The United States Marine Corps’ capability to respond quickly and effectively to a full range of worldwide crises and contingencies is at its lowest ebb in more than 50 years. Why?  The adoption of a transformation strategy called Force Design 2030 - - since renamed Force Design.

The Marines require a better and more effective operating concept to guide the development of capabilities needed to deter, respond, and if necessary, defeat the growing number of state and nonstate actors threatening America’s global interests.  In response to this need, a group of distinguished retired Marines articulated a framework for restoring Marine Corps capabilities to quickly deploy anywhere, fight any foe, and win.  This framework, Vision 2035, emphatically repudiates the underlying tenets of Force Design and calls for the restoration of offensive operations and combined arms capabilities to enable global response across the spectrum of conflict.

Vision 2035 provides the starting point for developing an operating concept to transform the Marine Corps back to its rightful role as the nation’s premier expeditionary force-in-readiness: a 9-1-1 force that is ready, relevant, and capable to persist forward and respond decisively anywhere in the world.  The Marines know how to move from a vision to a concept.  They have done it many times before. Consider the following.

Coming out of Vietnam, the Marines knew they needed to replace “the institutional and operational dysfunction of the Vietnam experience” with a more modern approach to warfighting. Commencing in the late 70s, the Marines began discussing and debating a new concept, which came to be called Maneuver Warfare.  The philosophical underpinnings of this new concept were argued, contested, and revised in the schoolhouses at Quantico, on the pages of the Marine Corps Gazette, in seminars and group discussions throughout the Marine Corps, and in field exercises and wargames. The senior leadership encouraged the discourse, often participating directly in it.  The results of this Corps-wide intellectual effort were codified as Marine Corps doctrine in the 1989 publication of Fleet Marine Force Manual 1 (FMFM 1), Warfighting.  Maneuver Warfare has stood the test of time and remains Marine Corps doctrine today.