[Salon] Joint Chiefs to get taste of Marine modernization with new senior enlisted advisor - Defense One

[Todd Pierce <todd.e.pierce@icloud.com>]

In my continuing updates to USMC Commandant Berger and his partner successor in creating Force Design 2030, as a “subversive strategy in fighting the Blob,” (ha ha) as “Marine Corps experts” at The American Conservative magazine and Quincy Institute characterized Berger’s Plan, obviously in keeping with Trump’s Plan to “End the Endless Wars” (super ha ah), here is the latest news: 

As far as “Ending the Endless Wars,” this is consistent with Trump’s “Military Strategy” doctrinal statements (most of which are classified, far beyond his predecessors ever did): 

https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2023/06/marines-will-restructure-its-infantry-battalions-september/387102/

"The Marines in 2020 began the Infantry Battalion Experiment, or IBX, to see if they could rework infantry battalions to be smaller while at the same time having Marines trained to use a variety of weapons in a distributed environment. Commandant Gen. David Berger has said Force Design 2030 was necessary to get the force ready for potential operations in the Pacific and elsewhere." 

As the article below explains: 

"The U.S. military is in an “interwar period” that the Marine Corps has been using to modernize its force, he said, adding that it must continue to do so in order “to meet the current multi-domain threats and be able to maintain our competency as an institution on the fundamental core requirements.”

I entered the Marine Corps Reserve in December 1970, with my Infantry Training as an 0311 Rifleman completed in May 1971. The Marines began withdrawing from Vietnam while I was “enjoying” Christmas in Boot Camp in 1970. (Had it not been for an injured back causing me to fail my 1969 entry physical for active duty as a Rifleman, I’d of been part of that withdrawal, had I not been killed or maimed by then.) So just as I underwent Rifleman Training in the Spring of 1971, we entered an “interwar period,” with my Company being the last to go through “Vietnam Village” (no, us trainees didn’t get to burn it down with Zippo lighters, but maybe the cadre did :-) before it was reconfigured as a Latin American Village, in preparation for the next war. With the first major exercise I shortly after went on being at 29 Palms, as an all-out Desert Training Exercise, hedging our training bets for where the next war would take the Marines to.   

That’s what Trump’s “end the endless wars” and Berger’s “subversive new strategy” really mean, in keeping with the “Trump Doctrine” of inciting “Peer Competitor Warfare,” continued by Biden. Which so far, “proxies” carry the main burden but if Republicans like Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley and other war fanatics have their way, U.S. “boots will be on the ground” soon. As I found out years ago with a Republican woman who was to be appointed a Judge by Tim Pawlenty not long afterward, that without “U.S. boots on the ground,” it doesn’t count as a “real war” of the kind that she and her Republican colleagues were clamoring for at the end of the Clinton administration. Which was conclusive evidence that a high degree of war insanity was required to be a “real” Republican. Which unfortunately has infected the Democrats now too. 

I have a friend who was a Democrat who insists to me that the Democrats are now worse than the Republicans. But she was never around “real Republicans” to know the “real” depths of their war insanity. Though the Democrats, especially like GWOT veterans too numerous to name, are now right there with the Republican  in the depths of war insanity. To lend the final coup de grâce to the United States as a “rights” based democratic republic, and to the prosperity we once had for us “ordinary people,” just as Conservative/libertarian political/legal/economic theorists intended, after WW II in building an Oligarchical controlled Military Industrial Complex, to include the elimination of the Bill of Rights. Mission (Damned Near) Accomplished

https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2023/08/joint-force-get-taste-force-design-new-senior-enlisted-advisor/389197/

Joint Chiefs to get taste of Marine modernization with new senior enlisted advisor

As the new senior advisor to the chairman, Sgt. Maj. Troy Black will bring four years’ experience with Force Design 2030.

Caitlin M. KenneyAugust 7, 2023 04:52 PM ET

When Sgt. Major of the Marine Corps Troy Black packs up his office to head over to his new position as the senior enlisted advisor to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he’s planning to bring some of the tenets of Force Design 2030 with him.

“I think if I was gonna say anything about [his new job] and moving forward, it's that the joint force must continue to modernize…in order to maintain primacy over our adversaries,” Black told reporters last week.

“We will always be involved in some form of counterinsurgency and low-intensity conflict. However, not since the end of the Cold War have we needed to focus on geopolitical adversaries…We are back there again. This is the war of our grandparents, the war we're living right now. And we need to transition to that.”

Black, who championed the Marine Corps’ transformation efforts for four years under then-Commandant Gen. David Berger, will be the first senior enlisted advisor to the Joint Chiefs chairman to come from a service’s senior enlisted position. In his new role, he will offer thoughts on the readiness and wellbeing of the military to the next chairman—presumably President Joe Biden’s nominee Air Force Gen. CQ Brown.

Putting the troops first, the infantry Marine said, is what he’ll carry over from his Force Design work.

“It's gonna be the same things that I'm doing now,” Black said.

The U.S. military is in an “interwar period” that the Marine Corps has been using to modernize its force, he said, adding that it must continue to do so in order “to meet the current multi-domain threats and be able to maintain our competency as an institution on the fundamental core requirements.”

While not everyone has been happy about the changes made through Force Design, the Marine Corps has grown accustomed to questioning what should be modernized next, Black said. That gives his successor, Sgt. Maj. Carlos Ruiz, an advantage that he nor Berger had at the start.  

“That momentum is already moving. Everyone is open right now to look at everything,” he said.

In a separate conversation last week, Ruiz told reporters that he wants to listen to Marines first before thinking about making any changes.  

“So it's not about what I'm going to change, it’s what's not going to change. And that's really about knowing your job, respecting the standard, and striving every day to have a disciplined day. That's the way I think of it in my brain. To be a little better than you were yesterday,” he said.

Hailing from Sonora, Mexico, Ruiz started in the Marine Corps as a supply warehouse clerk, figuring a short enlistment would set him up for success in the civilian world. Instead, he made the Marines a career. He has deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, and was supposed to take the senior enlisted position at U.S. Space Command before “fate stepped in.”

“This is surreal for me to be sitting with you,” he said. “I feel like an out-of-body experience because I never thought that I would ever be a sergeant major of the Marine Corps.”

Asked what he will prioritize with Force Design, Ruiz said he will always focus on the Marines and their professionalism and discipline.

“Because whatever fight we get into next, I think—I know—that what makes Marines different and why people think of Marines [differently], because they expect us to be a disciplined Marine Corps. And in that, I think we’ll carry the day no matter where we go fight,” he said.

Recruiting and maintaining the size of the force is “a lot of pressure,” Ruiz said. “Retention is key.”

He said the service is working on “permeability,” to allow people to move between the active component and the reserves, allowing them to pursue personal dreams while still being able to serve. Gen. Eric Smith—the Corps’ assistant commandant, whose ascension to the top job is under a GOP senator’s blanket hold—listed this as a “warfighting priority” in his recentguidance to the force.

“The point being is that we want access to you and your talents and your skills. You have to do your part to remain relevant, but I think we have to move towards that direction,” Ruiz said. “Because now the Marine Corps’ being advertised as making recruiting and retention, but the pool of people to recruit from is drastically shrinking."