The Navy faces huge hurdles in trying to get to 355 ships – but a new shipbuilding plan due in coming weeks could change the whole calculus.

The new commandant says the Corps has to start “unshackling ourselves from previous notions of what war looks like and reimagining how Marines will train, how we will operate, and how we will fight.”

The Naval Strike Missile is one tool that the Navy and Marines are looking to rely on in crafting a response to a new era of long-range threats.

“We’ve got to wrestle with ship mix and their capacity; there’s a balancing act.” 

Concerns over a new Okinawa airfield, and how to get Marines across vast swaths of ocean, are complicating American plans to spread forces across the Pacific.

The Marine Corps and Navy are moving past the insurgent wars of the past two decades and readying themselves to play a central role in countering China and Russia.

The Navy and Marine Corps are trying to buy new autonomous and unmanned systems more quickly for expeditionary ops, but as one general warned, “if I can’t sustain it, I’m hosed.”

“It would be illogical to continue to concentrate our forces on a few large ships,” the new USMC Commandant writes in his new guidance, setting decades of planning on its head. So what’s next?

Are big, expensive vessels like amphibious ships and carriers too vulnerable in a long-range missile war with Russia or China?

CAPITOL HILL: Threatened by hundreds of precision-guided munitions now in the hands of Russia and China, the Navy and Marine Corps continue to search for technologies and tactics that will allow them to operate close to the coastline without unsustainable losses. “We’re going to need long-range fires that can operate from a ship or from… Keep reading →