Commentary
How did the U.S. Marine Corps transform itself from the world’s premier expeditionary force-in-readiness to a poor parody of the French Maginot Line in just a few years? In his “Force Design 2030” plan, the 38th Commandant of the Marine Corps radically redesigned and restructured the Marine Corps to operate as a defensively oriented, narrowly specialized regional force under Navy command to attack and sink Chinese warships in the South China Sea. This new mission came at the expense of providing much-needed crisis response and global force projection capabilities to all geographic combatant and functional commands in an increasingly unstable world. The crown jewel of this new warfighting organization are called stand-in forces (SIFs), which are small isolated detachments of Marines, armed with anti-ship missiles, persistently spread across islands in the so-called contested areas of hostilities, specifically the first island chain.