The Corps is Shrinking!

What happened to my Corps?  Did anyone notice that we're shrinking? 

It was a tough winter for us.  First we lost the EFV in January, then in March of this year we released the Report of the 2010 Force Structure Review Group and in it the Corps did two big things, we'll see if they're both good.  Basically, we're going from 202k to 186k, reserves still stay roughly 40k. 

1.  We reshaped for the future (politically correct term for changed)....that's good.  Even though we were in Iraq for 8 years and we are still in Afghanistan after 10 years, we will eventually get back to ships and amphibious operations with relatively small (MEU/BLT/Squadron) units.

2.  We offered up 16,000 Marines to the evil forces of DoD shrinkage.  (I have a sneaky suspicion the evil forces of DoD shrinkage will want more eventually.)

If you pull up the link and look at the report, skip to the back for the real meat of what we will gain and what we will lose.  Here are some of the winners and losers:

1.  Artillery Battalions:  11 to 9
2.  Infantry Battalions:  27 to 24
3.  Flying Squadrons:  70 to 61
4.  Reduce Marine Wing Support Group HQ's: 3 to 0
5.  Increased Cyber structure (250 Marines)
6.  Inscreased Marine Special Ops (1,000 Marines)
7.  Reduced civilian structure (about 2,900)
8.  Increase civil affairs groups: 3 to 5
9.  Increase air and naval gunfire liaison companies: 2 to 3

There are others too...look at the report.  Some changes are already starting next FY. 

There are a couple themes in this:
1.  We need very capable, deployable battalion/squadon/MEU sized units, so we didn't take a big hit in training establishment we took a hit in the OpFor.
2.  War is changing, we need to be able to deploy quickly.  (less artillery and tanks)
3.  Integration, Liaison, and standing relationships are important.  (Standing MEB's oriented to geographic commands, standing Combat Logistics Battalions relationships with regiments and MEU's, more artillery/naval gunfire liaison companies)

But the potentially biggest deal is to build five standing Marine Expeditionary Brigade headquarters that are oriented to a geographic command.  These staffs will come from some MEF staff structure and some MARFOR staff structure.  I haven't seen yet how closely they'll work with the CoCOM's, if they will be the defacto MARFOR-fill-in-the-blank so the three stars don't have to wear four or five hats, or what.

The ink is still wet on this, (March this year) and we might have to revisit in light of budget talks.....who knows where that will go, at least we've put some marker down for our capabilities post-Afghanistan.