How to save the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps billions

OPINION:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has directed each of the military services to make an 8% cut in their budgets despite a $500 billion increase in the defense budget.

Most analysts believe it’s to get them to reexamine legacy systems that might need to be discarded. If that’s the case, then there’s a major project that would save the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps billions of dollars if eliminated and contribute toward a major decrease in wasteful spending.

This would push both services close to Mr. Hegseth’s goal. The services should divest themselves of the failed Marine Corps strategy dubbed Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations.

Shortly after becoming commandant of the Marine Corps in 2019, Gen. David Berger announced a radical change in Marine Corps doctrine and force structure. Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations, also called Force Design, shifted the Corps’ focus from a worldwide 911 force in readiness to a China-oriented missile-firing organization occupying islets and sand spits in the South China Sea.

To afford the Tomahawk and NMESIS anti-ship missiles needed to implement the strategy, Gen. Berger “divested” the Corps of all of its tanks, heavy engineers, much of its cannon artillery and significant combat aircraft. To support the strategy logistically, Gen. Berger excused the Navy from its long-standing requirement to maintain 38 large-deck amphibious ships, enabling it to afford to build dozens of smaller Landing Ship Medium.

An appalled former Navy secretary and Sen. Jim Webb wrote a 2020 article in The National Interest warning that Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations was a bad strategy and would be disastrous for the Corps’ long-term future.

In the following months and years, Mr. Webb was joined by virtually every former Marine Corps commandant and most retired four-star generals in objecting to Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations. Gen. Berger and the strategy’s supporters responded by labeling the dissenters as reactionary old fogeys who were not keeping up with emerging technological developments.

It turned out that technology outpaced them in turn. Six years later, Mr. Webb’s warning has become disastrously predictive.

Chinese defensive technologies for ships and the development of long-range hypersonic missiles by the other U.S. services have rendered the subsonic Tomahawk and NMESIS systems virtually obsolete. In addition, the longer range of the new hypersonic systems obviates the need (if there ever was one) to place the small, missile-firing units envisioned by the Marine Corps inside the Chinese Weapons Engagement Zone.

There, they will be vulnerable and logistically unsupportable by the slow, lightly armed Landing Ship Medium. As a result, the U.S. Navy/Marine Corps team can no longer provide 24/7 response to small contingencies, such as disaster operations and evacuation of U.S. citizens from trouble spots.

Worse, the Marine Corps couldn’t contribute meaningfully to large regional wars such as Vietnam, Desert Storm or Iraqi Freedom.

The result of the whole Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations project has been an ongoing series of embarrassments for the U.S. Navy/Marine Corps team. The lack of adequate large-deck amphibious ships has caused the services to tell joint combatant commanders on three occasions that they could not help with fast-developing contingencies.

They could not respond to a need to evacuate American citizens in Sudan, to an earthquake in Turkey or to a quick reinforcement of the European Command when the Russia-Ukraine war broke out. For the first time in modern history, the naval services proved unready.

In addition, the Landing Ship Medium program is hopelessly behind schedule and over budget.

The two services have frantically tried to compensate for shortcomings in Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations. The Navy has redesignated the Landing Ship Medium as the Landing Ship Tank. The Marine Corps canceled the Tomahawk buy and has minimized the unrealistic ship-killing expectations; it now is integrating its excellent G/ATOR radar system into the Joint Attack Controller program.

Despite these cosmetic efforts, attempting to salvage Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations is akin to putting lipstick on a pig and giving it dance lessons. It will never be a prom queen or even be invited to the big dance.

Totally pulling the plug by canceling the NMESIS and Landing Ship Tank programs will go a long way toward allowing the Navy and Marine Corps to meet their cost-reduction mandates. The original Landing Ship Medium cost estimate was as much as $7.2 billion, and the NMESIS would likely run to $500 million.

That saved money would allow the Navy to provide big-deck shipping to get Marine Corps units to the small, fast-breaking contingencies to which it has traditionally responded and rebuild the Corps’ ability to help win big major conflicts.

It will take the two services years to get back to where they were before Gen. Berger’s installation as commandant. The only good news is that they will be able to afford real technological improvements.

• Gary Anderson retired as the chief of staff of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab. He is the author of “Beyond Mahan, A Proposal for a U.S. Naval Strategy in the Twenty-First Century.”