From Hegemony to Competition: Marine Perspectives on Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations. Edited by Matthew R. Slater. Quantico, VA: Marine Corps University Press, 2022.
Pete Ellis was promoted to Captain in the Marine Corps in 1911 and was looking for a new challenge. In search of adventure and an engagement with cutting edge technology, he asked Headquarters, Marine Corps for orders to flight school to become one of the early naval aviators. Instead, however, Commandant Biddle had a different billet that needed to be filled, and he sent the young officer off to Newport, Rhode Island to join the student body of the Naval War College. Ellis completed the summer course, as ordered, and impressed his instructors. The Navy asked the Marine Corps to leave him in place for the longer and more rigorous “winter course.” At the end of a year in Newport, the President of the War College again asked the Marine Corps to keep Ellis in place for another year so he could serve as an instructor. The Corps agreed.
During this period, the foundations were laid for the strategic mindset that would allow Ellis to become one of the leading thinkers on the future of the Marine Corps and a vital agent for change within the Corps itself. In 1911 and 1912 he wrote three papers that were compiled as “Naval Bases: Their Location, Resources, and Security” and “The Advanced Base Force” and which laid the groundwork for the Marine Corps’ amphibious transition in the years after the First World War. His time at the Naval War College introduced him to strategic thinking and created within him a keen engagement with the roles and missions of the Marine Corps which would carry through to his untimely death in 1923 and reshape the modern Marine Corps.[1]
As the Marine Corps sails further into the 21st century, the service has reached another era of reform and transformation. Like any era of significant change, it has brought with it debate and discussion across both the Corps and the wider defense establishment. The introduction of Force Design 2030, the tentative doctrine of Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations, and the concepts surrounding employment of Marine Corps formations as a “stand-in-force,” have begun reshaping the way the Marine Corps sees the future of conflict and their role in it.[2] In the new book From Hegemony to Competition, students and scholars at Marine Corps University have followed in the wake of Pete Ellis, bringing together the work of eight students from the Marine Corps Command and Staff College and the School of Advanced Warfighting to consider the implications of change and to ask critical questions about the Marine Corps’ new concepts and doctrines. In doing so, editor Matthew Slater and the team of contributors provide vital thinking on the complexities of the Marine Corps’ future, and help to identify the issues that will challenge the service's success.
When taken as a whole, the studies included in Hegemony to Competition do an excellent job of illustrating the wide expanse of topics that the Marine Corps will need to address as the service continues to develop its doctrine and concepts surrounding Force Design 2030, Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations, and the stand-in-force. From logistics to service interoperability, from alliances and partnerships to the development or redevelopment of creative Marine Corps unit structures, from the Indo-Pacific to Northern Europe, the authors offer a great deal to think about. Perhaps the greatest strength of this collection of work is that it expands the questions that are being asked and provides creative ideas about those questions. All of the authors offer solutions and recommendations, some of them more convincing than others. But the solutions are not necessarily the point. What these chapters offer is opening salvos in exchanges about these topics, hopefully engendering wider and more creative discussions in open source analysis, which can lead to clearer thinking in the classified realm as well. Additionally, the work offered here lays bare the inaccuracy of claims from those older marines and naysayers who claim that no study, wargaming, or development was done or is being done on these concepts.
The first two chapters presented revolve around the challenges and questions of logistics in the Marine Corps’ new approach to their missions. It’s a professional topic that often introduces more complexity than just thinking about tactics, but these examinations reveal that the question of logistics is itself a tactical, operational, and strategic level question. Major Staffod Bouchard examines the tactical level of resupply for the stand-in-force’s smaller and distributed units. Sustainment is always a unique challenge based on environment and available resources, and Bouchard’s discussion of the future implications of fuel, food, and power requirements reveals that while military discussions of logistics often lead with armament or ammunition, there are basic needs at the tactical level that require creative solutions and new technologies. For all the the criticism that was aimed at Secretary Ray Mabus’s “Great Green Fleet” efforts, as we enter the 2020s it becomes apparent that the same technologies that might be considered green also improve efficiency and help the sustainability of military units, not in terms of the climate crisis but for their ability to remain effective in the operational environment. Major Gloria Lueddke examines the electromagnetic spectrum and the communications and cyber needs of a distributed force of small units, itself a logistical challenge for the operational level that becomes a greater and greater necessity for Marines in the 21st century.
Secretary of the Navy, Raymond Edwin "Ray" Mabus, Jr. during a interview in his office at the Pentagon March 27, 2013. (Thomas Brown/Navy Times)
In other chapters, a pair of marines raise their eyes to the horizon to consider how marine units as a stand-in force will relate to other services as well as allies or partners in the region where they operate. These chapters also have implications for the logistical questions raised in the first part of the book. Major Nicholas Lybeck returns to the concept of seabasing, a topic that has risen and fallen in the attention of naval writers across several decades. The necessary cooperation between U.S. Navy units and planners and forward deployed marine forces becomes readily apparent as the chapter focuses on the Indo-Pacific region. Failures of maritime interoperability are plentiful in naval history, and Lybeck uses the American-British-Dutch-Australian Command (ABDACOM) example from World War II as both a topically and geographically relevant micro-case study. Examining basing and seabasing opportunities in the modern Indo-Pacific, the chapter helps flesh out several of the challenges the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps face. There is as much to learn here for the Navy as the Marine Corps, and the chapter illustrates the need for collaborative naval work as opposed to siloed individual Navy and Marine Corps work. Pulling back to an even higher strategic level, Major Marianne Sparklin examines the international aspect of the region and considers the role of allies, partners, and the future of alliance structures and security organizations. It is a massive topic for a single chapter, but Sparklin summarizes many of the key questions well and makes the key point that issues of access for marine littoral units is also an issue of diplomacy and peacetime collaboration.
The second half of Hegemony to Competition offers a wide view of use cases for stand-in-forces and implementation of Force Design 2030 concepts. Major Matthew Hart examines Marine Reconnaissance Forces and fleshes out the important tactical and operational implications of the Marine Corps’ decision to transfer the bulk of its raider and force reconnaissance capability to Special Operations Command during the post-9/11 wars. This decision may have given Marine Special Operations more cachet and the ability to contribute to national mission tasking, but Hart demonstrates that it likely severely weakened the Blue/Green Team in fulfilling the future maritime component commander’s need for reconnaissance professionals, particularly in the kinds of conflicts that Force Design 2030 envisions in the Pacific. Major Kendall Ignatz takes up similar themes while casting attention toward the question of how to balance the need for investment across the wide expanse of American military capabilities needed to confront China. Focused on efficiency in military spending, Ignatz’s analysis raises important questions for readers on whether there are more efficient ways to spend the money that is currently being appropriated. Without asking the question directly, the chapter also suggests that we should examine whether current levels of investment are meeting the needs of competition in the theater.
The final two chapters of Hegemony to Competition continue the themes of Hart and Ignatz’s work but expand the view to a global one. Shifting focus from the Indo-Pacific to the European theater, we can see that the concepts at the keel of Force Design 2030 and the new concepts of littoral maneuver have applicability to multiple potential conflicts and adversaries. Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Discoll takes Hart’s earlier examination of the types of units necessary for successful littoral operations and envisions a whole new type of marine maneuver unit based on small boats and daring sailors and marines. The chapter’s use case for small units of marines embarked on combatant craft in the littorals focuses on the Baltic and potential conflict between NATO and Russia, and offers an interesting and creative approach to guerre de razzia in the European theater. Major Andrew Luedtke examines NATO’s northern flank, looking at marines in the Arctic and making suggestions for a new approach to the region that are rooted in a solid historical look at how marines played a role in previous eras of the defense of Norway and preparation for possible war in the north.
Hegemony to Competition offers thoughtful examinations of important elements of the transition to what the 2018 National Security Strategy called a new era of great power competition and how new Marine Corps concepts continue to develop. More work needs to be done, of course. And many of the observations and recommendations offered in this book, written prior to February of 2022, would benefit from re-examination based on what we are learning from Ukrainian defense against Russia’s invasion. But this book’s great strength is the questions that it is asking, and the rigorous efforts put forth to study them. The Marine Corps has a history of leveraging its professional military education institutions at Quantico in the development of their future concepts and identity. Rooted in the experience of Pete Ellis, the development of amphibious warfare doctrine and the Small Wars Manual, and the creation and embrace of vertical envelopment and the Marine Air Ground Task Force, were all successful efforts that leveraged the creativity and insights of students in Quantico. Hegemony to Competition demonstrates that the Marine Corps continues to leverage its operationally experienced mid-career leaders to help ask the right questions and develop the creative solutions needed for the 21st century.
BJ Armstrong is a historian and Principal Associate of the Forum on Integrated Naval History and Seapower Studies. He is the author of the new book Naval Presence and the Interwar US Navy and Marine Corps: Forward Deployment, Crisis Response, and the Tyranny of History and editor of the forthcoming revised and expanded second edition of 21st Century Mahan: Sound Military Conclusions for the Modern Era. Opinions expressed here are offered in his personal and academic capacity and do not reflect the policies or views of the U.S. Navy, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.
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Header Image: A Company Leaves, Maquinaya, Philippines 1909 (Earl H. “Pete” Ellis Collection at the Archives Branch, Marine corps History Division).
Notes:
[1] B.A. Friedman, 21st Century Ellis: Operational Art and Strategic Prophecy for the Modern Era (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2015), 45-48.
[2] United States Marine Corps. Force Design 2030. (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Navy, United States Marine Corps, 2020). United States Marine Corps. Tentative Manual for Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations. (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Navy, United States Marine Corps, 2021).