The Marine Corps just had its 250th birthday — now let’s abolish it

Last month, the Marine Corps turned 250 years old. In the two and a half centuries since its founding in a Philadelphia tavern, the Marines have evolved into a sophisticated and celebrated expeditionary arm, notably perfecting amphibious warfare in the Pacific and exemplifying American valor in conflicts spanning continents and eras — from Tripoli and Iwo Jima to Inchon and Khe Sanh to Fallujah and Helmand.

But as America reflects on its most mythologized service, we should ask a difficult question: do we still need the Marine Corps? As Congress prepares another record-setting defense budget, the U.S. needs to consider whether the Marines’ sustained independence makes strategic or fiscal sense. The simple truth is that the Marines became redundant long ago.

Originally, the Marines were designed as naval infantry—troops who could fight on land or sea, secure ship decks, and conduct coastal raids. Their advantage was amphibious warfare: the ability to storm beaches and seize ports before the main forces arrived. And through much of U.S. history, the Marines offered speed and mobility that neither the Army nor the Navy could match, thereby justifying the Marine Corps’ existence.

The Marine Corps’ apex moment came during World War II. The entire Pacific campaign was built upon the Marines’ model of island-hopping amphibious assaults. A string of brutal Pacific victories pushed Imperial Japan back to its homeland and established the Marine Corps as a national symbol of resolve. When the war ended with Japan’s surrender, the Marines’ role had crystallized — to take and hold the beaches no one else dared try.

But after the war, in a strategic landscape that had shifted dramatically with the emergence of nuclear weapons and missile technology, the Marines and their functions were suddenly outdated. They were fighting mostly to retain relevance. In Korea, the Inchon landing of 1950 briefly justified the Marines’ postwar existence, but by the Vietnam War, the Marines were engaging in land combat indistinguishable from that of the Army — and often conducted under Army command structures.

As the Cold War continued, and U.S. military doctrine centered around nuclear deterrence, the Marines reinvented themselves as a rapid-reaction crisis force, again demonstrating their legacy characteristics of speed and mobility in Lebanon, Grenada, and Panama. But these were short and symbolic operations, mostly divorced from wider U.S. strategic objectives, which hinted at a question already worth asking in the 1980s: Why do we still have the Marine Corps?

Since the Soviet Union’s collapse, and the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the question has only become more pronounced. As operations in landlocked Afghanistan and near-landlocked Iraq proved, the Marine Corps had become redundant with, and dependent upon, the other service branches. Today the Navy handles amphibious operations, the Army provides expeditionary ground forces, and the Air Force and Navy share air support — leaving the Marine Corps’ mission capabilities in conflict with three more robust and more singularly capable branches.

Now, as China rises and US strategy pivots towards the Indo-Pacific, the Marines are attempting to adapt; the Marines’ Force Design 2030 proposes a shift away from the heavy armor deployed in Middle Eastern conflicts toward small, agile anti-ship missile units. The plan, however, mirrors existing Navy and Special Operations Command capabilities rather than inventing or adopting a distinctive role. Indeed, the restructure looks like a bid to stay relevant — yet one that only proves redundancy.

The Marine Corps received $53 billion for FY25, about six percent of the U.S. defense budget — which is in turn by far the largest in the world. That is a steep price tag for a service branch with about 170,000 active-duty personnel (“The Few”) operating in redundancy with the other branches. Yet funding is sustained— not because of mission requirements, but because of political popularity and the Marine Corps’ enduring public standing.

Few American institutions command such bipartisan reverence as the Marine Corps. The Marine myth, cultivated so convincingly through advertising (“The Proud”), Hollywood (“Sands of Iwo Jima,” “Full Metal Jacket,” “Flags of our Fathers,” “A Few Good Men“), and an epic campaign across the Pacific, has embedded the Marines as a fixture of American ethos—making for a prestige that is disproportionate to current function, and making questions about the Marine Corps’ existence almost unpatriotic.

But as the U.S. defense budget trends toward the trillion-dollar mark, it is time to ask difficult questions and prioritize fiscal realities over mythology. Streamlining redundancies in our force structure would save billions per year, which could then be allocated toward pressing initiatives, whether military (cyber-warfare, autonomous platforms, hypersonic missiles), or non-military (infrastructure, healthcare, semiconductors).

As Congress continues to debate defense top-lines and readiness gaps, eliminating duplication across branches would do more for national security than another round of symbolic increases.

The Marine Corps has earned its place in American lore — through service and sacrifice and performance. But offering the Marines their deserved respect does not require allocating over $50 billion per year for a mythology that has long been redundant. Instead, preparing for the challenges of the 21st century will require the institutional nimbleness, forward-thinking, and non-sentimentality that the Marine Corps has always embodied. 

Harrison Kass is an attorney and national-security writer for The National Interest, where he covers military doctrine and institutional reform.