The U.S. Marine Corps Just Sank A Warship 100 Miles Away. It Needs To Do Better.

The U.S. Marine Corps has test-fired its new anti-ship missile.

The Aug. 15 trial of the Navy/Marine Corps Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System, or Nemesis, is a big step for the Marines as they reorganize for island warfare in the waters around China.

Two missiles, fired by Marines in Hawaii, struck a decommissioned frigate, which ultimately sank. Lt. Col. Ryan Collins, combat integration office for artillery and fires at the Marines’ Combat Development Directorate, called the missile “transformative.”

That’s an exaggeration. Capable of hitting ships just 100 miles away, the semi-robotic Nemesis in effect is a defensive system. One that scattered Marine battalions might use to ward off Chinese forces trying to pry the Marines from their island outposts.

What the Marines need now is an offensive missile. One that allows island forces to control larges swaths of ocean. It’s a problem the Corps is trying to solve.

It wasn’t too long ago that the idea of the Marine Corps as an anti-ship force might have seemed laughable. For more than a decade following the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the Marines trained and organized for land-based infantry warfare.

But with the ends of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Pentagon’s reorientation toward so-called “great power competition” with Russia and China, the Marine Corps is moving quickly—arguably the most quickly of any U.S. military service—to reconfigure for high-tech, air-sea warfare.

Under the leadership of Marine commandant Gen. David Berger, the Corps is ditching much of its heavier ground equipment, cutting back on light infantry forces and standing up new units, equipped with new gear, for island warfare.

Berger’s decision to eliminate all of the Corps’ roughly 400 M-1 tanks is indicative of the changes. The Corps is cutting back on armor, infantry and attack helicopters in order to free up money and manpower for sea-control forces. Drone operators. Missile batteries.

If the M-1 represents what the Marines are leaving behind, Nemesis might represent what they’re gaining in exchange. The system boasts a remote-control light truck chassis carrying a twin launcher for Naval Strike Missiles.

The NSM is a 900-pound missile with an infrared seeker and a 300-pound warhead. It can travel out to around 100 miles, skimming the sea the whole time, then home in on the telltale heat signature of an enemy warship.

The $2-million missile is popular for its accuracy and simplicity and the ease with which engineers can bolt its launcher onto practically any platform. A ship. A truck.

The U.S. Navy is adding NSM launchers to its Pacific-based Littoral Combat Ships in order to give those otherwise lightly armed vessels a fighting chance in a naval battle. The Marines are equipping their new littoral regiments with the NSM, starting with a regiment in Japan. The Corps’ budget request for 2022 includes up to 64 NSMs.

The littoral regiments are the Corps’ contribution to so-called “Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations.” Under the EABO concept, U.S. forces would sneak past Chinese defenses in the western Pacific in order to set up small outposts.

The outposts would launch drones to monitor surrounding waters, refuel F-35 stealth fighters flying long-range strike missions and lob missiles at passing Chinese warships.

The vast distances between inhabitable islands in the Philippine and China Seas complicate EABO. Outposts might be separated by hundreds or even thousands of miles. In the context, the NSM with its 100-mile range isn’t terribly useful.

Yes, a volley of NSMs might slow down a Chinese landing force steaming toward a Marine outpost. But Marine regiments firing NSMs pose little danger to, say, a Chinese aircraft carrier battle group.

To give the littoral regiments serious offensive power, the Marines are studying a $2-million, ground-launched version of the Navy’s classic Tomahawk cruise missile. The Pentagon test-fired a trailer-launched Tomahawk two years ago to mark the collapse of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty with Russia, which had banned certain ground-launched missiles.

A Tomahawk cruise missile weighs around 3,000 pounds—a third of which is warhead. The latest Block V Tomahawk can range as far as 1,000 miles and zero in on enemy ships using a multi-mode seeker that combines radar and infrared sensors.

The Marines asked for Tomahawks in the 2021 budget but Congress said no. The Corps added 48 Tomahawks to its “unfunded requirements” list for 2022. It’s not clear whether lawmakers will include the missiles in the budget.

If they don’t, it might be because the U.S. Army is busily acquiring anti-ship missiles of its own—and the Army’s experience might inform the Marines’ own acquisition.

Rather than choosing between several missile options for its own Pacific forces, the Army last year spent $340 million to integrate two separate missile types onto truck launchers.

One is the same Block V Tomahawk the Marines are interested in. The other is the Navy’s SM-6, an air-defense missile with significant surface-strike capability.

The two missile could not be more different. The Tomahawk is a sea-skimming, subsonic cruise missile. The SM-6 is a supersonic ballistic missile. Both are powerful weapons capable of disabling or sinking warships sailing many hundreds of miles away.

But they could require targeting systems and different tactics. The Army is opting to field both missiles. The Marines no doubt are closely watching to see how that dual acquisition shakes out.

U.S. Navy admiral Phil Davidson, then the head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, was clear about his own preference. This spring Davidson told the House Armed Services Committee the Marines needed both the Tomahawk and the SM-6.