Common Ground: The Advanced Base Force and the Marine Littoral Regiment
Common Ground: The Advanced Base Force and the Marine Littoral Regiment
John S. Naylor
28 July, 2026
Introduction
In the face of increased peer competition in the western Pacific, the Marine Corps has fielded a novel, task organized, fighting unit, the Marine Littoral Regiment (MLR). Composed of infantry, anti-shipping, anti-aircraft and logistics Marines, the MLR is deployed to island positions in the Pacific today. Persistent aggressive posturing by Chinese military forces, the enduring threat to Taiwan, and continuing threats to shipping lanes and unincorporated Philippine territory motivated Marine Corps leadership to adopt a new approach to its participation in the defense of the region.
The Marine Littoral Regiment is a major departure from the status quo; it combines infantry deployed in platoon sized units employing drones and advanced communications technology; anti-shipping weapons; anti-air weapons; and organic logistics forces designed for decentralized operations in the littorals (coastal or island areas). The MLR’s mission is a return to one in support of naval campaigns, through the localized execution of sea denial (sinking ships), using weapons and tactics not previously employed by the service. The unit has been designed with primarily one peer competitor in mind, to conduct a narrow range of operations over an extended period but as we’re witnessing a sea-change in the essence of war, it may find relevance in other littoral regions.
The MLR is a cornerstone of, and probably the most visible feature of, the transformation the Marine Corps has undertaken known as Force Design 2030. In the wake of decades’ long ground combat in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, Marine leaders recognized that the legacy force structure and weaponry on hand were not up to the challenges presented in the western Pacific. Additionally, they recognized that if the service was going to keep up with the technological advances made by challengers, appropriations would have to be shifted from the maintenance of legacy systems to those viable after the transition from the digital age to the intelligence age. The MLR is but a part of Force Design, however it is also a segment of what are known as Stand-in Forces. These forces are an array of commands from the United States and allies in the Pacific arrayed against Chinese hegemony, positioned throughout the region to combat the threats to international law and convention, and the self-determination of Asian-Pacific societies.
As one might expect, the process of change and evolution has been controversial within more conservative segments of the Marine Corps community. The push-back has garnered many angry op-eds, but no meaningful retraction by policy makers. In the first decades of the 20th century the friction between proponents of the then-new mission of the Advanced Base Force and the more conservative old guard wasn’t so evident to the public — the service presented a unified front in the press and before congress — but in that it pitted active-duty officer against active-duty officer the debate affected the relationships and promotions of senior leaders. The current dissent is not of great importance to this piece. Here, we’ll attempt to trace the parallels in the evolution of the ABF and the MLR. These matter because they show the enduring role naval campaigns play in the Marine Corps raison d’être.
While the MLR’s structure is unique in the history of the service, this is not the first time the service has embarked on such a major transformation under heightened international tensions. In 1900, the service entered into a comparable transformational role with the creation and fielding of the Advanced Base Force (ABF). That organizational evolution heralded nothing less than the establishment of the modern-day Marine Corps, and was responsible for the first steps taken in the development of American amphibious warfare doctrine.
At the turn of the 19th century, the General Board of the United States Navy directed the Marine Corps to develop an advanced base force to support Navy operations and logistics in foreign waters. Over the next two decades the service developed the capabilities required to establish a protected temporary position in hostile territory where,
“the ships of our battle fleet must return to the advanced base and recoal, refit, revictual, transfer the wounded, and make ready to take advantage of the first victory and carry the war to the enemy’s territory.”[1]
With a superficially similar mission, in a similar environment, today’s Marine Corps is fielding the Marine Littoral Regiment, with the intent,
“to be arrayed in a series of austere, temporary locations ashore within a contested or potentially contested maritime area to conduct sea denial and control and fleet sustainment operations.”[2]
Today, the anticipated enemy are the forces of the Chinese PLA Navy, and the battleground will be in the first island chain in the western Pacific. In 1900, the expected foes were Germany, and Japan. The ABF was intended to take and defend harbors in enemy waters, using naval guns, mines, and engineered defenses. The MLR is a small, but key component in what is called Stand-in Forces, which will draw on all the assets and capabilities of U.S. and allied forces in the region. The MLR is not a reinvention of the Advanced Base Force, but the two forces do share circumstances in their creation and execution. I’ll try to show some of the parallels in the creation and development of the two forces, their composition, deployment, and outcomes.
The Advanced Base Force
Building on the Navy’s experiences in the war with Spain, Secretary of the Navy John Long called for the creation of a General Board of the United States Navy in 1900.
“A general board has been made, of which the Admiral is president, and the function of which is to consider questions relating to the efficient preparation of the fleet in case of war and for the naval defense of the coast.”[3]
The admiral referenced was the “Hero of Manila Bay”, Admiral George Dewey, and the new board was established to carry on in the tradition of the Navy War Board of 1898, providing the civilian secretary of the Navy with counsel on technical and operational matters not well understood outside of naval service. As the United States embarked on creating a fleet that could compete with navies of the great powers, the board would commission studies, not just on ship design and construction, but also on how to best employ the sailors and Marines of the fleet.
Joining Dewey on the board were nine senior officers, including the chief of the Bureau of Navigation, the head of the Office of Naval Intelligence, the head of the Naval War College, and one Marine — Adjutant & Inspector Lieutenant Colonel George C. Reid. From the start, the board commissioned studies on the best locations for coaling stations in the U.S. and in the new territories and queried how many Marines would be required to protect such stations. The board took the responses and recommended creating a Marine Corps garrison in the Philippines — at Cavite and Olongopo — to support the Asiatic Fleet.
The board also asked Lieutenant Colonel Reid how the Marine Corps might best support naval operations in foreign waters. As early as 1890, leading economists such as Alfred Thayer Mahan imagined a force of Marines to secure bases in enemy waters,
“Having therefore no foreign establishments, either colonial or military, the ships of war of the United States, in war, will be like land birds, unable to fly far from their own shores. To provide resting places for them, where they can coal and repair, would be one of the first duties of a government proposing to itself the development of the power of the nation at sea.”[4]
It didn’t take the board long to develop a framework for a unit that could provide such resting places; they called the outfit the “Advanced Base Force”. Marines would be tasked with taking the terrain surrounding a temporary harbor, and with establishing a comprehensive, yet temporary defense of it.
The board could be confident in the concept of the advanced base force; in June of 1898, Huntington’s Battalion of Marines had performed just such a mission at Guantanamo, landing five companies of infantry, and one company of artillery, at Fisherman’s Point. The battalion landed to provide Commodore Sampson’s Atlantic Fleet a defended anchorage well within cruising range of the Spanish fleet, which was by that point penned-in at Santiago de Cuba.
Huntington’s First Battalion of Marines was not an overly sophisticated outfit. It was an ad hoc unit, its ranks consisting of Marines transferred from guard duty at the Navy yards of the east coast on short notice. After assembly and embarkation at the Brooklyn Navy Yard the unit spent a month training on the beach of Key West. After reembarking aboard a former merchant steamship and sailing for Cuba, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Huntington and his men landed and fought a short but intense battle with Spanish forces at Guantanamo Bay. While this was not the first time the Marine Corps had formed an expeditionary battalion for service beyond the seas, it was the first time they did so in support ofnaval operations.
A deployed ABF unit would be composed of two subordinate units — a “fixed” force, and a “mobile” force.[5]The fixed unit was responsible for the defense of the harbor, and ships within the harbor; the mobile force was responsible for the defense of the fixed force. By the time the table of organization was finalized in January of 1914, the unit was designated the Advanced Base Brigade, with the 1st Regiment being the fixed unit, and the 2nd Regiment being the mobile unit. As the fixed unit manned the defenses of the harbor, the mobile unit deployed, as needed, to defend the fixed regiment positions, and remained prepared to redeploy to take the next advanced base required by the fleet. In 1914, the fixed regiment was,
“composed of C Company, a mine company trained to handle harbor defense mines; E Company, a signal company specialized in radio, telephone, telegraph, buzzers, and visual signaling; a field artillery battery which manned 3-inch field pieces; F and I Companies, which manned fixed batteries intended to be mounted for harbor defense; and H Company, which was trained both as an engineer company and as a machine gun company.”[6]
The mobile regiment was organized as a standard infantry regiment would be, composed of two battalions. Mobile regiment lettered companies were composed of around 125 officers and men. The fixed regiment headquarters was staffed with around 47 officers and men — including members of the band — and the lettered companies of the regiment had about 125-officers and men; the 3-inch battery company was larger, composed of around 145 officers and men.
The Marines of the fixed regiment received specialized training in naval guns; they practiced the transportation of the guns — over land and water — and gun assembly on shore. The unit was not equipped with horses or mules, unless they acquired them in the field, so everything they moved was by hand over a temporary system of rails. Fixed regiment men practiced the deployment of submarine mines from small boats; they trained in field engineering, digging trenches and revetments for naval guns; they trained for all forms of communications, including semaphore, wig-wag, morse code, telegraphy, telephones, heliographs and signal lights. Perhaps the most novel, and enduring introduction to the organization of the ABF was a callow element of Marine Corps aviation. At the Culebra exercises in 1914, the service employed a small number of Curtiss pushers — both land planes and hydrofoils — as spotting and liaison aircraft for the force. All in all, the ABF was a far cry from the standard expeditionary regiment of Marines in the 19th century.
In 1910 the service opened the first advanced base force school, which trained the Marines of the brigade, and created a space within the Corps for the cadre that would form the Advanced Base Brigade when called upon. Marines in garrison for purposes other than securing navy yards was still a novel concept; the Marine Corps was only a tenant on Navy bases, and had no training or maneuver areas of its own. At the same time, the Marine Corps was finally standardizing recruit training by taking it out of the hands of barracks’ NCOs and putting it in the hands of designated training companies in four locations on the east and west coasts. In 1917 the establishment of the new Quantico training base allowed for more specialized training for Marines headed to France, those headed to the ABF, and those dispatched on various expeditions in the Caribbean and Central America. The new base became the hub of operations and training for the Marine Corps for the following two decades.
Geopolitics and the Advanced Base Force
In the first decade of the 20th century, the United States was enjoying the fruits of an overseas empire. Since declaring war with Spain in April of 1898, the U.S. had acquired new territories in form of the Philippines, Guam, Eastern Samoa, Hawai’i, Porto Rico, the Panama Canal Zone, and held treaty-based entrée in the affairs of Cuban governance. Theodore Roosevelt flexed his prerogative in implementing the Monroe Doctrine in the Caribbean. While policing his neighbors was his primary interest, the control of the pan-isthmian canal in the former Colombian province of Panama was of the utmost American strategic importance. In the years before the opening of the canal, the canal zone’s security was every bit in the interest of the United States’ place in the world order. Colombia hadn’t agreed to cession of its province, and Germany was positioning itself in the region as an ally of anti-American interests. And while diplomacy precluded bloodshed in the resolution of the Venezuelan Crisis, Roosevelt established legitimacy in ‘policing’ the affairs of other countries in the region. Yet the United States recognized that the potential for conflict with Japan and Germany remained, requiring a continued buildup of a strong navy defending American interests.
Protecting American interests abroad would normally only require landing parties from U.S. warships, or expeditions dispatched from the states, but if hostilities with Germany or Japan broke out, the ability to take and defend advanced bases remained essential. Throughout the decade leading up to the Great War, the Navy continued to push the Marine Corps to develop the Advanced Base Force, at the same time it dispatched Marines to every hotspot that erupted.
Through the first three decades of the century, the entire archipelago of the Philippines remained at risk to Japanese encroachment. After a decade of squabbling with the Navy, the U.S. Army Coast Artillery assumed responsibility for the permanent defense of the islands. The Navy maintained a more realistic appraisal of the situation; the war planners at the Naval War College created PLAN ORANGE, which called for an advance across the breadth of the Pacific to rescue or retake the Philippines. To cross the Pacific, the U.S. would need to seize advanced bases at strategic locations. With time, the protocols developed by the Advanced Base Force in landing operations would morph into the capabilities to conduct the offensive landing operations required to control the sea lanes in the advance on the Japanese islands.
In the Caribbean, the approaches to Panama from the Atlantic remained ripe for German interference. The advanced base outfit returned to Culebra, Porto Rico, and Guantanamo Bay periodically to practice their trade, making landings as an element of the fleet, and emplacing their guns above the great harbors at the strategically located positions; as much as these exercises built the Marines’ competencies, they displayed to the world that the United States was investing blood, sweat, toil and tears in the Caribbean, and was prepared to defend the Panama Canal. The appearance of a deterrent force is half of its strength.
With time, the Navy looked to the ABF not just for the ability to secure forward bases in the region, but to deny potential enemies of the use of such bases. The prospect of the Kaiser’s Navy operating in the Caribbean drove U.S. policy. Both the Philippines and Caribbean required the Advanced Base Brigade to remain at the ready.
But as the Advanced Base School opened, and the cadre was composed, the operational tempo of the Marine Corps picked up. Additional expeditions to Santo Domingo, Hayti, and Cuba removed advanced base Marines from their training, as the Navy and Marine Corps enforced U.S. policy in the tropics. In 1913, the U.S. Navy Aide for Inspections, Commander William Fullam accused the Marine Corps of shirking its responsibilities to in the advanced base mission, by not having the men, or materials required on hand, and for having obsolescent ordnance, poorly maintained, and worn from use. Most of these charges were true, if not the fault of the Marines. Brigadier General Commandant of the Marine Corps(check rank) William Biddle was put into a position where the Advanced Base Brigade would have to exceed all expectations on the January 1914 Fleet Exercises at Culebra.
These exercises were the culmination of nearly twenty-five years conceptualizing, planning, training, and critiquing. Originally commissioned in 1900, its school opened in 1910, the two regiments of the Advanced Base Brigade — 2,500 Marines and sailors strong — executed the mission assigned them at Culebra in the Porto Rican Territory, as Admiral Charles Johnston Badger reported,
“Attention is invited to the very complete outfit of the Advance(sic) Base Detachment and to the great variety of military work required of officers and men. Rifle pits and bomb proof shelters have been dug, 3” and 5” guns have been landed in transports, dragged up steep declivities and installed ready for firing. Methods for both direct and indirect fire have been perfected for both fixed and field artillery. Mine fields have been laid, and an aviation camp has been established. The problem of supply to the numerous outlying camps have been well worked out in a waterless country almost devoid of supplies. A very complete system of communications, including 4 miles of telephone system, a radio plan, a night and day heliograph system and a flag semaphore system have been established. All parts of this work seem to have been done in an extraordinarily efficient manner.”[7]
Culebra was the ABF’s graduation exercise, but the Navy had already realized that having Marines embarked on transport shipping, accompanying the fleet as it responded to crises around the world, was of great benefit. Three months after the Culebra exercise, the Atlantic Fleet landed the Mobile Brigade of the Advanced Base Brigade at the port of Vera Cruz, Mexico, in retaliation for the insult to American honor made in the Tampico Affair. The Fixed Regiment — without its naval guns and submarine mines — arrived as the city was being secured. The 1st Provisional Brigade of Marines became the backbone of the occupation of Vera Cruz for the following five months, and was joined by an Army brigade from Texas.
The Advanced Base Force would remain intact as a cadre and in deployed units leading up to and through the Great War, and remained at-the-ready for employment in European waters should the need arise. In 1923, Commandant John Lejeune announced the Marine Corps Expeditionary Force for the east and west coasts had been formed, concluding the use of the designation “advanced base force”. The mission remained germane to Navy war planners and became but one of the multitude of missions assigned to Marine Corps expeditionary forces afloat. And the mission assigned in 1900 to Brigadier General Commandant of the Marine Corps Charles Heywood, remains. It is memorialized and remains current by law; under Title X,
“The Marine Corps shall be organized, trained, and equipped to provide fleet marine forces of combined arms, together with supporting air components, for service with the fleet in the seizure or defense of advanced naval bases and for the conduct of such land operations as may be essential to the prosecution of a naval campaign.”[8]
The reference to “the prosecution of a naval campaign” is at the core of the mission the Marine Littoral Regiment is currently tasked with.
Genesis of the Marine Littoral Regiment
The Marine Littoral Regiment is but one element of what had been termed Force Design 2030, which is either a structural shakeup of the Marine Corps, or a natural evolution in the face of emerging threats. Castigated by a select group of retired Marine officers, Force Design has resulted in the service divesting itself of legacy occupational specialties, personnel, and their equipment. The Marine Corps will become smaller, and occupy a smaller footprint on already limited amphibious shipping. The service has shed some of its towed artillery assets, its tank battalions, its military police units, and some fixed wing aircraft, helicopters and tiltrotors. The aim of this divestment is to reduce both the cost and footprint of a force required to execute a mission requiring mobility and flexibility, capable of operating in coastal and island environments.
“The overall thrust of our FD2030 program is to produce a Marine Corps that is prepared to operate inside actively contested maritime spaces in support of fleet ops.”[9]
Just as the Advanced Base Force was just a small part of the new Navy’s implementation of strategy and operational planning in the Pacific and the Caribbean, the two MLRs, as an element of the Stand-in Forces, are central to an overarching allied Pacific strategy; Stand-in Forces are a continuation of the relationships formed with friends and allies in the region, and an augmentation of capabilities, with the intent of creating increased deterrence to Chinese aggression.
The MLR is a dramatic departure from the traditional Marine infantry regiment. It deploys a Littoral Combat Team composed of three infantry companies, an organic NMESIS battery[10], and a combat engineer platoon. The LCT is expected to deploy dispersed platoon-sized units to support expeditionary base operations at remote locations. The infantry companies are experimenting with new squad tables of organization and equipment, tailored to the challenges of modern warfare in the islands; the Marines of today are being trained to fight using the input of multiple devices and platforms, wielding weapons systems wildly more destructive from their predecessors. The information Marines receive from multiple sources today would have seemed like science fiction a decade or two ago. The regiment employs an anti-air battalion, which is composed of H&S battery; an air control battery; and a ground-based air-defense (GBAD) battery. Unlike traditional infantry regiments, which may have had administratively attached logistics personnel, the MLR deploys an organic logistics battalion. This may seem to be a pedestrian feature in the age of drones, computers, AI, satellites and the internet, but given the nature of the environment the MLR will be fighting in, across multiple remote locations and the diversity of weapons systems deployed, the ability to sustain all formations is essential. The challenge for the logistics companies supporting the regiment will be significant, if not heralded in public affairs materiel the way rockets and drones are.
As the ABF wasn’t the single supporting feature of the fleet — torpedo boat destroyers, submarines, and flying squadrons were integral to setting up a decisive contact — the MLR is not the only force within the SIF responsible for fighting the enemy. Others have pointed out that the MLR is not capable of directing other assets or the fire of allies and joint teammates but it still occupies a distinct role within the entire effort.[11] I draw a parallel between the ABF and the MLR because of the stated purpose the MLR,
“MLRs are specialized and purpose-built regiments designed for distributed operations that integrate advanced command, control, communications, computers, cyber, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (CISR) capabilities. These regiments enhance the Joint Force’s ability to find, fix, track, target, engage and assess (F2T2EA) threats rapidly from key maritime terrain in support of a naval campaign.[12]
Both the ABF and MLR were conceived around the ability of Marines to sink enemy ships in support of a naval strategy, and remain in communications with the fleet, and enable sustainment operations. In 1914 the Marines of the ABF were supporting logistical efforts for the fleet, in 2026 the Marines are supporting tactical and logistical efforts for the Stand-in Forces, protecting bases where Marine and allied support can refuel and rearm. The Fixed Regiment and Marine Littoral Regiment are both task-organized outfits, varying greatly from standard infantry regiments of their day. Where the ABF utilized naval rifles, submarine mines, automotive torpedoes and the first generation of heavier than air aircraft to determine enemy strengths and locations, the MLR employs long range anti shipping missiles, aerial and surface drones, and Marines trained to use computers to determine enemy capabilities, strength, and locations.
But I’m not sure the hardware is what determines the success or failure of naval operations. The forces deployed must match the operations required to accomplish the national strategy. The forces that crossed the berm into Kuwait in 1991 would have a hard time fighting as platoon-sized elements on remote islands spread across the first island chain. Which reminds me of the quote,
“…those who ignore the question of “why” navies exist and focus instead on “what” a navy will fight with are doomed to have neither the right ideas nor the tools to implement them when the reckoning comes.”
The hardware is bound to change, as it does, Marines must adapt.
Conclusions
American commerce is dependent upon an open and free global commons. Economists and strategists have digested this truth for centuries. At the turn of the previous century, when American interests shifted from continental to oceanic, and the world view included new territories located across vast oceans, she was motivated to expand her naval power. Asian markets became essential to American interests. In the peace with Spain, the U.S. acquired the Philippines and Guam, giving American commerce entrée to Asian markets. Secretary of State John Hay announced his “open door” policy in China just as the emerging power in the region, Japan, was seeking its place amongst the great powers. The coincidental competition between the two emerging powers created the need for expanded fleet and logistical assets in the region. The Advanced Base Force was one result of the competition.
At the turn of this century, it looked like American foreign policy might once again shift its focus to Asia; after the fall of the Soviet Union, and an endless decade of fighting in the Middle East, the United States announced renewed interest in Asian markets. China emerged as both a major trade partner for the United States, and as competitor. Common to both eras, when U.S. focus in the region increased, her major competitor in the region became increasingly interested in geographic expansion to support their economies. Japan in the early 20th century, and China in the 21st both emerged as threats to the independence of neighboring Asian and Pacific states, and U.S. protectorates in the region.
In both cases, the response from the United States was to buttress its naval reach, which prompted novel and experimental capabilities in the Marine Corps. By assigning the service — or reassigning it — a naval mission, the service was forced to adopt the guise of a task-focused unit operating from forward temporary positions. While many of the competencies required had previously been available to the service, the ABF and MLR were both departures from previous force organizational structure.
Historians looking at the ABF and modern-day critics of the MLR may look askance at the outfits given their “defensive” nature. History and Marine Corps ethos trumpet the employment of offensive operations, and regard the defense as anathema, on the level of logistics. The ABF, and its heir during the Pacific War, the Marine Defense Battalion, are de minimus, because they weren’t designed to force entry across a defended beach, but such landings may be in the past given advanced weaponry and sensing technology.
As the utility of the Advanced Base Force was realized at the Culebra exercise in 1914, the Navy realized that they could deploy the force in greater expeditions and operations, such as Vera Cruz, and the rapid occupation of Hayti and Santo Domingo. Marine landings were fated to become greater than those employed by ships’ companies and the ABF. The ABF was never intended to be a permanent defense of a naval base, that was the role of the Army and the Coast Artillery in follow-on operations. The ABF was intended to blunt the attack of the enemy fleet on U.S. Navy logistics operations, as the Marine Defense Battalions were expected to defend positions from raiding Imperial Japanese Navy attacks The ABF and Defense Battalions were expected to hold up their end as the fleet mobilized additional assets to counter-attack. So part of their role was deterrence. And given that the MLR is but one element of the Stand-in Forces, its role is deterrence. As was stated in the Force Design 2030 roll-out,
“We are not designing an across-the-ROMO[13] force; but rather, a force intended to prevent major conflict and deter the escalation of conflict within the ROMO.”
So what conclusions can be drawn by these two instances in Marine Corps history? My conclusion is that when challenged, the Marine Corps can adapt to a new mission, and make the most of its role in the prosecution of naval operations. In this way, the ABF and the MLR share some common ground, as the Marine Corps once again turns its focus to the execution of naval operations in the national interest.
Sources:
Austin E. Renforth. “The Marine Littoral Regiment – Opportunities within the naval command framework”, Marine Corps Gazette. June 2022.
Brian Kerg, Bobby Fowler, Anthony Johnson. “The MLR ≠ Stand-in Force”, Proceedings. July 2025.
Headquarters Marine Corps. “A Concept for Stand-in Forces”. December 2021.
Pat Hassett, “Bringing Clarity to Stand-In Forces”. JAMS Vol.15, No.2.
Headquarters Marine Corps. “Force Design 2030”. March 2020.
Abbreviations:
EABO – Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations
SIF – Stand-in Forces
RXR – Reconnaissance / Counter-reconnaissance
MLR – Marine Littoral Regiment
ROMO – Range of Military Operations
GBAD – Ground Based Air Defense
[1] Dion Williams. “The Advanced Base”. Lecture, Naval War College. 1912.
[2] Congressional Research Service. “U.S. Marine Corps Marine Littoral Regiment”. https://crsreports.congress.gov
[3] Secretary of the Navy Report, 1900
[4] Alfred Thayer Mahan. The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783
[5] The Army shared the same distinctions for artillery units at the time — fixed units manning coastal defenses, and mobile units with towed artillery, accompanying the infantry.
[6] A Brief History of the First Marines. Historical Branch, G-3 Division Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps. Washington, DC. 1968. PDF
[7] Andy Barnett, ed. George Barnett, Marine Corps Commandant, A Memoir, 1877-1923. McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Jefferson, NC. 2015. Kindle Edition.
[8] 10 U.S. Code § 8063 - United States Marine Corps: composition; functions
[9] Austin E. Renforth. “The Marine Littoral Regiment – Opportunities within the naval command framework”, Marine Corps Gazette. June 2022
[10] NMESIS is the ‘Navy Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System’ which is a naval strike missile fired from a self-driven launcher vehicle based on the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV). I am making an active attempt to avoid the acronym soup. It has a range of 120-190 miles.
[11] Kerg, Fowler, Johnson. “MLR≠Stand-in Force”, Proceedings Magazine. July 2025. Vol.151/7/1469.
[12] Headquarters Marine Corps. “Force Design: Annual Update (October 2025)”.
[13] ROMO – Range Of Military Operations; legacy military units, two up – one in reserve.
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