SLAYING THE DRAGON: Marines Retooling for Potential War with China.

• Author: Harper, Jon

The island-hopping campaign against Japanese forces during World War II was perhaps the U.S. Marine Corps' finest hour. Today, Marines are trying to ready themselves for a potential conflagration against another Indo-Pacific adversary that has emerged as a great power competitor in the 21st century--China.

After the 9/11 attacks and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, counterinsurgency became the service's main focus. But not anymore.

The Corps has been conducting "a lot of COIN ops for the last two decades," Lt. Gen. Mark Wise, deputy commandant for aviation, noted at the Navy League's Sea-Air-Space conference in August.

However, "the potential adversaries that we have out there have been watching closely and not standing idly by," he said. "They have been increasing in complexity, they've been increasing in capacity, and they've been doing all of that over the last 20 years. And it's only accelerating right now."

Who are these potential adversaries?

"The pacing threat is China," said Lt. Gen. Eric Smith, commanding general at Marine Corps Combat Development Command and deputy commandant for combat development and integration. "We shouldn't sugarcoat that and talk in vague terms. We're talking about China as a pacing threat because of their bellicose actions and language."

The Corps is not as well postured as it should be to address the challenge, officials say. To get after the problem, the service is pursuing new technologies, force structure changes and operating concepts.

Operating concepts that the Marines are looking to apply in the Indo-Pacific region include distributed maritime ops, littoral ops in a contested environment, and expeditionary advanced base operations.

Marines must be able to employ mobile, low-signature, operationally relevant, and easy to maintain and sustain naval expeditionary forces from a series of austere, temporary locations ashore or inshore within a contested or potentially contested maritime area in order to conduct sea denial, support sea control, or enable fleet sustainment, according to a service news release.

Employing these concepts in the Indo-Pacific is no easy task, Wise noted.

"When you look at an archipelago that's greater than 1,000 islands and you're looking at how you're going to posture in a theater like that ... that adds a level of complexity to the challenge you're trying to solve," he said. "How are you going to operate in that theater? ... It [is] really hard when you're looking...