The objective of this article is to highlight the unique capabilities of the Marine Corps and Space Force and how they can function as part of a Joint Task Force (JTF) operating within U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (USINDOPACOM). More importantly, it aims to discuss the need to establish a Joint force structure and package that minimizes the risk should the United States need to quickly shift from competition to a crisis or, worse, conflict with China. Determining command relationships, allocated resources, and authorities as part of a JTF structure and package will be critical to quickly transition such a force in response to a crisis or engage the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in conflict.

This article argues that the critical point of failure in the Allied catastrophe in France and the Low Countries in 1940 was a military plan that ignored key tenets of operational art and planning. In doing so, it points out that the Allies lacked a strategy oriented toward victory, failed to balance their operational factors of time, space, and force, and planned against a single potential enemy course of action. Together, these components set the conditions for a swift Allied defeat that shocked the world.

This article examines the strategic challenges faced by Admirals Elmo Zumwalt and James Holloway as chiefs of naval operations in the 1970s. Zumwalt’s charter was to reform the U.S. Navy, but it included a charge to address Navy strategy in the face of a growing Soviet maritime threat. He succeeded, but his successor, Admiral Holloway, who is less known, provided much needed stability for the fleet in the wake of Zumwalt’s reforms. Holloway continued to refine the ideas of Zumwalt and Admiral Stansfield Turner that eventually became the maritime strategy of the 1980s. The challenges they overcame provide insights for similar challenges today.

Seapower has come to cyberspace as a measure of the so-called greatest transfer of wealth in history given the efforts of China and other states to steal intellectual property online. But the first greatest transfer of wealth comprised Europe’s rise to prominence post-1500 ACE. What historians call the “rise of the West” came to fruition with a forfeiture of the ideological promise of sharing the benefits of Western civilization worldwide. Cyberspace promises to align both threads of the new naval power, economic gain, and ideological conviction, a novel change in the history of conflict at sea all made possible by the technical marvel of cyberspace.

On 15 May 2020, Operation Warp Speed, later renamed the HHSDOD COVID-19 Countermeasures Acceleration Group (CAG), was a collaboration between the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Defense (DOD), and the private sector to accelerate development, production, and distribution of effective vaccines and therapeutics to counter COVID-19 for the American people. The CAG was the nucleus of the “whole-of-America” effort to defeat COVID-19, and DOD’s contribution was essential to the success of the CAG. This article highlights the contributions made by DOD, with a focus on innovative solutions and best practices that might apply to other DOD activities.

Extant scholarship on Iranian cyber warfare emphasizes the ways in which Tehran’s cyber capabilities might be employed offensively to achieve its foreign policy objectives. Comparatively little attention, however, has been given to the ways in which Iran might leverage these same cyber assets in retaliatory strikes. This article argues that because of the unique combination of endogenous and exogenous variables affecting contemporary Iran, including diplomatic isolation and economic sanctions, as well as Iran’s historical track record of carrying out its foreign policy through proxies, Iranian cyber retaliation is likely to be executed through third parties, mostly symbolic in nature, and proportionate in scale.

General David H. Berger’s tenure as Commandant of the Marine Corps has set the stage for drastic change toward a Marine Corps more focused on maritime operations. The Commandant has called on these changes to be concept driven and capabilities tested, driving experimentation, wargaming, analysis, research and development, and acquisitions. The Marine Corps is pursuing or developing a number of concepts but lacks an overarching concept that provides context and coherence for conceptual exploration. The author proposes advanced force operations, a concept designed to be broad enough to link together modern concepts like expeditionary advanced base operations and distributed operations, while building on the Marine Corps’ traditions and strengths. Advanced force operations envision Marine Corps forces acting as a vanguard force, competing for maritime access, shaping naval campaigns, and enabling the introduction of Joint forces.

On 29 March 2019, a ceremony at Marine Corps University (MCU) marked the opening and full operational capability of the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Creativity. The conception, birth, assignment of permanent staff, funding, and now-robust schedule of activities of the Krulak Center came after some years of gestation, providing a case study of organizational change. The Marine Corps has long valued innovation and creativity, but the impetus to establish such a center had its origins in the decennial accreditation process of MCU by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC). This article looks at the early conceptualization of a Center for Applied Creativity (CAC), the organizational starts and stalls, the thoughts about goals and organization that came together for the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Creativity, and finally the initial years of its activity.

Despite the billions of dollars invested in the security cooperation enterprise each year, the Marine Corps and the Department of Defense (DOD) have failed to implement standardized metrics and processes for evaluating security cooperation engagements at the tactical level. Without such data, it is nearly impossible for the security cooperation enterprise to accurately assess progress in achieving national security objectives, such as partner nation basing access and partner force capacity building. Without clear signposts of progress, cooperation engagements will continue to be hampered by redundant or irrelevant training that limits the return on investment for the DOD and strategic U.S. partners.