A cheery huzzah! goes out to General Eric Smith, the newish commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps. This week Marine Corps headquarters released his first “Commandant’s Planning Guidance” to the service, setting forth his priorities for his tenure. Read the whole thing. Hearteningly, the directive vows to stay the course with “Force Design,” the effort formerly known as “Force Design 2030.” Initiated by General Smith’s predecessor, General David Berger, Force Design aims to reinvent the Marine Corps for nascent operational and strategic realities.

Realities such as island warfare in the Western Pacific.

Facing down today’s paramount challenges means confronting China, and it means restoring the marines to their past as an integral part of U.S. Navy fleet operations. Marines will work alongside the fleet and fraternal joint forces to deny an aggressor access to allied soil and the seas and skies adjoining it. Mapped onto Asia’s first island chain, this American-style access-denial strategy would bar the straits whereby shipping and aircraft pass from the China seas into the Western Pacific and back. Joint and allied forces would hold sovereign terrain while transforming the island chain into a barricade to Chinese maritime movement.

To enforce the barricade, bodies of missile-toting troops stationed on the islands would cut loose against approaching People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy and Air Force units, not to mention China’s merchant fleet, while also scouting on behalf of friendly maritime forces. Littoral action would convert nearby sea and air space into a killing ground—much as the waters washing against the Ukrainian seacoast verge on no-go territory for the Russian Black Sea Fleet these days.

Access denied.

Deployments........

© The National Interest