Six months ago, Secretary Gates stood right here at this podium and asked some very pointed questions about the capabilities and future of the Marine Corps. He challenged the Corps to, "define the unique mission of the Marines going forward." When the boss challenges you to do something, you probably ought to take it seriously... and we did.
I refer to our Marine Corps of today as a 'middleweight force.' I liken it to boxing, where a middleweight boxer can box up into the heavy weight division or box down to the lightweight division simply by changing his weight and training regime. The same is true for the Marine Corps. We fill the void in our Nation's defense for an agile force that is comfortable operating at the high and low ends of the threat spectrum, or the more likely ambiguous areas in between.
In early September, the Marine Corps began an internally-driven, comprehensive Force Structure Review. Armed with the "mission of the Marine Corps" from my Planning Guidance, and using the future security environment as the backdrop in which we will most likely operate, a team of our brightest Marines and Civilian Marines, guided by myself and the top leadership of our Corps, crafted a post-Afghanistan Marine Corps. Yesterday, I briefed Secretary Gates and our senior leadership on the results of this study, and Congress is being briefed, as well.
As a result of our review, the Marine Corps will:
1. Right-size the Marine Corps for a post Afghanistan world
2. Build capabilities that support a "middleweight force" whose role is to respond to today's crisis... TODAY
3. Fully institutionalize the lessons learned during nine years of combat and counter insurgency missions
4. Assure access, preserve freedom of maneuver and deny sanctuary against irregular, hybrid and conventional threats
5. Maintain a force with a minimum capability to simultaneously deploy two Brigade's worth of assault forces from 33 amphibious ships
6. Eliminate unnecessary HQ's and flatten the Marine Corps command structure where it makes sense to do so
7. Build regionally-aligned Marine Expeditionary Brigade Command Elements that provide scalable, Joint Task Force-capable, crisis response command and control for our Regional Combatant Commanders
8. Maintain Reserve force structure at current levels while internally reorganizing for increased operational relevance with the Total Force
9. Increase Marine Cyber-forces by 67% and Marine Special Operations Command by 44%
10. Turn high demand/low density forces into high demand/'right density' forces
11. Transition 7% of non-operational forces to operational billets
12. Reorganize and Consolidate Irregular Warfare Organizations
13. Restructure our logistics groups to increase the depth, availability and responsiveness of our combat service support