Military history
The 2007 Proposal to Move the Marine Corps to Afghanistan
In late 2007 Marine Corps leaders raised a proposal that attracted immediate attention: the Corps would withdraw from Iraq, where it held responsibility for Anbar province, and assume responsibility for Afghanistan as a single-service theatre, leaving Iraq to the Army. It was never adopted. The reasons it was not are more informative than the proposal itself, because they show how theatre responsibility actually gets assigned.
The case for it
The argument had several strands and none of them was frivolous.
Unity of command. A theatre run by one service has one commander, one set of procedures, one logistics chain and one aviation arrangement. Afghanistan at that point was a coalition patchwork with a complicated command structure, and simplification had obvious appeal.
Fit with the mission. Afghanistan’s terrain and dispersed, small-unit character suited the way the Corps organises: self-contained air-ground task forces operating with organic aviation and logistics, away from large fixed bases.
Institutional identity. Anbar had been a long, heavy, static commitment. A significant strand of internal Marine opinion held that the Corps had spent years doing something close to occupation duty, which is not what an expeditionary force is designed for, and that a cleaner expeditionary mission was preferable.
Aviation logic. Marine air is organic to the task force, which in a theatre with poor infrastructure and long distances is an advantage over arranging support from another service.
Why it did not happen
Anbar was working. By late 2007 the situation in Anbar had improved markedly, in a process Marine units had been central to. Handing over a province in the middle of a working arrangement, to a service with different procedures and no local relationships, risked the thing that was going right.
Theatres are not single-service. Both conflicts required capabilities the Corps does not hold at scale: heavy armour, large-scale engineering, theatre-level intelligence and logistics, and long-haul airlift. A single-service theatre would still have depended on Army and Air Force enablers, which means the promised simplification was partly illusory.
Coalition structure. Afghanistan was a NATO-led operation with troop contributions from dozens of nations. Command arrangements were the product of political negotiation among allies, not something the United States could restructure to suit one service’s preference.
It looked like a service argument. The proposal arrived while both services were competing for people, equipment and budget in a period of severe strain, and it was widely read (inside and outside the building) as being partly about institutional positioning. That reading, fair or not, made it harder to advance on its merits.
What happened instead
Marine forces did deploy to Afghanistan in strength, in Helmand province from 2009 onwards, while the Army retained the larger share of the theatre and the overall command. Iraq’s drawdown proceeded under Army leadership. In other words the Corps got a substantial Afghan mission without the single-service theatre, which is the normal outcome of this kind of proposal: the capability moves, the command arrangement does not.
The general point
Theatre assignment is decided by a combination of what capabilities are needed, what coalition politics permit, and what the current commander judges safe to change — not by which service is best suited in the abstract. Proposals framed around service suitability, however sound, tend to founder on the second and third of those.
The 2007 proposal is worth remembering as a clear, well-documented instance of that. It was a reasonable idea, argued by serious people, that lost to considerations having little to do with whether it would have worked.
The proposal is worth remembering less for what it asked than for what it revealed: that by 2007 the two campaigns were competing for the same finite pool of units, and that at least one service was willing to say so in public.
Questions and answers
What was the proposal actually asking for?
That the Marine Corps take responsibility for Afghanistan as a single service theatre rather than contributing units into a mixed command, on the argument that a self-contained air-ground force with its own aviation and logistics is better suited to a landlocked theatre with poor infrastructure than a coalition assembled from several services.
Why was it not adopted in that form?
Because a single-service theatre cuts across joint command structure, which exists specifically to prevent service boundaries from shaping operations. The proposal also concentrated one service in one place at a time when its other commitments had not gone away. Marine forces deployed to Afghanistan in strength regardless, inside the joint structure and not as an alternative to it.
What made Afghanistan such a difficult theatre to supply?
It is landlocked and mountainous, so everything arrives across another state's territory or by air. Ground routes were long and interdictable and depended on agreements that were periodically renegotiated; air supply was reliable and expensive. Logistics was therefore a diplomatic problem as much as a military one, and it set a hard ceiling on how much could be sustained where.