laststandonzombieisland

In March 2020, U.S. Marine Corps Commandant, Gen. David H. Berger, debuted his transformative Force Design 2030 which, within a decade, intended to recast the Corps from its traditional expeditionary Marine Air Ground Task Force (MAGTF) model that it had used since the 1950s to something, well, a lot different.

First, the plan called to “divest to invest” which translated to cutting 12,000 billets, disbanding all seven of the Corp’s tank companies (dialing the clock back to 1941), getting rid of 16 of 21 cannon artillery batteries (thus losing over 2/3rds of its proven 155mm howitzers), halving the number of Assault Amphibian companies (from six big to four small), jettisoning all of the Corp’s bridging units, shuttering all three law enforcement battalions, casing the colors of three active and two reserve infantry battalions (and reducing each battalion left by over 200 billets), cutting the number of aircraft in its 18 fighter attack squadrons– converting from exhausted F-18C/Ds and AV-8Bs to F-35s– from 16 frames to just 10, and cutting eight entire tiltrotor/helicopter squadrons. Plus the Corps lost its famed Scout Sniper program.

Jesus wept.

But the payoff was supposed to be big.

The three active component infantry battalions would be recast as “Littoral battalions” in three new Marine Littoral Regiments, a sort of expeditionary anti-ship missile force, and 14 new rocket artillery (HIMARS) batteries would be stood up.

At the same time, the number of drone squadrons (VMUs) would be doubled (from three to six) and an extra aerial refueler squadron (VMGR) of KC-130s would be added to give the Corps some longer legs in the air. Three new Light Armored Reconnaissance (LAR) companies would be added, presumably to provide the three Littoral battalions some added muscle.

But the thing is, the big linchpin on moving these missile-armed Littoral Regiments around scattered atolls in the Western Pacific, would be a new breed of between 18 and 35 cheap and simple (remember that) shallow-draft amphibious landing ships akin to the old LSMs and LSTs of WWII and Korea.

Dubbed the Light Amphibious Warship by the Marines and the Landing Ship, Medium by the Navy, the idea would be a beachable 4,000-ton/200-400 foot vessel capable of landing 75 Marines and 8,000 sq. ft. of kit, with a cost of $100 million a pop.

A force of nine LAW/LSMs would be required to deploy a single Marine Littoral Regiment in one lift.

And there lies the rub.

The Congressional Research Service and GAO have been sounding the alarm on the progress of FD2030, which has been quick to get rid of the old Corps but slow to recast the new one.

Meanwhile, the Navy, tasked with buying and fielding the new class of LAW/LSMs, has all but iced the program, at least for now, canceling the RFP issued to the shipbuilding industry for plans as estimates are now putting the cost at something like $400+ million per hull.

As reported yesterday by USNI News:

“We had a bulletproof – or what we thought – cost estimate, pretty well wrung out design in terms of requirements, independent cost estimates,” Assistant Secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition Nickolas Guertin said at an American Society of Naval Engineers symposium last week.

“We put it out for bid and it came back with a much higher price tag,” he added. “We simply weren’t able to pull it off. So we had to pull that solicitation back and drop back and punt.”

On the bright side, the Navy earlier this Fall (perhaps seeing the writing on the wall) issued a big, fat $9.4 billion contract to Ingalls for three new big-deck LPDs and an LHD.

If only the Marines had the tanks, howitzers, and infantry to form the landing teams and aircraft to carry them to form the MAGTFs for these new ‘phibs to carry…

Basic math tells you that the 21 remaining non-MLR Marine infantry battalions, on a 3:1 workup, would only be able to field 5.25 Battalion Landing Teams, the core of a deployable Marine Expeditionary Unit– now without any scout snipers, law enforcement personnel, bridging gear, or tanks, with fewer Amtracs, and possibly without howitzers. The number of helicopters on hand is fewer and even the prospect of having the MV-22 available at all is in the air. For the Navy’s lift part of that equation, only nine LHA/LHDs exist, augmented by 13 LPDs and 10 soon-to-be-decommissioned LSDs which, on the same 3:1 workup, allows just 2.6 three-ship Amphibious Ready Groups at sea on deployment. Even that number is going to tank in a couple of years with the retirement of the used-up LSDs. 

As noted by Compass Points on the saga of the LSM being pulled.

This may spell the end of the Landing Ship Medium and is also, at a minimum, a tremendous setback for the Marine Corps’ long-stalled and controversial program to place small missile units on islands in the Pacific. If the value of building the LSM was clear, it would be built. But the value of the current LSM is not clear. This is a negative vote for the entire SIF concept. It is becoming accepted that the Marine missile concept is duplicative of missile capabilities the Navy, Air Force, and Army have already deployed. The Navy may be trying to get out ahead of DOGE by cutting the LSM now. There are still too many questions about the Marine Corps’ entire plan for island-based missile units.