Twelve amphibious combat vehicles will arrive at the Okinawa, Japan-based 4th Marine Regiment in July, Col. Tim Hough, the Corps’ program manager for advanced amphibious assault, said on Wednesday at the Modern Day Marine conference in Washington.

“That’s important because now we’ll be in distinct geographical locations,” Hough said, adding that the Corps was ready to handle the challenges that would arise from having the amphibious combat vehicles spread out for the first time.

The update about the movement of vehicles to Japan was one of several the Corps and manufacturer BAE Systems unveiled at the Modern Day Marine conference.

BAE Systems already has fielded 184 amphibious combat vehicles to the Marine Corps, but only to the 3rd Assault Amphibian Battalion and the Assault Amphibian School, both located at Camp Pendleton, California, according to Hough.

The amphibious combat vehicle allows Marines to travel from the Navy’s amphibious ships to shore and then roll onto land. It is replacing the amphibious assault vehicle, which had been in service since the 1970s.

After the amphibious combat vehicles were involved in multiple rollovers in 2022, in which no injuries were reported, the Marine Corps temporarily pulled them from operations in the surf zone. The service determined the mishaps happened because Marines hadn’t gotten sufficient training on how the amphibious combat vehicle differed from its predecessor vehicle, which has tracks rather than wheels, a flatter hull and a smaller size, among other design differences.

In 2023, the Marine Corps started recertifying vehicle operators and maintainers based on a new training curriculum.

The amphibious combat vehicle program is set to hit a few other milestones in the coming years.

The command-and-control-focused variant is scheduled to reach initial operating capability in fiscal year 2024′s third quarter, which ends July 1, according to Hough. The Corps expects the variant with a 30-mm cannon will reach initial operational capability in 2026, Hough said.

The assistant Marine commandant, Gen. Christopher Mahoney, said in January that amphibious combat vehicles would deploy with the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit from California in the spring.

Outfitting vehicles with new tech

At the same Modern Day Marine trade show where Hough delivered his update, the company showed off the amphibious combat vehicle variant with the 30-mm cannon — this time equipped with an integrated combat system, which takes in information from sensors linked to other platforms and gathers it all on one interface.

The idea is to assemble information instantaneously through a network rather than relying on radio communication, said Garrett Lacaillade, vice president of amphibious vehicles at BAE Systems.

When BAE Systems demonstrated the system from within the vehicle on Monday, the sensors were filming from drones and other platforms at locations around the trade show. The sensor arrayed the live feeds of exhibitors’ booths and unsuspecting attendees on one screen, as in a Zoom call.

After BAE Systems’ Jesse Swangnete selected a target on the screen, the cannon moved to the appropriate angle.

Lacaillade said the Marine Corps seems “interested” in the system but has not yet issued any contract.

Junior Marines have tested out the system, though, and they have been able to figure out how to operate it with a few hours of training, according to Swangnete.

“They’ve grown up with the Xbox mentality,” he said.

In unveiling the name, Carlos Del Toro called back to his late 2022 announcement that the America-class amphibious assault ship LHA-9 would be named the USS Fallujah, after the Marines who fought in the first and second battles of Fallujah and more broadly who served in Iraq.

Naming a ship for Helmand province will recognize “the bravery and sacrifice of our Marines and our sailors who fought for almost 20 years in the mountains of Afghanistan,” Del Toro said in his remarks at the Modern Day Marine conference in Washington.

Trish Smith, the wife of Marine Commandant Gen. Eric Smith, will serve as the ship’s sponsor. She will see the ship through all its construction-related milestones and support the ship and its crew once it joins the fleet and begins operating around the world.

The Navy awarded HII’s Ingalls Shipbuilding a $130 million contract in November 2023 to begin buying long-lead materials for the ship.

Smith gave an emotional accounting of the meaning of the ship’s name on Thursday, following the secretary’s announcement.

He called the region — which was the focus of Marines’ operations that at its height involved a full Marine expeditionary force forward, and more than 19,000 Marines and sailors — “the heart of the opium trade, a Taliban stronghold, and a terrain as rugged and formidable as any on earth.”

“And yet, it was there that our Marines and sailors and allies and partners showed what it means to be at the tip of the spear,” Smith said. “It was there that another generation of warriors added to the storied history of our Marine Corps.”

Smith spoke of Medal of Honor recipient Cpl. Kyle Carpenter, who used his body to shield others from a grenade explosion in Marjah, Afghanistan, on Nov. 21, 2010.

He spoke of Sgt. Christopher Farias, who refused treatment for his wounds when his patrol base was ambushed in 2010 in Kajaki, Afghanistan. With fragmentation from a 73 mm recoilless rifle in his neck and shoulder, Farias climbed to a rooftop to coordinate his Marines’ fire and maneuver to repel the assault, in “true Marine fashion,” Smith said.

And the commandant spoke of Lance Cpl. Donald Hogan, who was patrolling a road on Aug. 26, 2009, when he spotted an insurgent preparing to detonate a roadside bomb. He protected a nearby Marine from the blast and remained in the blast zone to warn fellow Marines. Hogan died in the explosion, but he saved the rest of his squad.

“Three hundred and sixty-six Marines would lose their lives to hostile action in Afghanistan during the years of the Helmand campaign, and almost 5,000 more were wounded,” Smith said.

But beyond fights on the battlefield, the commandant said they trained Afghan counterparts, supported local governance and helped develop infrastructure.

“As we reflect on these years of hard-fought victories and painful losses, it is crucial to remember why we fought,” Smith said. “Our mission was to deny a safe haven to terrorists who would harm the United States, and support the Afghan people in their quest for peace and stability. It was about what they might one day become.”

Smith did not directly address the fall of Kabul in 2021 or the emotional reaction by many Marines who had served there and families of those who died there.

But the commandant told the audience, “The legacy of our Marines in Helmand is not defined merely by the ground that was gained or lost, but by the spirit they embodied and the lives they touched. They fought with honor, they served with compassion, they led by example, and they made a difference in this world.”

To the families of the fallen, Smith said, “Through the naming of LHA-10 as the USS Helmand Province, your sacrifices will never be forgotten and their legacy will endure through the generation of Marines that follow.”

Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps Carlos Ruiz said in a video posted to Instagram on Thursday, “This name not only honors the battles won and the successes of our units in the Helmand province, but it also honors the names of those who left blood, sweat, tears and even their lives on the battlefield. The stories of what Marines did in combat are epic and more often today are not shared enough.”

The legacy of the fighting in Helmand, Afghanistan, is personal for Ruiz, the senior enlisted Marine.

On Oct. 28, 2009, he was the first sergeant for Lima Company within 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines, in the province, he said in the video.

That day, he was the vehicle commander of a shock trauma platoon. While he was on his way to recover Marines who had been wounded by improvised explosive device attacks, the vehicle that was supposed to clear his way to the landing zone also was hit.

A Marine kicked open the hatch of the vehicle and pointed at Ruiz with his minesweeper. Undaunted by whatever injuries he may have sustained in the recent blast, the Marine told Ruiz to follow him to the landing zone, and he cleared the way.

There were 11 casualties from the explosions that day, ranging from routine injuries to deaths, the sergeant major said.

“It’s a story for me that I’ll never forget,” Ruiz said, adding, “Thousands of you have your own stories to tell.”

Marine veteran Cole Lyle, who served in Helmand province as a diesel mechanic and wrecker operator and volunteered at Camp Bastion’s trauma hospital, said in a statement to Marine Corps Times on Thursday, “Today’s announcement gives those Marines and partners that served in Helmand an ironclad symbol of our victories; a permanent memorial honoring our collective losses; and a commemoration of the individual experiences and unbreakable personal bonds we forged in fire.”

“I’ll be proud to point at the U.S.S. Helmand one day and tell my son about the Corps’ role in Afghanistan and some of my personal heroes who served there,” he added.

Editor’s note: This story was updated at 4:30 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday with comment from Lyle.

As the Marine Corps’ budget chief sees it, one reason was years of spending more on weapons systems than on quality of life.

“For too long, because we were taking risk in those types of initiatives in order to buy the weapons systems, they became more and more in disrepair,” Lt. Gen. James Adams, the deputy Marine commandant for programs and resources, said about the barracks at a panel discussion Wednesday at the Modern Day Marine conference in Washington.

As the land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were ending, the Marine Corps began to prepare for the next big conflict, which it anticipated might be a faceoff with the powerful Chinese military in the Indo-Pacific. In 2020, then-Commandant Gen. David Berger launched the Force Design initiative to update the Corps’ structure, training and platforms for that potential fight.

Meanwhile, the barracks were in bad shape.

A Government Accountability Office report in September 2023 found widespread problems, such as mold and water issues, in barracks across the military. Media reports in ensuing months highlighted dilapidated, moldy, vermin-infested and otherwise insufficient barracks in the Marine Corps.

Commandant Gen. Eric Smith, who took the helm of the Corps in summer 2023, has made improving the barracks a top priority.

As part of the Barracks 2030 initiative, the Marine Corps plans to consolidate Marines in the better buildings and demolish the worse ones, install professional barracks managers and spend more money on restoring barracks. In February, the Corps ordered each barracks room to be inspected “wall to wall” so it could gather data about the problems and fix some of them immediately.

In response to a Marine Corps Times question about who was at fault for the previous underinvestment in barracks, Adams said, “I wouldn’t say it’s a fault.”

Previously, the Corps had spent approximately $200 million a year toward maintaining and modernizing its living facilities, he said. That wasn’t enough to stave off the degradation that happens to buildings over time.

But it was hard to justify receiving additional funds for barracks, especially as the force shrank as the military withdrew from Middle East wars, according to Adams.

“We didn’t have the data to say, ‘How are we tracking the facilities’ condition in detail to defend more than $200 million a year for that?’” Adams said. “But we did have the data to say, ‘We need this Force Design weapons system or this modernized vehicle or this modernized weapon platform.’”

For fiscal year 2025, the Marine Corps is seeking from Congress $274 million for restoring barracks, a $65 million increase, and it has signaled via its budget wish list that it would like a further $230 million for that effort.

One major asked the panelists, who had a collective eight stars on their shoulders, if any Marine leaders would be held formally accountable for the problems with the barracks, which he characterized as “systemic” and “organizational.”

“I’m the organizational failure that happened,” said Maj. Gen. David Maxwell, who has served as commander of Marine Corps Installations Command since July 2022.

Maxwell said he had been unable to communicate the state of the barracks to senior Marine leadership because he had been limited by having merely anecdotal data. That changed after his command launched the Corps-wide inspection, which determined approximately half of barracks rooms were only “partially mission-capable,” meaning they had fallen short in at least one aspect of living standards.

Asked by Marine Corps Times why the Corps hadn’t assembled the necessary data on the barracks earlier, Adams said, “We didn’t have the tools that we needed to actually collect up the data and to organize it in a way that’s usable.”

Those advanced analytics tools include the big-data platform Advana, Adams said. The Defense Department has used that tool for some purposes since at least 2019, according to congressional testimony.

To some observers of the Marine Corps’ modernization plans, that sounds familiar.

In a fight with the Chinese military, the Corps wants Marines to move from place to place near shore in stealthy groups, working with the Navy to monitor and block enemy vessels.

The Houthis, Iran-backed rebels in Yemen, have followed similar tactics in their attacks on ships in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.

From outposts on land, the Houthis figure out the locations of ships and then launch drones and fire anti-ship missiles at them, explained Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. Then they move to another location, making it harder to track them.

In order to launch counterattacks, the U.S. military has to engage in “very aggressive, persistent surveillance and targeting,” Clark said.

The Houthis lack some of the Marines’ capabilities — in electronic warfare, for instance, Clark said.

“But still, I think it’s an example of the kind of operation that the Marines are trying to pursue,” Clark said. “And the Houthis have done it pretty effectively with a much less sophisticated force.”

The U.S. Navy and coalition fleets have managed to block most Houthi attacks on ships — but at a high cost. The warships have launched missiles that cost millions to intercept Houthi drones worth just thousands of dollars.

Meanwhile, many commercial ships are making lengthy diversions around the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa to avoid transiting the Red Sea. The rebel group has said it is launching the attacks in solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza.

The Houthis’ attacks come as the Marine Corps is four years into its ambitious plan to overhaul the force to counter a naval power like China, after spending decades waging land wars. The service intends for Marines to be lighter, more dispersed, and better at tracking enemies while avoiding being tracked themselves.

The plan, called Force Design, has attracted criticism from a group of retired Marine leaders, although it has largely secured the support of decision-makers in the Pentagon and Congress. The group of retirees claims the Corps made cuts and other changes with insufficient evidence, while current Marine leaders have argued that experiments, exercises and wargames back up their decisions.

“A lot of people have said, ‘The Marines aren’t going to be able to pull off these distributed operations inside the weapons engagement zone of an adversary like China,’” said Marine Lt. Col. Travis Hord, a student at the Joint Advanced Warfighting School who previously worked on future concept and capability development for the Marine Corps.

“I think what the Houthis are showing is that you might be able to do that, because they’ve been able to do it against us to some degree.”

In Hord’s view, while the Houthis’ operations are “not an absolute validation” of Force Design concepts, they show a land-based force equipped with sensors and missiles can pose dramatic challenges to ships.

Hord, who emphasized he was not speaking on behalf of the Marine Corps, is one of six Marines and Marine veterans who drew parallels between Force Design and the Houthis’ operations in January in a War on the Rocks piece defending the Corps’ modernization plan.

Another of the essay’s co-authors, Lt. Col. Zach Ota, stressed that the U.S. military would not emulate the Houthis’ mission of disrupting trade, even as it might learn from their tactics.

“We are the upholders of freedom in the Pacific and of open commerce in the maritime commons,” said Ota, an operations planner with U.S. Pacific Fleet and Marine Corps Forces Pacific who noted he was not speaking on behalf of the Corps.

Another difference between the Houthis’ sea-denial operations and those the Marine Corps might undertake in a war in the Pacific is that the Houthis operate on the offensive, while the Corps’ stand-in forces are geared toward defensive actions, Ota said.

Ota pointed to a real-world example of land-based forces striking ships for defensive purposes: Ukrainian attacks on Russian ships in the Black Sea that have freed up commercial ships to export grain from Ukraine’s ports.

Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, who led U.S. Central Command from 1997 to 2000, expressed deep skepticism about the Marine Corps’ turn toward sea-denial operations from land.

Of course land-based missile systems can be part of sea-denial operations, Zinni said, but, he asked rhetorically, should the Marine Corps focus on that at the expense of other capabilities?

“Looking at this like a combatant commander, this was the crisis response force,” Zinni said. “They could respond with a greater degree of capability faster than anybody else. … That degree of readiness, deployability and flexibility were unique to them — all thrown away for Force Design.” (Corps leaders insist that Marines remain ready to respond quickly to a range of crises, even as they make Force Design-related changes.)

There’s also the fact that the Houthis haven’t damaged any U.S. Navy ships.

“How effective have the Houthis been at sea denial against our capabilities?” Zinni asked.

Retired Col. T.X. Hammes, a distinguished research fellow at the National Defense University, said one lesson from the fighting between the Houthis and the Navy is that ships can fend off a small number of missiles. So the Marine Corps should have more of them.

The Marines, Hammes said, should be capable of firing volleys of missiles that can overwhelm enemy ships’ defenses.

It is unclear to what extent the Marine Corps is implementing lessons from the Houthis’ operations. The Marine Corps did not respond to requests to speak with Marines who are studying insights from combat operations in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.

One thing is clear, however: Even when developing Force Design, the Corps drew lessons from U.S. adversaries.

In its 2021 document explaining stand-in forces — a concept that envisions Marines lurking near an adversary to conduct reconnaissance and support naval missions — the Corps devoted a page to the Houthis’ 2016-2018 activities in the Red Sea.

“Their efforts quickly evolved into an excellent example of how one might conduct effective reconnaissance, counter reconnaissance, and sea denial while operating inside of a contested area,” the document reads.

The Houthis aren’t the only hostile actors from which the military may be learning.

Even if military leaders may not acknowledge it, they are learning from Russia’s electronic jamming of Ukrainian communications, Clark said.

Corps leaders have said the service’s autonomous low-profile vessel prototype was inspired by drug smugglers’ narco-submarines.

Drawing lessons from enemy tactics would be nothing new.

During the Vietnam War, for example, the U.S. military adopted jungle-warfare tactics of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces, noted retired Lt. Col. Travis Reese, another co-author of the War on the Rocks piece.

“Learning from your enemy is as old as war,” Reese said.

The CH-53K King Stallion will get deployed from the East Coast sometime in 2026 with a Marine expeditionary unit, said Col. Kate Fleeger, the helicopter’s program manager, on Tuesday at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space conference in National Harbor, Maryland.

At the same conference in 2023, Fleeger said the Corps planned to deploy the King Stallion with a Marine expeditionary unit in 2025.

But the Marine Corps has adjusted how many heavy-lift helicopter squadrons it anticipates having on the East Coast, Fleeger said Tuesday.

The Corps’ previous plan had been to deactivate Marine Heavy Helicopter Squadron 464, keeping Marine Heavy Helicopter Squadron 461, but now the plan is for both North Carolina-based squadrons to remain in the fleet, according to the colonel.

Before sending the helicopters abroad with a Marine expeditionary unit — a crisis-response force that travels aboard three amphibious ships — the Corps wants to make sure it would have enough spare components and repair capability left in the United States, according to Fleeger.

“What we don’t want to do is we don’t want to send aircraft forward and then have a deficit at home,” Fleeger said.

The Marine Corps has tweaked its deployment timeline for the King Stallion before: Back in 2022, the service said it planned to deploy the helicopter in 2024.

The sea services tout the King Stallion as the most powerful helicopter in the U.S. military.

A replacement for the aging CH-53E Super Stallion, the King Stallion can haul armored vehicles or other heavy equipment over long stretches of land and sea. The service predicts the King Stallion would be especially useful in providing logistics support to Marines who are spread out on and near shore in the Indo-Pacific.

Sikorsky, the Lockheed Martin subsidiary that manufactures the helicopter, has delivered 14 King Stallions to the Marine Corps and has 79 total on contract, including 12 for Israel, according to Andrea Ulery, program manager for the aircraft at the company.

The King Stallion won’t reach full operational capability until 2029, according to Fleeger, but the helicopter already has shown off its power in domestic missions.

In September 2021, Marines used a King Stallion to recover a Navy MH-60S Seahawk that had experienced a hard landing in California’s White Mountains. It was déjà vu all over again in October 2023, when Marines once again used a King Stallion to recover a downed Navy Seahawk from California mountains.

But the top enlisted Marine said he’ll “never apologize” for demanding that money.

“If we’re going to continue with an all-volunteer force, then it’s OK to pay them, and it’s OK to give them a place where it’s safe for them to live and it’s OK to fuel them like a Division I athlete,” Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps Carlos Ruiz said Monday at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space conference in National Harbor, Maryland. “Because, frankly, they deserve it. Because they’re the ones — as the commandant says — they will be the ones doing the fighting and the dying.”

Earlier in 2024, the Marine Corps unveiled its Barracks 2030 plan for revamping its barracks, the living quarters that typically house younger, unmarried enlisted Marines.

For now, Marines in some barracks have had to live with visible mold, vermin, broken appliances and other issues, reports from the Government Accountability Office and the media have found. Corps leaders have said the Barracks 2030 plan is aimed in part at keeping Marines from exiting the service.

But the plan, which will involve bulldozing the worst barracks and renovating others, won’t come cheap.

The Marine Corps plans to spend $274 million on barracks modernization in Fiscal Year 2025, a $65 million increase from the previous year.

Barracks modernization also tops the Corps’ unfunded priorities list, which spells out what the service would spend additional money on if there were room in the budget. On that list, the Marine Corps signaled to Congress that it would like an additional $230 million for the barracks, on top of the $274 million it already plans to spend in Fiscal Year 2025.

“We’re not asking for Taj Mahals,” Ruiz said Monday.

In previous years, Ruiz said, the Marine Corps opted not to make investments in infrastructure because it decided it had to spend money on modernizing. With the Force Design initiative, which then-Commandant Gen. David Berger rolled out in 2020, the Corps has overhauled its approach to fighting in preparation for potential conflict with the high-tech Chinese military.

“We’re transparent with that: Decisions were made not to invest in your buildings because we needed to buy these platforms in order for you to come home, in order for you to win,” Ruiz said. “But now it’s the time to do both. And it’s OK to ask for both.”

The board game Reisswitz had crafted was an update of a prototype by his father, which itself was indebted to earlier wargames derived from chess, Milan Vego recounted in a 2012 article in the Naval War College Review. Like its predecessors, the junior Reisswitz’s game involved two sides of few players each making decisions about simulated military maneuvers.

Yet the game was revolutionary.

It brought a new level of reality to wargaming: a detailed map as the gameboard, umpires who challenged the players with realistic scenarios and precise calculations of casualties, Vego wrote. Karl von Mueffling, the chief of the general staff of the army, was mightily impressed.

“It’s not a game at all!” Mueffling ­exclaimed, according to Vego. “It’s training for war.”

The Prussian army adopted the game as a tool to train for battle. And two ­centuries later, militaries are still using games to simulate aspects of war.

The Marine Corps, which has rethought its approach to fighting in recent years, uses wargames to explore the tough problems it might be forced to confront in war. These mostly classified games have become yet another focus of the conflict over the future of the Marine Corps.

Marine leaders say the results of wargames are one justification for the controversial changes they have made to the force, such as the divestment of tanks and the reduction of cannon artillery.

Critics of the changes have raised concerns about the games themselves, arguing they were unsound and didn’t lend support to the changes.

Did the Corps conduct its wargames properly and draw the right insights from them? Supporters of the changes say yes — and their view has carried the day, since the service already is years into its ambitious overhaul with the support of Congress and the Pentagon. Some critics still say no.

The Corps has said wargame results helped underpin its decisions aimed at making sure Marines are ready to fight, and win, the next war.

For the Marines who may one day carry out new kinds of operations, while armed with new weapons systems, the stakes of these games are high.

What wargaming is — and isn’t

Wargames try to simulate aspects of armed conflict, imperfectly.

In wargames, as in war, human beings on opposing sides make a series of decisions that have consequences for what happens next. Unlike in war, no one gets hurt.

Generally, the competitors in a professional wargame are the “blue cell” — the home team of sorts, representing friendly forces — and the “red cell,” representing enemy forces, according to a 2019 Rand report.

A white cell often adjudicates how the game progresses as the blue and red cells make their moves. Sometimes a green cell represents allied forces or civilians.

These days, computers often play a role in wargames, according to retired Marine Lt. Col. Travis Reese, who as a contractor has helped develop scenarios and wargames pertaining to Marine Corps modernization since 2017. But many wargames still involve people laying a map out on a table and, given a detailed scenario, making the tough decisions a commander might face in war, according to Reese.

There are two broad categories of wargames: educational and analytical, according to retired Marine Maj. Ian T. Brown, who worked with educational wargames while at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation & Future Warfare.

In educational wargames, the focus is on the players and their learning, according to Brown. In analytical wargames, the focus is on better understanding the problems that the games simulate.

Wargames can’t predict how a real war would unfold or even how the same wargame would turn out if it were played again. They can’t “validate” real-life decisions, several wargaming experts cautioned.

“In essence wargaming is an exercise in human interaction, and the interplay of human decisions and the outcomes of those decisions makes it impossible for two games to be the same,” the influential wargamer Peter Perla and Navy Lt. Cmdr. Raymond Barrett wrote in the Naval War College Review in 1985.

And no wargame can capture the complexity of real life.

Wargame designers must keep a narrow scope and assume, for the games’ purposes, that some things will work the way they are supposed to, freeing them up to play with other variables, according to Reese.

“You can never do everything in detail that you need to do to simulate a fight perfectly,” Reese said. “It’s just too many things to put together.”

The limitations of wargames are many, but so are their possibilities, these wargaming experts said.

Educational wargames can sharpen service members’ abilities to make good decisions when in a conflict with an adversary, Brown said.

Analytical wargames can “investigate processes” and “explore questions of strategy, human behavior and warfighting trends,” Perla and Barrett wrote.

The Quantico, Virginia–based Warfighting Lab has its own wargaming division to conduct these kinds of wargames.

Its major wargames tend to take place in a Marine Corps University auditorium, with the cells huddled on different sides of the room, division director Col. George Schreffler said. The cells get briefed for about a day and spend about three days making the moves that form the meat of a wargame.

The players, ranging in number from about 30 to 150, work long days that start at around 7:30 a.m., with a break for a ­brown-bag lunch, according to Schreffler. The adjudicators from the Wargaming Division sometimes work overnight sorting out the implications of the players’ decisions.

At the end of the week, the players ­debrief the game, explaining their choices. The Wargaming Division writes a ­preliminary report on the game and then a more fleshed-out analytical ­report, which typically takes two to three months, according to Schreffler.

Well-conducted wargames can usher players into a mental zone called “the magic circle,” in which they accept the virtual world and make decisions that feel real within it, Brown said. In this magic circle, players emotionally engage with what happens in the game.

“That’s actually a very valuable psychological dynamic, because it makes your experience stick with you in a way that you remember,” Brown said. “And if you remember it, you can assess it yourself, and you can learn from it.”

Preparing for war

Analytical wargames have been at the center of the Marine Corps’ bold, and controversial, overhaul plan.

That plan — called Force Design 2030, though leaders recently dropped the “2030″ — was championed by now-retired Gen. David Berger, who served as commandant from 2019–2023 and before that was the deputy commandant for combat development and integration.

From 2016 to 2018, before Berger was in those two modernization-focused roles, he was the leader of Marine Forces ­Pacific. It was at that job that he witnessed a series of worrisome wargames, he said at a ­Brookings Institution event in May 2023.

The games convinced him the Corps had to evolve if it didn’t want to lose a fight with China.

“If we don’t change something, the same result is going to happen every time,” Berger recalled thinking.

A 2018 wargame Berger observed at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, indicated to him that Marine forces needed to be lighter, more mobile and positioned closer to the possible sites of conflict in the Indo-Pacific and China, he told Defense News.

In 2019, Berger devoted three of the 23 pages of text in his commandant’s planning guidance to wargames, including what they have “shown” the Corps needed to change.

He already had decided that the Corps needed to become capable of spreading out on and near shore, fending off enemy naval forces, and avoiding getting tracked and hit by long-range fires, he wrote in the guidance. Wargames would “rapidly produce solutions for further development in accordance with my guidance and vision.”

Divestments of tanks, artillery, law ­enforcement personnel and more ­followed. So did controversy.

Critics of the changes, including several retired Marine leaders, have voiced concerns that the Corps was focusing too much on China and losing its ability to assert itself in conflicts elsewhere — and that even a fight with China would go poorly because of these divestments.

One skeptic is Scott Moore, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel who holds a doctorate in conflict analysis and resolution and who as a BAE Systems contractor observed and analyzed wargames at the Warfighting Lab between 2016–2021.

He said he took issue with the timing of the divestments relative to wargames. The games he was involved in didn’t lend support to those changes, he said.

“Those decisions, to my mind, were made absent any wargames,” he told ­Marine Corps Times.

Yet Gen. Eric Smith, who became the Marine commandant in September 2023, has said the Marine Corps shouldn’t wait until concepts are totally fleshed out ­before implementing them.

That would take too much time, he said in October 2023 on a War on the Rocks podcast. And with changing administrations and budgets, and adversaries who are modernizing their own militaries, time isn’t something the Corps can afford to lose.

“If you wait until it’s completely validated, you’ll get nowhere,” Smith said.

Current Marine leaders have insisted the force needed to modernize given the threat of the Chinese military. Even in its revamped form, these leaders have said, the Corps remains ready to respond worldwide.

Wargames are just one element in the Corps’ “virtuous cycle” of learning, according to Smith.

First, the Marine Corps develops a concept, Smith said. Next comes a wargame. Then Marines do an experiment in the field with real equipment. Finally, the Corps ­incorporates feedback from these efforts.

“One wargame is one wargame,” Smith said. “It’s a data point.”

“Now, when I see 17 data points aligned and moving in a certain path or a certain trajectory, OK, now I’m interested.”

Logistics, logistics, logistics

But what if, some critics of Force Design have asked, those data points came from wargames that were fundamentally flawed?

Moore said the wargames he observed made too-optimistic assumptions, especially about logistics and mobility: that the ­Marines would be in the theater ready to fight when conflict broke out, that ship-to-shore vessels would come ashore without issues, that civilians would help Marines get food and supplies locally, that roads and bridges would be in good shape. He said the games also assumed uninterrupted command and control, sufficient air defenses and lack of detection by adversaries.

“Those were the assumptions that we never were allowed to test,” Moore said. “And those underpin the entire Force ­Design.”

A source who has firsthand knowledge of Marine Corps wargames and participated in some himself, and spoke on condition of anonymity, said he also had concerns about logistics being assumed away.

“It’s like a play,” he said. “The curtain goes up, and everyone’s on stage, and then we play. But how did everyone get on the stage?”

A now-retired senior Marine officer recalled asking questions about logistics while getting briefed on the results of the Corps’ wargames. How would Marines and their equipment be moved to the fight? How would they be sustained? How would these logistics efforts evade the enemy’s notice?

“Every time, it was like, ‘Sir, that’s a great question,’” said the retired Marine, who spoke on condition of anonymity for professional reasons. He said he never got those questions answered.

Proponents of Force Design argue a lack of emphasis on logistics in some wargames does not mean those games were entirely flawed.

The wargames that Moore observed ­occurred early in the Force Design ­process, Reese noted. The games had to constrain “some chatter and some noise” so the Corps could begin to answer the questions it had about the nascent overhaul, he said.

“A lot of the games that, quote-unquote, ‘didn’t address logistics’ weren’t designed to, because it was going for a different problem,” said Lt. Col. Leo Spaeder, a ­logistics officer who worked at the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab from 2018–2021.

Spaeder acknowledged that “there were very, very unlikely and very favorable logistics assumptions made” in some games when he first got to the lab. But that soon changed, in part thanks to the 2018 arrival of now-retired Col. Tim ­Barrick as head of the Wargaming Division, according to Spaeder.

These days, Marine Corps leaders make clear they aren’t ignoring logistics. Far from it, they say: In his final year as commandant, Berger repeatedly declared his focus was “logistics, logistics, logistics.”

In the past three years at the Wargaming Division, 40% or more of the games have been specifically geared toward ­examining logistics, according to Schreffler.

Logistics “are gap areas that the Marine Corps has considered, continues to work on and is very alert to,” Schreffler said.

In interviews with Marine Corps Times, those with knowledge of the wargames spoke about them in general terms. That is because the Corps keeps the results of many of the analytical wargames classified — a fact that has provided more fuel for criticism from those with concerns about Force Design.

“I have not heard or seen anything of any weapons systems or any tactic that would justify the classification of these games, other than the fact that they really didn’t want people to know what they were up to,” said retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson, who retired as chief of staff of the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory in 2000.

Reese pushed back on the idea that high levels of classification allowed the games to evade scrutiny. Before Berger could make changes, he had to have ­buy-in from civilian Defense Department leaders and legislators, Reese said.

The Corps keeps wargame details classified for good reason, Schreffler maintained.

“There are, in fact, secrets that need to be protected from adversaries, who if they had the information, would immediately use it to develop counters to the capabilities the Marine Corps is developing,” he said.

What comes next

In coming years, the Wargaming Division plans to do more wargaming than ever before — about 20 big games a year, up from eight to 10, Schreffler said on a Corps podcast in August 2023. Enabling that will be the large facility now under construction on the campus of the Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia.

Named for retired Gen. Robert Neller, who championed wargaming while serving as commandant from 2015–2019, the $79 million, 100,446-square-foot center is set to reach initial operational capability in 2025.

The Neller Center will allow more games, at a bigger scale, with better technology for analyzing data, according to Schreffler. The center will have remote capabilities, meaning a Marine in California could examine a problem through a wargame without booking a cross-country flight.

A defining characteristic of wargames — whether played on a map or through the cloud — is, according to the 2019 Rand report, that players make decisions and end up “living with the consequences of their actions.”

Yet the wargames that inform the path of change the Marine Corps is pursuing have consequences of their own. When Marines and Marine veterans argue about wargames, they are also arguing about war: how to prepare for it and how to fight it.

The Corps has an obligation to the more than 30,000 Marines now positioned overseas to get its transformation right, Berger told the audience at the Modern Day Marine conference in June 2023.

“They are our sons and daughters, and we owe them an unfair fight,” Berger said.

Reisswitz’s wargame was no game, a Prussian general observed in 1824 — but war is no wargame. People live and die with the consequences.

The Corps would like an additional $230 million for restoring and modernizing the living facilities where Marines have had to put up with mold, vermin, broken furniture and appliances, and other deficiencies.

The money would come on top of the $274 million for barracks restoration in the service’s official budget request — a sum that already was a $65 million increase from the fiscal year 2024 budget request. The Corps plans to spend that money on renovating 13 barracks, where 3,517 Marines live, according to congressional testimony Wednesday by Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps Carlos Ruiz.

The Marine Corps’ wish list, known as an unfunded priorities list, totals nearly $2.4 billion. The service’s formal budget request includes $53.7 billion for personnel, weapons, operations, infrastructure and more.

The congressionally mandated unfunded priorities lists are a way for the branches to signal how they would spend any additional money that came their way — and nudge lawmakers for those extra funds.

But the defense budget topline is capped, based on Fiscal Responsibility Act spending limits put in place for fiscal years 2024 and 2025, so additional money for one service’s priority would have to come from somewhere else in the Defense Department’s budget.

On the Corps’ fiscal year 2024 wish list in spring 2023, the No. 1 item wasn’t even a Marine asset: It was an amphibious warship, which falls under the Navy’s budget.

Then-Commandant Gen. David Berger insisted the ship was necessary to maintain a congressionally mandated fleet size of at least 31 amphibious ships, which the Marines use to deploy overseas and conduct deterrence and crisis response missions.

Ultimately, Congress added a billion dollars to the fiscal year 2024 defense authorization bill to incrementally fund that amphibious ship, LPD-33. Congress has not yet passed an appropriations bill, though, to actually provide that money. The Navy has asked for remaining money needed to finish building LPD-33 in its fiscal year 25 budget request.

Throughout the past year, Marine leaders repeatedly have said fixing the barracks is a top priority. The state of the barracks could hamper the Corps’ plan to retain experienced Marines who have the training and talent necessary for fighting future wars, leaders have acknowledged.

The Marine Corps has rolled out a Barracks 2030 plan, which involves installing civilian barracks managers, consolidating Marines in the higher-quality barracks, improving the maintenance process, replacing outdated furniture and considering partnering with the private sector.

To restore the barracks, though, the service needs much more money.

The Marine Corps estimates its backlog of deferred maintenance in its facilities totals more than $15.8 billion, according to Department of the Navy budget request documents. Commandant Gen. Eric Smith said in October 2023 it would take about a decade for the service to fix its barracks.

On March 11, the day the military services unveiled proposed budgets, Marine spokesman Maj. Kevin Stephensen told Marine Corps Times that the formal budget request’s $274 million for barracks restoration came “in this time of hard choices and budget constraints.”

The Corps is now assessing how its barracks are being used, Stephensen said. Barracks occupancy averages between 55% and 63%, according to the spokesman.

“Simply put, we have too many facilities and need to ensure we are making smart investments,” Stephensen said.

Items No. 2 and No. 3 on the fiscal year 25 wish list also pertain to quality of life on bases. The list includes $119 million for base operating support and $293 million for other kinds of facilities modernization.

What else is on the Marines’ wish list?

The Marine Corps requests $1.25 billion for modernization efforts related to the Force Design initiative, ranging from developing new communications tools to accelerating vehicle procurement to buying more bombs.

The list includes $6 million to develop the autonomous low-profile vessel, something the Marines began experimenting with in 2023 and successfully used in February’s Army-led Project Convergence exercise in California.

These drug-runner-inspired boats would fill an important resupply gap for the highly mobile Marine littoral regiments that will hop around the Pacific theater. They’ll carry with them the Navy Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System to provide a sea-denial capability for the larger joint force — and the autonomous low-profile vessels solve the problem of how to resupply these units with more missiles.

The vessel could deploy from a landing ship medium or connector and swim undetected to the shore while carrying two naval strike missiles inside.

Two big-ticket items are $340 million for the amphibious combat vehicle 30 mm cannon variant and $250 million for two CH-53K heavy-lift helicopters.

The list includes $95 million for four sets of Marine Corps F-35C engine spares and power modules, $90 million for an improved variant of the long-range anti-ship missile, and $90 million for the Osprey drive system safety and health information kits to monitor performance of the MV-22B Osprey.

Also on the list are items to upgrade new systems important to Force Design, including $10 million to modernize some equipment related to the Medium Range Intercept Capability and nearly $16 million for equipment upgrades on the Common Aviation Command and Control System, or CAC2S.

Gen. Eric Smith, the Marine commandant, hadn’t been performing the Corps’ top job since he was hospitalized from a cardiac arrest on Oct. 29, 2023. But he repeatedly had signaled he intended to get back to work once he had recovered.

Three weeks after his hospitalization, Smith appeared in a brief video to reassure Marines, “I’ll bounce back from this.”

In January, he underwent a successful open-heart surgery to repair the congenital heart abnormality that the Corps said caused the cardiac arrest, and he reiterated he planned to return to full duty status once he could.

In recent weeks, Smith has made visits to the Pentagon and listened in on meetings in preparation for his return to the job, the Associated Press reported.

“General Smith and his family appreciate the full support of Congress, the leadership at the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, the Joint Force, and all who extended them their well wishes during his recovery,” the Marine Corps said in a news release Tuesday announcing Smith’s return to full duty status.

This will be the first time since July 2023 that the Marine Corps’ top two positions have been filled by leaders on full duty status.

When Gen. David Berger retired as commandant that month, the Senate hadn’t confirmed Smith as his successor thanks to a hold on nominations by Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who refused to confirm senior military nominees through the usual unanimous consent process, in protest of a Pentagon policy facilitating troops’ travel for abortions.

Smith, then the assistant commandant, took over the role of commandant in an acting capacity. The Senate confirmed him as commandant by individual vote in September 2023.

Without a Senate-confirmed assistant commandant, Smith still was doing the equivalent of two jobs at once, he told reporters two days before his cardiac arrest.

Smith’s hospitalization briefly left Lt. Gen. Karsten Heckl, the most senior general in Marine Corps headquarters, in charge of the service. Days later, the Senate rushed to confirm Gen. Christopher Mahoney as the assistant commandant, who would perform the duties of commandant.

Tuberville, who insisted the blame for the military’s leadership gaps lay with Senate Democrats and Pentagon leaders, relented on his hold on hundreds of military nominations in December 2023.

Since his confirmation, Mahoney had been in a situation similar to the one Smith previously faced: performing the top two jobs in the Marine Corps at once.

In October 2022, an amphibious combat vehicle rolled over in the water during training, prompting the Corps to halt most operations of the vehicle in the surf — the second time that year that the service restricted the use of the vehicle after a mishap in rough waters.

The Marine Corps attributed the mishaps to training shortfalls and is recertifying vehicle operators and maintainers, focusing the new training on how the amphibious combat vehicle differs from its predecessor, the amphibious assault vehicle.

With these new training procedures in hand, the Corps plans to deploy amphibious combat vehicles with the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit in or around March, Assistant Commandant Gen. Christopher Mahoney said Thursday at a Hudson Institute event in Washington.

The eight-wheeled amphibious combat vehicles can emerge from a ship, transit the waves and then roll onto shore, allowing the military’s amphibious force to conduct amphibious operations. But the vehicle has faced challenges, not only on the water but also on land, including a a December 2023 rollover that killed a Marine aboard a California Marine base.

Even the operators who have gotten recertified aren’t yet authorized to transit the surf zone with embarked troops or when the average height of the tallest waves are at 4 feet or higher, Marine spokesman Capt. Ryan Bruce said via email Friday. The spokesman said the service wouldn’t make “predictions or assumptions” about when it would lift those restrictions.

“Setting the proper foundation for the long-term success of this platform is our focus and we are going to make sure we get this right,” Bruce said.

The California-based 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit will deploy on the Navy’s Boxer Amphibious Ready Group in phases, with the amphibious transport dock Somerset heading to the Pacific in the coming days to begin a six-month scheduled deployment, Shon Brodie, the director of the Maritime Expeditionary Warfare Division at the Corps’ Capability Development Directorate, told Defense News on Friday.

The amphibious assault ship Boxer and the dock landing ship Harpers Ferry will deploy about two months later, in or around March, due to ship readiness and maintenance challenges.

Corps and fleet leaders recognized the importance of having Marine forces afloat in the Pacific between Taiwan’s January election and its May inauguration, Brodie said. Since the entire amphibious ready group would not be ready to go, they elected to send the Somerset early to allow for some presence in the region.

Mahoney said the vehicles likely will deploy with the other two ships, allowing for more time to wrap up testing and training.

The Marine Corps previously had been tight-lipped about when it would lift the restrictions on the operation of the vehicle.

Bruce said via email back in December 2023, “Our Marines are training and experimenting with the platform as we speak, but the service is not going to rush into announcing capabilities on upcoming deployments until we are certain we have done our homework.”

In announcing that the vehicles soon would deploy with the Marine expeditionary unit, Mahoney acknowledged that Marines still have some more homework to do first.

“We have a very detailed checklist sort of criteria to get that platform back to unprotected waters,” said Mahoney, who also is the acting commandant while Commandant Gen. Eric Smith recovers from his October 2023 cardiac arrest.

“We’re working on that. There are a couple more things to go, but I’m confident that we will get the training, get the procedures and the methods to the level that we need to be confident in rough sea states.”

Defense News reporter Megan Eckstein contributed reporting.

Editor’s note: This story was updated at 3 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday to reflect the correct names of the ships in the Boxer Amphibious Ready Group. A previous version of this story included a reference by Mahoney to a ship that wasn’t in the amphibious ready group.

This story was updated at 1 p.m. Eastern Time on Friday with additional comment from a Marine Corps spokesman about restrictions on the operation of the amphibious combat vehicle.