their first term of enlistment. To maintain its force structure, the Corps must recruit 39,000 men and women each year.

Marine forces are organized based on the Marine air-ground task force (MAGTF) structure, which is a basic, scalable design including a ground combat element, an air combat element, a command-and-control element, and a combat service support, or logistics, element. The largest MAGTFs are the Marine expeditionary forces (MEF), including between 20,000 and 90,000 Marines equipped with 60 days worth of supplies when deployed. The MEF's combat forces include the ground combat elements of Marine divisions, and the aviation combat elements of Marine air wings, of which there are three each in active service. The Marine expeditionary brigade (MEB) is a MAGTF including between 3,000 and 20,000 Marines, with 30 days worth of supplies. Following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Marine Corps established the 4th MEB, a specialized antiterrorist brigade that encompasses the Marine security Force Battalion and Fleet Antiterrorist Support Teams, the Marine Security Guard Battalion, the Chemical-Biological Incident Response Force, and a new infantry battalion. This led to a request to increase the Marine Corps' end strength by 2,400 Marines to a total of 175,000 Marines on active duty.