Chapter 3. Preparing for war

“The essential thing is action. Action has three stages: the decision born of thought, the order or preparation for execution, and the execution itself. All three stages are governed by the will. The will is rooted in character, and for the man of action character is of more critical importance than intellect. Intellect without will is worthless, will without intellect is dangerous.” ¹

—Hans von Seekt

“The best form of welfare for the troops is first class training, for this saves unnecessary casualties.” ²

—Erwin Rommel

“Untutored courage is useless in the face of educated bullets.” ³

—George S. Patton, Jr.

During times of peace the most important task of any military is to prepare for war. As the nation’s rapid response force, the Marine Corps must maintain itself ready for immediate employment in any clime and place and in any type of conflict. All peacetime activities should focus on achieving combat readiness. This implies a high level of training, flexibility in organization and equipment, qualified professional leadership, and a cohesive doctrine.

PLANNING

Planning plays as important a role in the preparation for war as in the conduct of war. The key to any plan is a clearly defined objective, in this case a required level of readiness. We must identify that level of readiness and plan a campaign to reach it. A campaign is a progressive sequence of attainable goals to gain the objective within a specified time.⁴

The plan must focus all the efforts of the peacetime Marine Corps, including training, education, doctrine, organization, and equipment acquisition. Unity of effort is as important during the preparation for war as it is during the conduct of war. This systematic process of identifying the objective and planning a course to gain it applies to all levels.

ORGANIZATION

The Fleet Marine Forces must be organized to provide forwarddeployed or rapidly-deployable forces capable of mounting expeditionary operations in any environment. This means that, in addition to maintaining their unique amphibious capability, the Fleet Marine Forces must maintain a capability to deploy by whatever means is appropriate to the situation.

The active Fleet Marine Forces must be capable of responding immediately to most types of conflict. Missions in sustained highintensity warfare will require augmentation from the Reserve establishment.

For operations and training, Fleet Marine Forces active and Reserve will be formed into Marine Air-Ground Task Forces (MAGTFs). MAGTFs are task organizations consisting of ground, aviation, combat service support, and command components. They have no standard structure, but rather are constituted as appropriate for the specific situation. The MAGTF provides a single commander the optimum combined-arms force for the situation he faces. As the situation changes, it may of course be necessary to restructure the MAGTF.

To the greatest extent practicable, Fleet Marine Forces must be organized for warfighting and then adapted for peacetime rather than vice versa. Tables of organization of Fleet Marine Force units should reflect the two central requirements of deployability and the ability to task-organize according to specific situations. Units should be organized according to type only to the extent dictated by training, administrative, and logistic requirements. Further, we should streamline our headquarters organizations and staffs to eliminate bureaucratic delays in order to add tempo.

Commanders should establish habitual relationships between supported and supporting units to develop operational familiarity among those units. This does not preclude nonstandard relationships when required by the situation.

DOCTRINE

Doctrine is a teaching advanced as the fundamental beliefs of the Marine Corps on the subject of war, from its nature and theory to its preparation and conduct.⁵ Doctrine establishes a particular way of thinking about war and a way of fighting, a philosophy for leading Marines in combat, a mandate for professionalism, and a common language. In short, it establishes the way we practice our profession. In this manner, doctrine provides the basis for harmonious actions and mutual understanding.

Marine Corps doctrine is made official by the Commandant and is established in this manual. Our doctrine does not consist of procedures to be applied in specific situations so much as it establishes general guidance that requires judgment in application. Therefore, while authoritative, doctrine is not prescriptive.

LEADERSHIP

Marine Corps doctrine demands professional competence among its leaders. As military professionals charged with the defense of the nation, Marine leaders must be true experts in the conduct of war. They must be men of action and of intellect both, skilled at “getting things done” while at the same time conversant in the military art. Resolute and self-reliant in their decisions, they must also be energetic and insistent in execution ⁶.

The military profession is a thinking profession. Officers particularly are expected to be students of the art and science of war at all levels tactical, operational, and strategic with a solid foundation in military theory and a knowledge of military history and the timeless lessons to be gained from it.

Leaders must have a strong sense of the great responsibility of their office; the resources they will expend in war are human lives.

The Marine Corps’ style of warfare requires intelligent leaders with a penchant for boldness and initiative down to the lowest levels. Boldness is an essential moral trait in a leader, for it generates combat power beyond the physical means at hand. Initiative, the willingness to act on one’s own judgment, is a prerequisite for boldness. These traits carried to excess can lead to rashness, but we must realize that errors by junior leaders stemming from overboldness are a necessary part of learning. We should deal with such errors leniently; there must be no “zero defects” mentality.⁷ Not only must we not stifle boldness or initiative, we must continue to encourage both traits in spite of mistakes. On the other hand, we should deal severely with errors of inaction or timidity. We will not accept lack of orders as justification for inaction; it is each Marine’s duty to take initiative as the situation demands.

Consequently, trust is an essential trait among leaders - trust by seniors in the abilities of their subordinates and by juniors in the competence and support of their seniors. Trust must be earned, and actions which undermine trust must meet with strict censure. Trust is a product of confidence and familiarity. Confidence among comrades results from demonstrated professional skill. Familiarity results from shared experience and a common professional philosophy.

Relations among all leaders from corporal to general should he based on honesty and frankness, regardless of disparity between grades. Until a commander has reached and stated a decision, each subordinate should consider it his duty to provide his honest, professional opinion even though it may be in disagreement with his senior’s. However, once the decision has been reached, the junior then must support it as if it were his own. Seniors must encourage candor among subordinates and must not hide behind their rank insignia. Ready compliance for the purpose of personal advancement the behavior of “yes-men” will not be tolerated.

TRAINING

The purpose of all training is to develop forces that can win in combat. Training is the key to combat effectiveness and therefore is the focus of effort of a peacetime military. However, training should not stop with the commencement of war; training must continue during war to adapt to the lessons of combat.

All officers and enlisted Marines undergo similar entry-level training which is, in effect, a socialization process. This training provides all Marines a common experience, a proud heritage, a set of values, and a common bond of comradeship. It is the essential first step in the making of a Marine.

Basic individual skills are an essential foundation for combat effectiveness and must receive heavy emphasis. All Marines, regardless of occupational specialty, will be trained in basic combat skills. At the same time, unit skills are extremely important. They are not simply an accumulation of individual skills; adequacy in individual skills does not automatically mean unit skills are satisfactory.

Commanders at each echelon must allot subordinates sufficient time and freedom to conduct the training necessary to achieve proficiency at their levels. They must ensure that higher-level demands do not deny subordinates adequate opportunities for autonomous training and that oversupervision does not prevent subordinate commanders from training their units as they believe appropriate.

In order to develop initiative among junior leaders, the conduct of training like combat - should be decentralized. Senior commanders influence training by establishing goals and standards, communicating the intent of training, and establishing a focus of effort for training. As a rule, they should refrain from dictating how the training will be accomplished.

Training programs should reflect practical, challenging, and progressive goals beginning with individual and small-unit skills and culminating in a fully combined-arms MAGTF.

In general, the organization for combat should also be the organization for training. That is, units including MAGTFs should train with the full complement of assigned, reinforcing, and supporting forces they require in combat.

Collective training consists of drills and exercises. Drills are a form of small-unit training which stress proficiency by progressive repetition of tasks. Drills are an effective method for developing standardized techniques and procedures that must be performed repeatedly without variation to ensure speed and coordination, such as gun drill or immediate actions. In contrast, exercises are designed to train units and individuals in tactics under simulated combat conditions. Exercises should approximate the conditions of battle as much as possible; that is, they should introduce friction in the form of uncertainty, stress, disorder, and opposing wills. This last characteristic is most important; only in opposed, free-play exercises can we practice the art of war. Dictated or “canned’, scenarios eliminate the element of independent, opposing wills that is the essence of combat.

Critiques are an important part of training because critical selfanalysis, even after success, is essential to improvement. Their purpose is to draw out the lessons of training. As a result, we should conduct critiques immediately after completing the training, before the memory of the events has faded. Critiques should be held in an atmosphere of open and frank dialogue in which all hands are encouraged to contribute. We learn as much from mistakes as from things done well, so we must be willing to admit and discuss them. Of course, a subordinate’s willingness to admit mistakes depends on the commander’s willingness to tolerate them. Because we recognize that no two situations in war are the same, our critiques should focus not so much on the actions we took as on why we took those actions and why they brought the results they did.