This article reveals where we are now and where we're going. What reveals all are CMC's comments at the end.

COMMENTARY: THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW

James T. Conway
First to the Fight
By BRENDAN MINITER
January 12, 2008

The Pentagon

When James T. Conway went down to see the draft board at the height of the Vietnam War in 1969, he was told "we're not going to draft you. You've got a great number and you don't have to worry about military service." He responded, "You don't understand, I actually want to go."


Today, as Commandant of the Marine Corps, he's one of the nation's leading military commanders. He's led tens of thousands of Marines on two significant campaigns in Iraq. The first was the drive on Baghdad in 2003; the second was what turned out to be an aborted assault on Fallujah in April 2004. In 2006 he became the steward of a fighting force with a history that stretches all the way back to 1775, before there was a United States of America.

But it's the future of the Corps, not its past, that dominates Gen. Conway's thoughts and our conversation. We met at the Pentagon earlier this week -- just a few days before the one-year anniversary of President Bush's decision to "surge" more troops into Iraq. He was dressed in cammies, combat boots and an open collar. He's lean and tall and he seemed to envelop the table we were seated at. He's also a man who gives the appearance of someone who would much rather be with his Marines in Anbar province than in an office on the outskirts of Washington.

Two related concerns about the war occupy his mind: That in order to fight this war, his Corps could be transformed into just another "land army"; and, if that should happen, that it would lose the flexibility and expeditionary culture that has made it a powerful military force.

The Corps was built originally to live aboard ships and wade ashore to confront emerging threats far from home. It has long prided itself in being "first to the fight" relying on speed, agility and tenacity to win battles. It's a small, offensive outfit that has its own attack aircraft, but not its own medics, preferring to rely on Navy corpsmen to care for its wounded.

For more than a decade, the size of the active-duty Marine Corps has been 175,000. The Army, by comparison, has more than 500,000 soldiers on active duty.

Now, however, the Corps is being expanded to 202,000 over the next couple of years. And what's more, the Marines are being asked to conduct patrols and perform other non-offensive operations in Iraq that are forcing the Corps to become a more stationary force than it traditionally has been.

It's a "static environment where there is no forward movement," Gen. Conway says. And "that gets more to an occupational role, and that's what the Army historically does and the Marine Corps has previously seen very little of."

One way the Marines are clearly changing is in the vehicles troops use to patrol in Iraq. "If you look at the table of equipment that a Marine battalion is operating with right now in Iraq," Gen. Conway explains, "it is dramatically different than the table of equipment the battalion used when it went over the berm in Kuwait in '03, and it is remarkably heavier. Heavier, particularly in terms of vehicles.

"I mean the Humvees were canvas at that point for the most part. Today they are up-armored and we're looking at vehicles even heavier than that. We've got a whole new type of vehicle that we're patrolling in, conducting operations in, that's the MRAP [Mine Resistant Ambush Protected], a 48,000 pound vehicle. . . . these type of things, make us look more like a land army than it does a fast, hard-hitting expeditionary force."

Gen. Conway commends the MRAP's performance: "[W]e had over 300 attacks against the MRAP without losing a Marine or sailor." And, he says, "We always have to be concerned about protecting our Marines. We owe that to the parents of America."

"But," he adds, "first we have to be able to accomplish our mission. And I think there are a lot of instances where a lighter, faster, harder-hitting force that gets to a scene quickly is more effective than a heavier, more armored force that gets there weeks or months later."

It is clear that the MRAP can make it more difficult to maneuver in a battle zone. "We saw some problems with the vehicle once it went off of the roadways," Gen. Conway says. "Its cross-country mobility, particularly in western Iraq where you have wadis [dry riverbeds] and small bridges and that type of thing was not what we hoped it would be."

And it is something Gen. Conway has decided to have fewer of. He recently announced that the Marines are halting orders for these vehicles. The Corps will take delivery of a total of 2,300 new MRAPs by the end of the year, which it will use to conduct missions in Iraq. But Gen. Conway is canceling orders for 1,400 additional MRAPs that he and his advisors believe they will not need in the coming years. In the process, Gen. Conway is saving Uncle Sam $1.7 billion. "Yeah. I mean, that to me was a common sense kind of determination."

In short, wars have a tendency to change the culture of the militaries that fight them. For the Marines, the cultural change they fear most is losing their connection to the sea while fighting in the desert.

Today there are about 26,000 Marines in Iraq, many of them on their second or third tour, and tens of thousands of others who have either recently returned or who are preparing to go in the coming months and years. Keeping a force that size in Iraq has made it difficult for the Marines to give mid-level officers assignments that would hone the skills necessary to conduct what has always been a central component of Marine warfighting -- landing troops on a beach head.

"If you accept a generation of officers is four years," Gen. Conway says, "that's what an officer signs on for, we now have that generation of officers -- and arguably troops -- that have come and gone, that are combat hardened, but that will never have stepped foot aboard ship. . . . an amphibious operation is by its very nature the most complicated of military operations; and that we have junior officers and senior officers who understand the planning dimensions associated with something like that, that have sufficient number of exercises over time to really have sharpened their skills to work with other services to accomplish a common goal -- these are the things that concern me with the atrophying of those skills and the ability to go out and do those things."

Gen. Conway graduated from Southeast Missouri State University in 1969, got married, and volunteered for the Marines at a time when the Vietnam War was still raging. He had friends -- fraternity brothers -- who hadn't kept their grades up and who got drafted.

Not that he regrets signing up. "I thought about trying to contact [that recruiter] and thank him for the way he kind of reeled me in," he says.

As a young officer, Gen. Conway didn't end up in Vietnam. But he did get a front row seat in watching the Marine Corps rebuild itself after the war in Southeast Asia ended. And now, looking back through history, he has a clear perspective on the turning points in the development of the modern Marine Corps.

The first turning point came in World War I at the Battle of Belleau Wood, where a few thousand Marines helped stop a German advance that otherwise might have taken Paris and knocked France out of the war. Marines fought so ferociously in hand-to-hand combat in dense French forest in that battle, that the Germans nicknamed them "Devil Dogs." Afterward, Congress expanded the size of the Marines to more than 70,000, up from about 14,000 at the start of the war.

The second turning point brings Gen. Conway back to his concern for protecting the Marines' institutional culture. "Others will cite other battles," he said, but he sees the Battle of Guadalcanal in World War II, a six-month campaign in the Pacific starting in August 1942, as a turning point.

It was there that Marines, later reinforced by Army units, dealt the Japanese their first significant land defeat. "It was only our expeditionary ability to get out there rapidly, as rapidly as we could . . . to put the force out there, smack in the path of the Japanese [that] was a major capability and one we're still very proud of."

So is the Marine Corps the right force to be fighting in Iraq now? It's a loaded question because in recent months Gen. Conway made headlines by airing a plan that would have had the Marines rotate out of Iraq and, with a somewhat smaller force, into Afghanistan. The plan was a nonstarter with Defense Secretary Robert Gates and has been shelved.

"Yeah, I think we are," Gen. Conway said. "For what the nation is now engaged in, it is a major insurgency. From our perspective a counterinsurgency. And when the nation is as hotly engaged as we are in Iraq, I think that's exactly where the Marine Corps needs to be.

"Now, it has necessitated that we undergo these changes to the way we are constituted. But that's OK. We made those adjustments. We'll adjust back when the threat is different. But that's adaptability . . . . You create a force that you have to have at the time. But you don't accept that as the new norm and you do the necessary draw-down at a time when you can."

As for now, he sees the expansion of the Corps to 202,000 "as good . . . We need a Marine Corps that's larger. We need an Army that's larger until we get through what probably is going to be, I think will be, a generational struggle. I think it is absolutely necessary. . . . our military today, all the services all uniforms, is still less than 1% of our great country."

Has the country already forgotten the lessons of 9/11?

Not all of us, Gen. Conway says. "I still hear that a lot, you know, we saw [a] surge [in enlistments] after 9/11, but if you talk to a young Marine out there, even people who were, I don't know, 12, 13, 14 at that point, [they] are still saying that, you know, that they are offended by that, are still incensed by that and they realize that those are still essentially the people out there that we're fighting, so it continues to reverberate. . . . When I visit Gen. Odierno in Baghdad, he's got a picture, a very large picture of one [World Trade Center] tower burning and the other plane about to hit. And I think that our country would do well to remember how we got to where we are today."

Mr. Miniter is an assistant features editor for The Wall Street Journal.

quote:

And it is something Gen. Conway has decided to have fewer of. He recently announced that the Marines are halting orders for these vehicles. The Corps will take delivery of a total of 2,300 new MRAPs by the end of the year, which it will use to conduct missions in Iraq. But Gen. Conway is canceling orders for 1,400 additional MRAPs that he and his advisors believe they will not need in the coming years. In the process, Gen. Conway is saving Uncle Sam $1.7 billion. "Yeah. I mean, that to me was a common sense kind of determination."

They should take that money and invest it into more LAV's. They do really well off road, I think are lighter, are more agile and faster and have alot more firepower. Haji ambushes Mr. LAV. Mr. LAV goes oh really Mr. Haji and then asks Mr. 25mm what he has to say about that. Then Mr. 25mm gives his opinion and Mr. Haji is no more.

Ha ha ha ha ha ....

Good call on LAV's. What is most interesting is how he's talking about bringing the Corps back to our more normal organizational and operational tempos to maintain a trained pool of fully trained and ready units for the broader warfare spectrum. Thats a relief because I was starting to become really concerned with these proposed new sweeping changes like the expeditionary rifle squad. While they're great in concept on paper, how many good Marines would have to die to once again prove the age old addage "don't fix it if it ain't broke."

That's a good point on LAV's. It does so many things that the Army has several vehicles for.

we're suppossed to go on boats?

quote:

Originally posted by Thrust_0311:
That's a good point on LAV's. It does so many things that the Army has several vehicles for.

Yeah but those Army vehicles don't have Marines in them. Instead of spending all that money on developing the MRAP and then buying more they needed to buy more fighting vehicles such as the LAV or the Stryker in the Army's case. I've never seen an MRAP myself but from what I hear if you get ambushed in one you can't take it mobbing off road and flank the ambushers let alone chase them down. In an LAV you could do it. Also who the fck wants to ambush a company of LAV's? I wouldn't. The only difference between an MRAP and a humvee is the MRAP has more armour but is slower and less agile. Speed kills right. Sometimes faster is more lethal and safer. Plus if I'm not mistaken doesn't an LAV able to carry more Marines than an MRAP can?

The new LAVs typically carry 4 dismounts while MRAPs (depending on the version) can fit somewhere between 4-7.

Let's not forget an LAV has an M242 25mm chain gun and TWO M-240's, as well as two hatches in the back that scouts can be popped up firing from.

quote:

Originally posted by cwubullrider:

quote:

Originally posted by Thrust_0311:
That's a good point on LAV's. It does so many things that the Army has several vehicles for.

Yeah but those Army vehicles don't have Marines in them. Instead of spending all that money on developing the MRAP and then buying more they needed to buy more fighting vehicles such as the LAV or the Stryker in the Army's case. I've never seen an MRAP myself but from what I hear if you get ambushed in one you can't take it mobbing off road and flank the ambushers let alone chase them down. In an LAV you could do it. Also who the fck wants to ambush a company of LAV's? I wouldn't. The only difference between an MRAP and a humvee is the MRAP has more armour but is slower and less agile. Speed kills right. Sometimes faster is more lethal and safer. Plus if I'm not mistaken doesn't an LAV able to carry more Marines than an MRAP can?

Those are great points and I agree. Also simple tactics solve IED problems easily enough: How about night patrols, deception, and general offensive action. Marines I've talked to who've been in the **** since the IED epidemic took off all tell me that common sense beats gimmicks still.

Thrust, Common sense does NOT beat IED's. IED's are an ever evolving threat. When we got in country, radio detonated IED's were the big threat. So we got IED jammers, almost IMMEDIATELY they switched RIGHT back to pressure detonated and command detonate dIED's. The IED is the most dangerous thing we're facing over there. And the human factor is NOT enough to spot them.

quote:

Originally posted by Ignoranceisbliss:
The new LAVs typically carry 4 dismounts while MRAPs (depending on the version) can fit somewhere between 4-7.

How about (and I know I'll catch hell for this) why not purchase an amphibious version of the stryker instead? The stryker can hold up to 9 dismounts. The MRAP seems to be a mission specific vehicle (convoys on hardball roads). So thats cool we spent alot of money on a vehicle that we can't take a beach with or use it cross country in lets say Iran or N. Korea. So that's alot of wasted money. Why not integrate strykers with LAVs. You'd have more dismounts for a larger offensive capability as well as keeping the LAV's with their 25mm for that awsome firepower it offers. And lets not forget you can put a .50 cal or a MK19 on a stryker as well as it's M240. The stryker has proven itself and I think if we're going to spend the money on a vehicle we should spend it on a vehicle we can actually use sometime down the road.

Even if you don't want to integrate it into the LAV battalions even replacing alot of the humvees with strykers would still be alot better than replacing humvees with the MRAP. That's just my opinion. Also on LAV's. I think we should have twice as many LAV's as we currently have. They are an awsome offensive weapon and force multiplier and when I was over there we never had enough of them although the ones that were around really made a difference.

Ha ha ha yes Ignorance, we do indeed go on the big gray suckers, get seasick and everything. Of course if you draw the air company you're on the big deck and it's one big long pleasure cruise. You kill me Brother ha ha ha!!!

CW, when first conceived LAR was LAI (Light Armored Infantry) and designed to carry at least one infantry company per regiment. Due to the LAVs great success in Desert Storm the concept was expanded to have one LAV equipped infantry regiment per division but like so many good ideas it scrapped due to the massive defense cutbacks during 92-95. Believe it or not, we lost all the recon battalions along with 95% of MCSF which is why there aren't any ship MarDets or Marines guarding naval bases anymore.

While the utility of the LAV is without question, to this day it still comes down to funding levels. Thats why we're only just now receiving the MV-22s and EFVs instead of 10-12 years ago when they were supposed to come aboard.

Apparently these guys like the MRAP a little too much:MRAP

quote:

Originally posted by AHill_USMC:
Apparently these guys like the MRAP a little too much:MRAP

Thats ****ing hilarious. We used to do that with our humvees, good times.

Cool. The more things change the more they stay the same because it doesn't matter what generation, Marines will always be Marines. We used to play cassette tapes in ghetto blasters as we drag raced and launched our "mules" off dunes and any rise we could find. Sweet.