After years of experimentation, the Marine Corps has finally settled on a 13-person rifle squad, including a grunt trained in long-range precision weapons as the service looks to increase the distance from which its most fundamental ground unit can destroy the enemy.
The Corps' top officer, Commandant Gen. Eric Smith, made the announcement Monday at the Navy League's Sea-Air-Space 2025 conference in National Harbor, Maryland, where military and defense industry leaders are gathering this week to discuss national security aims and challenges.
The service had used a 13-Marine rifle squad for decades. But in 2018, as the Corps embarked on its most ambitious organizational shift since before World War II -- known as Force Design -- and it began to tinker with the number of infantrymen in the unit, ranging from 12 people to 15 over the last several years.
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"This includes a school-trained squad leader sergeant and three fire teams," Smith said at the conference. "While this structure sounds familiar, it now includes an organic precision fires specialist."
Those specialists will use drones carrying loitering munitions, a move that comes as the service is looking to insert unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, not only into its most elemental infantry units, but also into the broader culture of the service, Military.com previously reported.
Smith also said that the service will be standing up dedicated fire units within its infantry battalions, taking weapon systems like the 81mm mortar out of its headquarters companies, and creating a single unit within the battalion to better "integrate intelligence, precision fires and reconnaissance at greater ranges."
The commandant said that the changes were informed by bottom-up feedback from Marines in the fleet, "empowered by our campaign of learning to refine and adapt" -- a core aim of Force Design as the service looks to challenge China in the Indo-Pacific.
"So as we experiment, we have our young battalion commanders telling us how to do things, and we're complying with them," Smith said. "We're executing what they direct from the bottom up."
The revamped infantry squads will apply to all traditional infantry battalions, as well as littoral combat teams, which are part of the service's latest Indo-Pacific-oriented formations known as Marine Littoral Regiments, Cathy Close, a spokesperson for the Marine Corps' Combat Development and Integration Division, told Military.com in an emailed statement Tuesday.
The service dabbled with rifle squads with 14- and even 15-Marine units, which would have included a corpsman, she said. Now, the squads will include three teams of four Marines, with a sergeant squad leader, corporal assistant squad leader and corporals as team leaders.
After experimenting for years, the service settled on 13, Close said, noting that any less than that "indicated risk regarding resilience within the formation" related to its ability to take casualties. The current revamp, she said, gives squads and platoons more flexibility with three fire teams, as opposed to just two.
"The Marine Corps has looked to current conflicts, including the war in Ukraine, to help determine the capabilities the infantry battalions, including their rifle squads, need to be effective on the battlefield," Close said when asked whether the service took lessons from modern combat to codify its rifle squad structure. "The impacts of multi-domain operations, to include the importance of drone, counter-drone and loitering munitions, have been considered as an integral requirement for modern warfare."
The changes -- which the commandant said were made last week -- have not come without their challenges. Smith said that "unpredictable funding" due to Congress' inability to pass a long-term budget has slowed the modernization efforts, requiring the Corps to "make tough decisions."
Military.com reported recently that Marines were at risk of losing out on bonuses, and the service was unable to move thousands of troops for routine military moves because the funding wasn't there. Congress has relied on continuing resolutions -- stop-gap measures that require the services to rely on the previous year's funding levels -- to manage the budget.
"I'll stay out of politics, but I will say that we need predictable, on-time funding that only Congress can provide, meaning that continuing resolutions aren't continuing anything," Smith said. "They stop our progress."
