But modernizing the Army will take decades and tough decisions about everything from online propaganda to the National Guard.

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 →

“For far too long, Russia has violated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with impunity,” a statement from the White House said. Moscow has refused to admit that it has for years been “covertly developing and fielding a prohibited missile system that poses a direct threat to our allies and troops abroad.”

“The Army is looking at this too but probably on a different timeline — the Marine Corps wants to get after this pretty quickly.”

It’s a major shift after decades in which submarines focused on projecting power ashore, with their only anti-ship weapons being their rarely-used torpedoes. Driving the change: increasing anxiety about China.

As President Trump pushes Beijing on trade and cyber espionage, the United States and China are on a collision course. The U.S. urgently needs a new strategy to avoid the traditional fate of rising and status quo powers: catastrophic war.

The concepts the Warfighting Lab comes up with aren’t holy writ, but rather a baseline for young Marines to build on, “a point from which to deviate,” said Maj. J.B. Persons, a special projects officer at MCWL. “Give Marines new tools or toys, and they’ll surprise you every time.”

China’s increasingly aggressive rise puts the Pacific theater in play in a way it hasn’t been since 1945. In this essay, Singaporean scholar Ben Ho Wan Beng and retired US Marine Gary Lehmann look at what a critical but overlooked World War II battle has to tell us about the potential strengths — and weaknesses — of the Marine Corps’s new concept for waging the next Pacific war. — the editors

The Marines want new missiles for multiple missions: attacking enemy aircraft, ships at sea, and ground targets. But getting them on a tight budget will require working closely with the Army and Navy.

“We’ve started getting together for breakfast every week or two,” said Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson, “just the three of us. It’s absolutely terrifying the staffs.”