Marines Reorganize Infantry For High-Tech Warfare
Sydney Freedberg, Breaking Defense May 5, 2018
“Everything that Marine wears -- from their boots to their socks to their utilities to their helmet -- is all going to be changed," the Commandant said. "We've got money now to do that, and so we've got to make it happen now. We've got to make it happen now, because I'm not going to make the assumption that that money's going to be there.”
ARLINGTON: The Marine Corps is reorganizing its infantry for future high-tech conflicts in which troops must spread out to avoid the enemy’s precision-guided firepower.
To conduct such “distributed operations,” Commandant Robert Neller said last night, the Marines are adding technical experts — in drones, intelligence, supply, and other specialties — to small units so they can operate more independently of higher headquarters. The tradeoff comes in old-fashioned firepower: Infantry squads will shrink from 13 Marines to 12, and infantry battalions will have fewer heavy-duty support weapons such as 81 mm mortars and TOW anti-tank missile launchers.
Not all the changes have been finalized, but pending a formal bulletin to the force, Neller outlined the following moves to a Marine Corps Association awards banquet:
Each rifle squad will get its own quadcopter mini-drone to scout ahead and a drone operator to run it. But the squad will shrink from 13 Marines (three fire teams of four plus a squad leader) to 12 (three fire teams of three plus a command team of squad leader, assistant squad leader, and “squad systems operator”).
Every rifleman will carry the new M27 Infantry Automatic Rifle (IAR), complete with flash suppressor, instead of the lighter and less powerful M4 or M16.
Each rifle platoon will also get a specialist drone operator. They and the platoon leadership will also get the M27.
Each company headquarters will get an intelligence cell — making permanent an improvisation from Afghanistan and Iraq — as well as drone operators for reconnaissance, counter-drone specialists to defeat enemy reconnaissance, and logisticians to keep the company supplied.
Each battalion will gain a combat engineer platoon and reshuffle its weapons company. The number of anti-tank teams with shoulder-fired Javelin missiles will increase from eight to 12, and the Javelin’s range will increase with an upgraded control unit. But the number of the heavier (and older) TOW missile launchers will drop by half, from eight to four, and the number of 81 mm mortars by a quarter, from eight to six.
The weapons company will also get Polaris MRZR offroad vehicles to help haul its heavy gear. Their personnel, however, will stick with the old M4 carbine.
“I felt like we could afford to get a little bit lighter,” Neller said of the weapons company changes, speaking to reporters after the dinner, “because of what I anticipate to be the increased range and lethality of weapons and because of other capabilities I think the squad platoon and company’s going to have like Switchblade.” Switchblade is a drone that can both scout for targets and dive on them, detonating itself (or you can think of it as a missile that can do reconnaissance).
