The Marine Littoral Regiment design is taking shape:
The basic idea for the MLR is about 1,800 to 2,000 Marines and sailors – smaller than the 3,400-strong 3rd Marine Regiment operating out of Hawaii today – that would include three main elements: a Littoral Combat Team, a Littoral Anti-Air Battalion, and a Littoral Logistics Battalion, spokesman Maj. Josh Benson told USNI News.
“The Littoral Combat Team (LCT) is task-organized around an infantry battalion along with a long-range anti-ship missile battery. The LCT is designed to provide the basis for employing multiple platoon-reinforced-size expeditionary advance base (EAB) sites that can host and enable a variety of missions such as long-range anti-ship fires, forward arming and refueling of aircraft, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) of key maritime terrain, and air-defense and early warning,” he said.
“The Littoral Anti-Air Battalion is designed to train and employ air defense, air surveillance and early warning, air control, and forward rearming and refueling capabilities. The Littoral Logistics Battalion provides tactical logistics support to the MLR by resupplying expeditionary advance base sites, managing cache sites, and connecting to higher-level logistics providers,” along with also providing for medical and maintenance capabilities.
Unless the anti-ship battery has 8 firing units able to be sent off individually, a single battery seems kind of light. Otherwise the Marines rely on F-35Bs brought into those forward rearming and refueling points.
This change will mostly affect three Pacific-based Marine regiments. The Marines will retain the ability to fight on the ground, although the tanks are going away.
The Marine Corps is really going hard at supporting the fleet. This effort to build an island-based kill web will support the Navy and Air Force in gaining control of the seas near China. Although I am skeptical of the small ships the Navy wants to use to move in the Marine elements:
Sure, some of the ships could be unarmed. But as I wrote about a few years ago in Proceedings (membership required) when calling for conversions of old warships to be APDs--armed transport ships--the way the Navy used in World War II by converting old destroyers to carry a company of troops.
I argued for the ships to carry Marine Expeditionary Companies for various missions, including ground combat, anti-ship, forward air bases, and air defense.
This is experimentation, so things will change.
