Letters: Think Carefully Before Remaking The USMC (From The Wall Street Journal)

The Lexington Institute’s Daniel Goure recently penned a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal in response to the Journal’s editorial “Deterring China on a Coronavirus Budget” that was published on April 11. Goure wrote that there were “sound reasons to question the proposed redesign” of the Marine Corps by General David Berger, expanding on the editorial’s commentary on the issue, which focused mostly on Berger’s plans to restructure USMC chiefly around the threat of a war with China.

Goure criticized Gen. Berger’s plan for not heeding the “one enduring lesson of the U.S. deterrence strategy of the past 75 years,” which is that “designing the military around a single contingency, in this case a major war with China, has always been a mistake.” When that mistake is compounded by “ building the new force on small units with limited firepower that are only relevant to the first salvo of that war, you have a recipe for disaster,” he argued.

The full letter to the editor can be read here.