U.S. Marine Corps being destroyed from within

OPINION:

My first official act as the Marine Corps officer instructor at the Naval ROTC at Vanderbilt University in 1979 was to blow up a classroom.

My predecessor had warned me that I would be teaching the evolution of warfare at the death hour (1 p.m.) after lunch, when the students were drowsy. He recommended an “attention getter.”

That day, I was lecturing on ancient Greek naval warfare and decided to use a cardboard scale model of a period warship to demonstrate the early use of fuel-air explosives. Frankly, chemistry had never been one of my strong points, and I apparently used more white gas in the mix than was needed. The resulting explosion blew the door open and set off the fire alarms.

A graduate divinity teaching assistant next door went screaming from his classroom, vowing to “never teach in the same building with that maniac again.” In my defense, no one ever fell asleep in any of my classes.

I used Jim Webb, my platoon commander at Officer Candidates School at Quantico, Virginia, in 1970, as my teaching model. At the time, he was a lieutenant just back from Vietnam and one of the most highly decorated Marines of the war. He later became a distinguished author, secretary of the Navy, a senator and a presidential candidate.

Mr. Webb was hard on us, but he led by physical and moral example. After hours, he sat us down and talked to us about combat leadership. We all expected to go to Vietnam sometime after graduation, and we listened in rapt attention. He was trying to impart lessons that would keep us alive.

I look back on my three years at “Vandy” with great pride because the product has lived past my time in the Marine Corps. The officers we produced all served honorably. Some made the Corps a career, and some went on to other things. Although several have died, I still keep in contact with most. I am proud of them all.

I wonder whether the 1987 Marine Corps officer instructor of Texas A&M feels the same way about graduating Gen. Eric Smith.

Gen. Smith, now the commandant of the Marine Corps, has been a great disappointment to former and active Marines. He probably will go down in history as the second-worst commandant in recent times. His immediate predecessor, Gen. David Berger, will likely retain that dubious distinction.

One of Gen. Smith’s first accomplishments as commandant was to have a massive heart attack while jogging in downtown Washington. That should have forced him into medical retirement, as it has many other officers in similar circumstances. Yet he somehow dodged that bullet.

Gen. Smith is a wounded and decorated war hero, but so are thousands of other Marines. A friend of mine says the Corps lost a great company commander when it made Gen. Smith commandant.

As commandant, Gen. Berger enthusiastically embraced the Biden administration’s “diversity, equity and inclusion” policies and created an extensive infrastructure to implement them. As his assistant commandant, Gen. Smith enthusiastically helped institutionalize DEI. How enthusiastic he was about doing so is irrelevant at this point.

Gen. Smith took over as Gen. Berger’s handpicked successor and altered nothing.

Everything changed when the Trump administration came in. When Gen. Smith realized that the Trump Pentagon would go after DEI, he frantically began dismantling the Corps’ DEI establishment. He could have told the press that the Biden administration had mandated DEI, and that the Marine Corps had complied, but that DEI was now being discontinued under the new management. That would have been the end of it.

Instead, Gen. Smith chose to lie. In mid-January 2025, he told an assembled group of defense reporters that the Marine Corps had never bought into DEI. The entire Marine Corps family — active, former and retired — knew this to be untrue. He diminished the credibility of the office of the commandant as he bamboozled the president and secretary of defense.

I fully expected him to be fired, along with the rest of President Biden’s woke senior military, but he has survived. If nothing else, he is a crafty, slimy politician. Gen. Smith invited Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to be the guest of honor at the ball marking the 250th anniversary of the Corps. Maybe it’s hard to fire a guy after he has flattered you that way.

I won’t go into how Gens. Berger and Smith have damaged the Marine Corps’ combat readiness; that’s the subject of other columns. What bothers me is what future Marine Corps officer instructors and Jim Webbs will tell their midshipmen and officer candidates about the likes of Mr. Smith.

Perhaps it is better to be a bad example than no example at all.

• Gary Anderson retired as 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.”