In the May 2018 U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, Navy Captain Dale Rielage published a “future history,” written as a first-hand account of a defeated Pacific Fleet Commander in the 2025 timeframe. Titled “How We Lost the Great Pacific War,” Rielage’s article was superb—thought-provoking, well-researched, and forcefully argued. The alternative future history below is intended to provide a more optimistic view, and another potential path.
10 November 2027
Commandant –
I just finished the final command interviews for our Great Pacific War archives. With our Navy partners, we have sent to the printer “The Naval History of the Great Pacific War, 2025–2026” that we previously reviewed with the CNO in his office. We all know that you remain laser focused on resetting the force after our extensive losses, and on grieving with the families still recovering their lost Marines and Sailors. I am writing to offer some optimism. After all, while the struggle still simmers, we won the first round.
Importantly, the Joint Force’s success—as always—occurred within an overarching political and strategic context. As one of your retired warhorses, please allow me a small amount of latitude to speak freely: the contribution of serious statesmen and strategists cannot be overstated. They were critical actors in assuring the competitive advantages so important to our recent success, and in providing the strategic design. Our margins of victory were razor thin and could not have been delivered absent their leadership and discernment in national security policy.
Before going further, I want to note that the Army and the Air Force also made essential contributions to this campaign—many central to the execution of successful actions credited to the naval services. I will focus below on the Navy and Marine Corps, but it would be a disservice if we fail to acknowledge that this was a true joint fight.
The enduring influence of previous Commandants’ emphasis on naval integration—along with their CNO counterparts—was instrumental to the recent operational successes of Navy and Marine Corps, but I concede that initially it was bitter medicine for many of us. I regret being one of the naysayers. From the mid-1990s, through the late-2010s, Marines relished our MARFORs (Marine Corps forces)—coequal service components within the COCOMs. Your predecessors forced us to double-down on our roles as fleet Marine forces (FMF)—subordinate to the fleet commanders as one of their type commands often at the expense of our more prominent MARFOR roles. In many ways, I credit this simple act of professional humility as the essential precondition for all other actions foundational to our success. Those Marines that succeeded and excelled in this fleet Marine force role were critical to convincing the Navy that the Marine Corps was serious about naval operational art and integrated naval capability. For many of us, the emphasis on Marine air-ground task force (MAGTF) support to sea control was too far of a departure from our comfort zone of power projection operations and sustained operations ashore (most especially counterinsurgency). We did not fully appreciate that this emphasis on fighting as a fleet Marine force and supporting sea control created new imperatives for power projection and sustained operations ashore, and that it was not necessarily limiting. Truly, your predecessors returned the Marine Corps to our reason for being as “soldiers of the sea.”
General Neller and Admiral Richardson were responsible for the publication of operational concepts that provided the intellectual foundation for years of naval wargaming, experimentation, exercises, and analysis. “Distributed Maritime Operations, Littoral Operations in a Contested Environment” and “Expeditionary Advance Base Operations” were billed as “a family of concepts” and they provided a framework for conceptual alignment that created true synergy for Sailors and Marines fighting afloat and ashore. In one of the most challenging operational environments ever, sailors and Marines, fleets and Marine expeditionary forces, applied integrated capabilities across the maritime, land, air, space, cyber, and electro-magnetic domains. They created operational advantage with powerful options for maneuver, sensing, and weapons delivery widely distributed across these domains. They exploited the advantages of fleet maneuver with “unsinkable ships” operating ashore. These “unsinkable ships” were small, mobile, and lethal MAGTFs, Navy expeditionary combat commands (NECCs), and special operations forces teams that, from locations ashore, extended the reach of Fleet weapons and sensors into highly contested areas. These “unsinkable ships” were also the ever-shifting expeditionary airfields that MAGTF and NECC enablers used to quickly “turn” naval and joint tactical air and unmanned aerial system assets in forward locations, to provide greater benefit from every sortie that transited long-ranges into their objective areas. Through tremendous focus and some cost, Pacific Fleet and Fleet Marine Forces-Pacific maintained these teams in a state of readiness, and used them to quickly reinforce our traditional forward-deployed, forward-engaged forces. We take it for granted now, because we have gotten good at combining combat power and capabilities across all domains, but realizing this vision required exhausting, demanding exercises and experimentation over many years. Your predecessors’ vision, and that of former CNOs, paid off.
Of course, your predecessors fought more than a “culture war: about the identity and role of the Marine Corps. They had to change the service’s investment strategy to balance between sea control, power projection, crisis response, and sustained operations ashore capability and capacity. Changes in investments were often accompanied by significant changes in MAGTF composition and design. The debates centered on this balance were brutal, and took a heavy toll on many senior Marines, and, sadly, many of their friendships. Even today, these debates are being rejoined as forward-thinking Marines consider what is next. In many ways, this debate and the one now being revitalized are reminiscent of the post–World War I debate on whether the Marine Corps should focus on small wars like the early 20th-century Banana Wars, sustained operations ashore like Marine Corps participation in WWI ground action in France, or amphibious operations in support of the Navy’s pre-World War II War Plan Orange.
The CNO and his predecessors faced the same cultural challenges and investment debates inside the Navy. Like Marines who had lost sight of FMF responsibilities, many Sailors had lost sight of naval operational art above the carrier strike group level, including the application of fleet components—with fleet Marine forces—at the fleet and multi-fleet levels. The reinvigoration of naval operational art at the fleet level and above, in the operational context of the 2020s, presented significant challenges to preferred capabilities and resourcing strategies. When previous Commandants committed Marine Corps funding to required amphibious shipping survivability systems, the C2 systems necessary for a more complete MAGTF and amphibious ship integration into Naval Integrated Fires, and land-based maritime fires to increase fleet lethality, their CNO counterparts often met them halfway. These enhanced capabilities provided a true operational multiplier for the fleet, embarked MAGTFs, and MAGTFs ashore, but these enhancements also cost both the Navy and Marine Corps treasured capacity in other areas. For a relatively small investment compared to the investment already made in the ships, amphibious shipping upgrades provided additional fleet capacity for distributed sensing, information warfare, fires, C2, logistics, and the employment and recovery of unmanned systems. Land-based antiship units hunted in small, mobile packs from locations ashore, and they created real advantage for the main effort action executed by the fleets. As in the Marine Corps, the debates inside the Navy about shifts in resourcing strategies were difficult and hard fought, and previous CNOs and Commandants likely would not have been able to advance these initiatives without strong operations analysis, wargaming, and experimentation. The same dynamics and challenges were present as both CNOs and Commandants inserted into their programs increasingly artificial intelligence-enabled, autonomous and unmanned systems that led to divestment of treasured manned system capacity. In retrospect, it is now clear that Third Offset Strategy initiatives of the mid-2010s were foundational to developing many of the capabilities required to operate in this manner. We are fortunate to have had service and department leaders of vision and conviction, because these investments paid off.
This recent fight in the Pacific also highlighted the strengths that are truly unique and advantageous with Navy-Marine Corps integration. Most importantly, it is not a novelty or an episodic event, it is enduring. Naval operational integration is built on conceptual, technical, and fiscal alignment, as well as the purposeful posturing of partnered headquarters and formations that routinely plan, coordinate, train, and operate together. Joint integration has expanded considerably—as it should in an era of networked weapons and sensors—but Navy-Marine Corps integration still is unique within this environment. Over the past eight years, the evolution of integrated naval capability was particularly challenging because it required moving from capable carrier and expeditionary strike groups, complemented by Marine expeditionary units and Marine expeditionary brigades, all the way to integrated, multi-fleet, and multi-MEF training and operations. That the Navy and Marine Corps were successful in scaling training and operations to this level is testament to the will and intellect of our Marines and Sailors when confronted with a significant strategic challenge.
While the greatest attention has been paid to combat operations in the Indo-Pacific region, the global operational reach of the naval services also was critical to imposing costs, stripping away key Chinese assets in locations at significant distance from the Indo-Pacific area of operations (AO), and sustaining our alliance and partner network. In operations in the AO, and in more distant locations, our allies and partners made important contributions. A few allies brought key capabilities to the fight, well-integrated into U.S. joint force operations, but most suffered from a lack of command, control, communications, and intelligence integration borne of capability development complexity, bureaucracy, and expense. Some allies and partners simply provided critical access, and those that allowed the U.S. joint force access paid a real price in economic isolation from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the early-2020s, during the period of rising regional tensions, followed by large-scale physical damage from PRC kinetic strikes once the shooting started. It is unimaginable that the Indo-Pacific commander’s campaign design—or the design of the other combatant commands that supported Pacific Command—could have been successfully executed without our allies and partners. Their role was important as the Secretary of Defense sought tools to “compete below the threshold of conflict,” which allowed the joint force time and space to set conditions for ultimate success. Their role was nothing short of essential once the shooting started. Like the United States, they now face the daunting task of rebuilding, but the damage to their countries is far greater than the damage that we suffered from the PRC’s cyber destruction of key elements of our critical infrastructure.
Surely the PRC leadership was surprised, after years of violating international norms and the rule of law, when the international community called their hand in the South and East China seas and resolved to keep open international air and sea space in the Western Pacific. The Chinese had been so effective in forward-posturing military capabilities on reclaimed South and East China sea islands that it was extremely difficult to close the Joint Force over the extended ranges of the Pacific. The forward-deployed posture of Seventh Fleet and III MEF, their shaping actions across the region in the late 2010s and early 2020s, and their ability to transition quickly into an operationally advantageous posture are hallmarks of the skillful application of forward-deployed, forward-engaged naval forces. Seventh Fleet and III MEF paid a horrible price in the early days of the conflict; but they also won the first fights and forever will be celebrated for their heroic and decisive action.
We are close to finalizing our anthology of concurrent naval operations in the Mediterranean and Black sea regions, as well as the Middle East. The Army and Air Force are writing similar histories to address operations in the Baltics and Middle East. I fear that, before it is all done, we will have more histories and anthologies to write. I am humbled and honored to tell the story of our brave and selfless Marines and Sailors.
Very respectfully, and Semper Fidelis,
J. BUCKLE
BGen, USMC (Ret)
Director, Marine Corps History Division
