Naval Warfare

Marine Littoral Regiment to refine concepts of employment in coming months

MODERN DAY MARINE 2022: The 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment will spend much of the second half of this year experimenting as it figures out exactly how it will operate in the Indo–Pacific.

“This coming fall we’ll turn back to training and experimentation as we look at working on… training the new MLR once we have all three supporting battalions,” Col. Tim Brady, the commanding officer of the 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment, said Wednesday at the Modern Day Marine conference.

The Marine Corps’ 3rd Littoral Regiment was redesignated from the 3rd Marine Regiment earlier this year. The Hawaii-based unit’s change is part of the Marine Corps’ Force Design 2030, an overarching strategy document guiding numerous changes that all amount to preparing the service for a future fight.

Later this year, Brady said the 3rd MLR will be doing several experiments with expeditionary advanced base operations, the Marines new expeditionary warfare concept that includes the deployments of small, low-signature units to temporary locations to complete a mission.

“We’ll be doing some of those EABO type experiments and figuring out as an MLR what our concept of employment looks like,” Brady said.

A key goal of the littoral regiments is to build a unit that can strategically deploy to where it is needed quickly, shifting away from the traditional deployment cycle where marines spend six months preparing, six months deployed and six months of rest.

The 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment will include a Littoral Combat Team, Littoral Anti-Air Battalion and a Littoral Logistics Battalion. The unit capabilities include the MQ-9A Reaper, the Ground/Air Task-Oriented Radar and the Navy Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System.

Brady added that the unit will also do some work with its command and control systems to “understand how we fit into the joint force and how we can flatten that kill web.”

Brady said the MLR needs to better understand aspects of its unit such as how many Marines from a littoral combat team it takes to establish a expeditionary advanced base for fires, what the lift requirements are and how many personnel it takes from the logistics battalion to support an expeditionary advanced base.

What “does that force package look like? Those are all the things, along with digital interoperability and C2 systems that we’re looking to experiment and train with,” Brady said.

Brady said that the experimentation will culminate with an expeditionary advanced base operation exercise early next year in southern California. Brady said the MLR will reach initial operating capability in fiscal 2023 and be fully capable by FY25.

“But before we get there, we want… to train and experiment with [capabilities] to be able to figure out our concepts of employment,” he said.

The Marines also plan on redesignating the 4th and 12th Marine Regiment into littoral regiments.