The commandant of the U.S. Marines Corps, Gen. James Amos, told the House Armed Services Committee Tuesday his service could not fight one major war if the $500 billion in cuts to defense spending from sequestration were implemented.
The Marine Corps stands at 27 infantry battalions and will be reduced to 23 because of the Budget Control Act. Sequestration, however, would drive the service below the 19 required for a major theater war, Gen. Amos testified.
"The typical notional major theater war is about a 19-battalion requirement of the United States Marines," he said. "As we go down to 182,100 (personnel), that would give us a couple of battalions beyond if you just deployed everybody ... So there's really not a lot of slack ... We bring in sequestration and we'll be down in the teens for battalions, and we will be very, very strained to be a single MCO Marine Corps."
Testifying alongside Adm. Jonathan Greenert, Chief of Naval Operations, Gen. Amos also said the Marines have near-term readiness problems, AOL Defense reports:
To keep Afghanistan-bound units fully manned, trained, supplied, and equipped, the Marines are stripping readiness funds from the rest of the force. While an infantry battalion or aircraft squadron preparing for an Afghan deployment will be funded at 100 percent of need, he said, "if you went to their sister units across the base, they'd be 30 percent down."
"As we move into the early parts of '14," said Amos, units not committed to Afghanistan "will be at a readiness rating of C-3 or below," on a scale from C-1 (fully ready for "wartime missions") to C-5 (totally unprepared -- a rating almost never given). Units rated below C-2 are normally not sent abroad at all. So if there's a crisis anywhere but Afghanistan, the Marines will have to "cobble together" ad hoc forces as they did for the first days of the Korean War in 1950 -- a particularly painful analogy given the current tensions with Pyongyang.
The sea services will try to protect their top priorities, such as support for wounded warriors and sexual assault victims:
"We're going to do less with less," Gen. Amos told the committee. "That doesn't mean we're going to do it poorly."