The Marines are changing how they train Marines. I think this change will help Marines adapt to the day when precision weapons reach even the lowliest militia personal firearms.
Marine Corps leaders have their eyes on the kind of combat that a war against an adversary such as China or Russia could bring, and they are training their troops to be prepared for that fight by building better-thinking, more well-rounded infantrymen capable of operating in small units with little oversight.
The Corps wants to create infantrymen who will arrive at their first duty station with the critical and creative thinking skills of Marines several years into their career, instead of the robot-like, trigger-pullers that some have accused the service of producing in its longstanding entry-level infantry course, Marine officials said last week.
I think this will be useful against insurgents and militias, too, although that threat is not as close as the threat of Russia and China.
I recently brought up this change in training and noted that it is partly related to the rise of precision rifles. The article I referenced in that post was more related to dispersed Marine operations on Pacific islands and littoral regions. But the focus on battling China and Russia raises the aspect of the change related to infantry combat.
And that fight against other infantry what I was focused on in the USNI Blog a few years ago:
The May 1972 “Battle of the Bridges” in which U.S. aircraft destroyed targets that had long resisted dumb munitions announced the arrival of a new precision method of waging war that promised “If you can see it, you can hit it. If you can hit it, you can destroy it.” That was described as the first phase of a revolutionary change in the nature of warfare.[22] That battle won with expensive but effective “remotely piloted munitions” fired from expensive planes by expensively and extensively trained air crews has filtered down to the level of rifles carried by even ill-trained individual fighters. Will U.S. Marines be prepared to win on such a battlefield of tomorrow?
Yes, technology will still give U.S. Marines a competitive shooting advantage if Marines have expensive guided rounds while enemy combatants have cheaper DBC[*] rifles. But the relative edge based on technology will be smaller than the current advantage produced by trained soldiers firing single aimed shots versus ill-trained enemies firing full auto with little thought to aiming. Just as air crews, ship captains, and tankers have adapted to precision fire capabilities, Marine infantry must now adapt to the same challenges to ensure battlefield dominance.
Every Marine will still be a rifleman with this expanded training. But eventually a lot of that status will be standard issue within the weapon the Marines carry. Enemies like China and Russia will have some form of them, too. And even militias and insurgents will have them, even if less capable.
Kudos to the Marines. Will the Army follow to ensure battlefield dominance?
*DBC, or dumb but controlled, is a term for precision-aimed but non-guided rounds that I coined for the article.
