The End of the Marine Corps?

The House Armed Services Committee released last Friday its truly dire assessment of future Defense Department budgets through 2021 if the super committee fails to find $1.2 trillion in savings by Nov. 23 or if the Office of Management and Budget enacts a 10 percent cut across the entire federal government.

If the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction fails to agree on those savings, the Defense budget will be arbitrarily chopped, which means the Marine Corps would have a hard time performing its "From The Sea" mission due to the lack of ships, the committee said.

In order to deploy two brigades (six battalions of about 1,200 personnel) the Marines need 38 Navy amphibious ships, such as the USS Makin Island which has a flight deck for helicopters and a well deck for landing craft and berthing for more than 1,600 troops.

But, current funding will result in the decommissioning of at least six amphibious ships, reducing inventory to 23. Additional cuts could scrap an equivalent number of vessels, resulting in an inventory of 17 -- less than half the Marine Corps requirement, the panel said.

Cuts to personnel budget lines would reduce Marine forces to 150,000 from 202,000 today, leaving the Corps as nothing much more than a small, mostly land-based Army.

And, since we already have an Army, I predict that sooner or later someone in power will decide to get rid of the Marines and sell off the 17 miles of shorefront at Camp Pendleton, Calif. (where I learned my "From the Sea" skills) to real estate developers in a ridiculous budget balancing exercise.