Pacific Marines modernize, prep for a busy year

MARINE CORPS BASE HAWAII—The Japan-based III Marine Expeditionary Force has made some “significant modernization changes” in the past few years as part of the service’s ongoing force design efforts, and is looking forward to a “busy, busy year” of exercises in 2026 amid increasing Chinese aggression in the region, the unit’s commander said.

“My mandate is to deliver combat credible capability, and to do it in conjunction with our partners and allies…So I don't think too much about the deterrence space. I really just think about: ‘Is the capability and capacity relevant, and is it credible?’ And really, that's kind of the space that we're really grinding,” Lt. Gen. Roger Turner told Defense One during a recent visit here.

The unit, made up of nearly 7,000 Marines and sailors across the Pacific, includes the service’s two Marine Littoral Regiments—as well as 4th Marine Regiment, which leaders recently decided to leave as a traditional infantry regiment instead of turning it into a MLR.

The Hawaii-based 3rd MLR, the first to be converted, is “leading the service,” and has grown rapidly to have a host of capabilities, Turner said, including the Marine Air Defense Integrated System, or MADIS, and the Navy-Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System, or NMESIS. The Okinawa-based 12th MLR, the second to be converted, has the advantage of being able to learn from the 3rd MLR, making the learning curve “much shorter,” Turner said.

“The other big advantage that 12th has is they essentially sit right on top of their mission, so they don’t need to travel to be able to do their mission. And every day, they can work with their partner. And because of the location, being in Okinawa, they’re already on some of the terrain that they would need to operate from,” he said.

And while 4th Marine Regiment will not become an MLR, the sea-denial capabilities that were planned for the unit will still come to III MEF, Turner said, “In my view, that gives me more capability and, most importantly, capacity, in the first two MLRs, while still retaining traditional combat capability provided by 4th Marines. And so it was a good decision, and it was necessary, and it was aligned with what INDOPACOM is asking us to do.”

Though many people equate Force Design with the MLRs, that is “an oversimplification of the concept,” Turner said. The idea behind Force Design is to move beyond the Marine Corps’ traditional capability—to project power from the sea to the land—to having the ability to also project power “from the land to the sea, into the air, and into space and cyberspace from key maritime terrain,” Turner said. “That really kind of underpins the thesis of Force Design, is the ability to do both. And that was a capability that, let’s say five years ago, we didn’t have.”

While the MLR does have that capability, it’s not just confined to the MLR, Turner said. “It’s really a whole-of-MEF effort.”

Turner pointed out that the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit is now on its third deployment this year. The unit has “shown incredible agility over this last year, with its ability to rapidly composite and then, you know, do really meaningful activities in support of crisis response and support deterrence.”

The Marine Corps has been struggling to get its medium landing ship funded and fielded, to give it the maneuver capability it needs in the shallow waters around Pacific islands, but Turner said he is appreciative of the funding the Marine Corps received in the reconciliation bill for that capability.

“We are encouraged to see that the department [of the Navy] is moving in a way that is going to provide that capability with a program in the future. But I think our main concern is, how do we bridge a program of record with some sort of capability in the near term.”

And as the Marines’ capabilities grow, the contributions they’re seeing from partner militaries in the Pacific—including Japan, Korea, and the Philippines—have also become exponentially more meaningful Turner said.

“These are not token in any stretch of the imagination,” he said, which was illustrated in Resolute Dragon 25, an exercise in which the Marines and the Japanese defense forces rehearsed the bilateral defense of Japan.

About 20,000 troops participated in the exercise, defending from Kyushu—Japan’s southernmost main island—to Yonaguni—the westernmost island of Japan, which is less than 70 miles from Taiwan.

During the exercise, the Marines deployed a new advanced radar system called the AN/TPS-80 Ground/Air-Task-Oriented Radar, or G/ATOR; the MADIS air defense system; and the NMESIS missile launcher. The U.S. Army also brought a Typhon missile system to the exercise.

“We were able to successfully integrate those new systems into our systems, and then also successfully coordinate bilaterally with the Japanese,” Turner said. “So Resolute Dragon 25 really was a significant increase in capability from what we did in 24 and in years before.”