Semper folly: Abolishing the Marines would ignore history, geography

Harrison Kass’s recent piece recommending the abolition of the Marine Corps argues that the corps is a redundant relic that should be subsumed by the Army. This zombie idea, reanimated for clicks in December 2025, was already mercifully put back into the ground in the 1940s. It deserves to be buried once again.

Kass argues that the Navy “handles amphibious operations,” implying that the Marines are now but unnecessary passengers. But this choice of words evinces ignorance. The Navy drives the bus; it does not kick down the door. The Navy operates ships, but it possesses no capability to storm a beach, seize a port, or secure a littoral zone.

To say the Navy “handles” these operations is therefore akin to saying an Uber driver handles surgery because he drives a surgeon to the hospital.

There are still deeper problems with the simplistic idea that the Army has infantry and the Navy has ships, so therefore the Marines must be superfluous. But the Marine Corps is not and is not meant to be a second land army. It is the nation’s statutory “force in readiness,” mandated by law as a crisis response force that fights from the sea.

The Marine Air-Ground Task Force integrates aviation, ground maneuver, and logistics under a single commander. Unlike the Army, the task force is self-sufficient, seizing battle space while owning its own organic air support.

The Army is a sledgehammer built for sustained heavy occupation. But it cannot deploy a brigade in under a month. The Marines, in contrast, are a sharp knife, designed to deploy within 24 hours. The Marines land so that the Army may expand.

Suggesting that the Army could simply “absorb” this mission ignores a century of institutional culture. The Army does not live on ships or permanently attach aviation wings to its divisions. To hand the amphibious mission to a service currently struggling to recruit for its own mission would effectively degrade America’s power projection.

The Marine Corps’ Force Design 2030 initiative, far from “mirror[ing] existing Navy and Special Operations Command capabilities,” bridges a gap that neither of those two forces can fill. Special Operations Command conducts surgical raids but lacks the capacity to hold ground or deny sea space. The Navy fights on water, but it cannot occupy the land features necessary to control straits.

Force Design 2030 envisions Marines operating inside the enemy’s weapons engagement zone, sanitizing the area so that the fleet can survive. The services are not distinct silos; rather, the Marine Corps treats them as an integrated weapon.

The laziest argument of them all is that we don’t need a Marine Corps because we haven’t stormed a beach recently. This is like abolishing the fire department because the house hasn’t burned down this week. We are not facing Normandy in 1944; we are facing China’s “First Island Chain” in 2025. This challenge requires small, dispersed stand-in forces to seize austere islands. That capability is distinct from the Army’s mass. This is why the Army and the Marine Corps are complementary, not interchangeable.

As for the claim that dissolving the Marine Corps would save $50 billion, it is a fiction. Missions are not optional. The requirements remain to guard embassies, conduct non-combatant evacuation operations, and patrol littorals. To transfer those duties to the Army would merely shift the cost, likely inflating it.

The Marine Corps has long been the Pentagon’s best investment, providing 15 to 20 percent of the nation’s combat power for roughly 4 to 6 percent of the Defense budget. Marines are culturally conditioned to do more with less. Replacing a self-contained Marine Expeditionary Unit with an ad-hoc conglomeration of Army and Air Force units would create a disjointed Frankenstein’s monster with bloated supply chains and a heavier price tag.

Kass cited Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower as authorities for abolishing the Marine Corps. But he failed to acknowledge just how wrong both men were proven during the Korean War. The First Marine Division’s September 1950 landing at Inchon saved the peninsula after the Army had been pushed to the brink. Were it not for the Marines’ unique ability to conduct a complex amphibious assault far behind enemy lines, we might never have seen Psy dance to “Gangnam Style.”

To say the Marines are obsolete is to confuse contrarianism with insight. There is a serious debate to be had about American force structure, but this is not it.

Justin McCall, is currently a Commander in the U.S. Navy Reserves and a former Marine of 11 years, who deployed in 2003 in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.