After two turns at combat in Iraq, first as invaders in the 2003 march to Baghdad and later as occupiers of landlocked Anbar province, the Marines left the country in early 2010 to reinforce the fight in southern Afghanistan. Over that stretch the Marines became what the former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, has called their own “worst nightmare’’ — a second American land army, a static, ground-pounding auxiliary force.
That’s scary for the Marines because, for some in Congress, it raises this question: Does a nation drowning in debt really need two armies?
Gen. James F. Amos, the Marine Corps commandant, says that misses the real point. He argues that the Marines, while willing and able to operate from dug-in positions on land, are uniquely equipped and trained to do much more. They can get to any crisis, on land, at sea or in the air, on a moment’s notice.
He is eager to see the Iraq and Afghanistan missions completed so the Marines can return to their traditional role as an expeditionary force.
“We need to get back to our bread and butter,’’ Amos told Marines Nov. 23 at Camp Lawton, a U.S. special operations base in Afghanistan’s Herat province.
That begins, he said, with moves such as returning to a pattern of continuous rotations of Marines to the Japanese island of Okinawa, home of the 3rd Marine Division formed in the early days of World War II. The rotation of infantry battalions to Okinawa was interrupted by the Iraq war. After the March 2003 invasion, that war evolved into a bigger, costlier and longer-lasting counterinsurgency campaign than the Pentagon or the Marines had anticipated.
Amos says he plans to begin lining up infantry battalion rotations for Okinawa even before the 2014 target date for ending U.S. combat in Afghanistan.
Another element of this return-to-our-roots approach is the decision announced in late November to rotate Marines to Australia for training with Australian forces from an Australian army base in Darwin, beginning in 2012.
Up to 2,500 Marines, infantry units as well as aviation squadrons and combat logistic battalions, will go there from Okinawa or other Marine stations in Japan and elsewhere in the Pacific for a few months at a time.
