USMC Questions Ships, Troops Availabile for Pivot by Stew Magnuson, National Defense
With a rapidly shrinking force and fewer amphibious ships available, the Marine Corps is questioning whether it can support the strategic shift to the Asia-Pacific region.
“We are on our way …. to a less than a 300 hundred ship Navy. We are on our way to a 175,000 man Marine Corps. These are the messages we are trying to take to Congress,” Gen. John M. Paxton Jr., assistant commandant of the Marine Corps, said April 7 in a speech at the Navy League’s Sea, Air, Space conference at National Harbor, Md.
“Do we have enough people and enough ships to do it?” he asked of the Asia-Pacific strategic shift.
Budget pressures will bring the service’s end strength down from 202,000 during the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, to the current goal of 186,800. However, with cuts under sequestration scheduled to return after 2015 the force will shrink to 175,000.
Meanwhile, the service said it needs 54 amphibious assault ships to do its job. Current plans call for only 38, but that is likely to shrink to 33, he said. Operational availability of those ships continues to go down as they age, and they spend more time in maintenance yards. “And the demands on a diminished fleet keep going up,” he said…