All my adult life, I have enjoyed a sense of smug superiority over the lesser military services because of the Marine Corps’ performance in Grenada. Operation Urgent Fury was a triumph for the Marine Corps, but not for the Rangers, Delta Force, or the SEALs. Four SEALs from SEAL Team Six drowned, apparently knocked unconscious after jumping into the Gulf of America from low altitude. The SEAL Team sent to rescue the Governor General of Grenada claimed they were surrounded by enemy forces and needed immediate rescue. When a platoon of Marines arrived in their Assault Amphibious Vehicles ( AAVs), they found no enemy in the area. The Cubans or the Grenadian militia had fled when they heard the 30-ton lightly armored AAVs full of Marines from BLT 2/8 coming up the hill.
A Deta Force team had jumped into Port Salinas to secure the airfield ahead of the Rangers, but Cuban construction workers spotted them and pinned them down with heavy machinegun fire. The Rangers, following them, adapted by jumping in from less than 500 feet and sustained numerous serious jump injuries. While all this was happening, the Marines had taken their assigned objectives and were rampaging across the island. The contrast in performance was so bad that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General John Vessey, called the commander of the 82nd Airborne and said, “We have two companies of Marines running all over the island and thousands of Army troops doing nothing, what the hell is going on?”
In 1989, at the tail end of our WESTPAC deployment, our Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) blew straight through a typhoon, which caused considerable damage to the Amphibious Ready Group ships, to assist in Operation Just Cause in Panama. Despite the obvious need for our tanks, trucks, light armored vehicles, assault helicopters, and infantry, we never got into the fight.
The army didn’t want a repeat of Grenada, but they got it anyway. The Delta Force detachments performed well in that operation. The SEALs sent to secure the airfield where President Noriega’s plane was staged got their asses kicked. The Rangers once again jumped into combat from less than 500 feet, taking 1 KIA and 36 serious jump injuries in the process.
The Marine Corps contribution was limited to a couple of rifle companies from 3/6, a Light armored vehicle company from the 2nd Light Armored Infantry Battalion, a Fleet Antiterrorism platoon, and the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion. 1st Recon seized the Punta Patilla Airport, encountering fierce resistance that they easily brushed aside. The Fleet Antiterrorist Team linked up with the LAVs and started methodically knocking off Panamanian police posts.
Once again, the issue was mobility, as demonstrated by the Fleet Antiterrorism/LAV combination. Our MEU would also have demonstrated the advantages of coming ashore in our own vehicles, tanned, rested, fit, and ready to fight, rather than jumping in after flying for 9 hours, crammed into the back of C-130s and C-141s.
In the early 1990s, I was back in Quantico working at the Infantry Officer Course (IOC). The Marine Corps IOC was recognized at the time as the best entry-level infantry training in the world. I remember the staff from the Army’s infantry officer training detachment visiting during the live fire ambush exercise. Our Lieutenants had set up their ambush positions, and we were standing on a finger 100 meters away. I think the Army major from Benning thought we were pulling his leg when I pointed to their position because he couldn’t see them in the thick vegetation.
As a Marine Corps school, we had no high-speed target arrays, so we built a target sled towed by a Humvee with about 300 feet of rope. When the sled entered the kill zone, the Lieutenants cranked off a daisy chain of claymore mines and then opened up with a machine gun squad, several M249 squad automatic weapons, and rifle fire. They then withdrew behind a cloud of smoke grenades and were gone before our ears stopped ringing. I heard the army officer tell our group chief that they could never do an evolution like that with their students. When our boss explained that the Lieutenants would be in the field for the next 10 days, conducting multiple live-fire events that would progressively become more difficult, the Army dudes just shook their heads in wonder.
During the squalled doings of the Clinton administration, the officers I worked for and respected, men like my boss at IOC, John R Allen, taught us how to be professional when working for a President they could not stomach due to his proclivity for sexually assaulting low-status women. That included a female Air Force SSgt in the galley of Air Force One, whom he was forced to issue a half-assed apology. Of course, the press covered that up, but his Air Force military aide, Buzz Patterson, wrote about it in his 2003 book Dereliction of Duty. My Marine friends and I knew the Marine Corps military aide, so we heard about it in real time. I recall Major Allen being particularly disgusted by this story.
When 9/11 struck, I was retired and medically unqualified to return to active duty. I still wanted to contribute, so I signed on as a contractor working in Iraq for a few months, then in Afghanistan for 7 years. The first indication I had that trouble was brewing in the Marine Corps was hearing that Asad Khan had been relieved of command and retired. I knew that the “loss of confidence” excuse normally meant a male officer had been caught sleeping with a woman who was not his wife. I also knew that would never be a problem for Asad Khan. I heard the rumors that he was physically abusive to his subordinates, but I knew the Marine Corps well enough to dismiss that bullshit out of hand. When I ran into Asad in Kabul in late 2005 or early 2006, I didn’t ask him what happened because I sensed he had been fucked over and didn’t want to talk about it. I felt no need to press him.
I watched the Marines take over the Helmand Province with no small amount of pride. When two of my best friends were slated to deploy there in command of Regimental Combat Teams, I volunteered to serve in Lashkar Gah to manage the USAID Community Development Program. The owner of CADG was glad to send me, by 2010, competent outside the wire management was hard to find, given the enthusiasm with which the Taliban targeted rural aid workers. When Regimental Combat Team(RCT) 2 was replaced by RCT 8 the RCT 2 Commander, Colonel Paul Kennedy, warned me to stay away from the Command Post on Delaram II. “Timmy RCT 8 is commanded by Eric Smith, and he still irons his skivvies; stay away from him”. That was all the warning I needed. I also stayed away from the headquarters of Major General John Toolan in Camp Leatherneck. He had replaced my friend Larry Nicholson, and I had heard he was a clichés-spewing lightweight.
The picture above, which I blogged about here, verified that assessment. Why would a Marine Corps general officer put on a Shalwar Kamise and dance around like a Bacha bazi boy? Why would he invite the governor of Halmand Province into his crappy ass “cultural center” to celebrate the success of his year-long deployment? If security had improved that dramatically, why not go to the governor’s compound and eat real Afghan food in a real Afghan room and then dance around like a chimp chump?
It was mind-boggling, but I was still proud of the Marine Corps because they were stacking bodies, which seemed to me about all they could do given Obama’s inability to explain why we were still in Afghanistan.
Now I have retired Army guys writing me on Substack to offer encouragement as we watch the Marine Corps wither on the vine due to colossal mismanagement enabled by the Great Awokening. How did this happen? How did my Marine Corps mentor, General John R Allen, go from despising Bill Clinton to endorsing Hillary Clinton on National TV during a democratic convention? He was one of many who patiently explained that it was our sacrosanct duty to follow the duly elected President, but that noble sentiment went MIA when President Trump won his first term.
Trump 45 made a serious error in judgment when he brought two of John Allen’s closest friends, John Kelly and Jim Mattis, into his administration. Hiring a former 4-star and the chief of staff was silly. Four-star generals aren’t capable of personally handling the detailed workload of a Presidential Chief of Staff; they’re accustomed to having a large staff doing the work for them. Jim Mattis ended his career as the Commander of CENTCOM with John Allen as his Deputy Commander. Allen’s vigorous trashing of Trump should have served as a warning that Mattis was as reliable as the CIA, which manipulated intelligence to fabricate a story of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign.
During the dark years of President Trump’s first term and the disastrous Biden Administration, the Marine Corps charged ahead with DEI programs and a bizarre divest to invest in the Force Design 2030 plan that gutted its capabilities. The highly credentialed managerial class and their four-star adjuncts were convinced that we need to “pivot to the Pacific” and allow the “pacing threat” to dictate our future force design and emergent capabilities. None of them paid heed to the folly of predicting the future outlined by Lin Wells in his famous note to George Bush, ” Thoughts for the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review.”
And then along came Trump 47, who had learned his lesson and placed competent people into key cabinet positions. Has there ever been a better Secretary of State than Marco Rubio? Pete Hegseth has stunned the dour pundits and think tank gurus with the only metric that matters, operational success. A fish rots from the head, and despite the evident rot inside the bloated flag officer ranks, the recent Venezuelan operation revealed that the competence of our warfighters remains.
The Russian-supplied integrated air defense system Venezuela had mortgaged its future to acquire proved to be useless. The constant carping of the credentialed defense elites that helicopters and big-deck Amphibious ships were obsolete demonstrated not prescience but arrogance and hubris. Only the forces flowing off those amphibious ships were not Marines; they were Tier 1 Special Forces. The helicopters that flew them into Venezuela were not Marine birds; they were the Nightstalker’s from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. elf of the combat enablers that made it the world’s premier ground combat force.
President Trump has just handed the military its first unambiguous victory since Operation Iraqi Freedom rolled over Saddam’s military over twenty years ago, without getting the US sucked into a quagmire. While the Secretary of War focused on lethality, the Marine Corps introduced a new PT test that allows pull-ups to be optional. The Marines now say that women take the same physical fitness test as men under the mistaken belief that nobody will notice the decrease in standards.
Trump has shown (again) that elite certainty is not the same thing as elite credibility. After 20 years spent replacing the Taliban, the Taliban rank no longer confers automatic credibility—they must be earned through accountability and demonstrated learning from past failures. The Joint Special Operations Command has apparently learned a thing or two over the past 20 years. Pete Hegseth has learned the wisdom behind punitive raids and operational security.
The Marine Corps has learned how to reduce standards, organize Littoral Regiments built to deploy on naval ships that have not been funded and will never be built. They have sacrificed tube artillery for anti-ship rockets that will never be built, as they are already obsolete. They no longer have a medium assault helicopter; instead, they rely on the Ospreys, which are not suited for tactical operations in hot landing zones. The Marine Corps is committing seppuku and can only be saved by replacing the dead wood with serious warfighters who can do more pullups than my tired old ass. And I can easily do 10 dead hangs – 15 if there are cute girls in the gym. We need a few good men at the top of the Corps who can do 20 dead hang pullups, a standard every active duty Marine once strived to meet. Aspirational leadership can only be provided by men who are what other men want to be: smart, dedicated, fit, and loyal to the Marines below them.
