Perspective: Marines find Iraq mission unsettling

Above: A Marine with the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit monitors a communication station inside a local Iraqi home serving as a Patrol Base in Anbar in August.

Here at "the crossroads of the Marine Corps," some officers are uneasily pondering a paradox: No service was better prepared than the Marines for the challenges of post-invasion Iraq, yet no service has found its mission there more unsettling to its sense of itself.

When asked in 1997 to describe the kind of conflict for which Marines were training, Gen. Charles Krulak, then the Corps' commandant, replied with one word: "Chechnya." He meant ethnic and sectarian conflict in an urban context. He spoke of "the three-block war" in which a Marine wraps a child in a blanket, then is a buffer between warring factions, then engages in combat, all within three city blocks.

For Marines, however, fighting such a war for more than four years jeopardizes the skills essential to its core mission -- combat as an expeditionary force. Marines have not conducted a major amphibious landing since Inchon in Korea, but the Corps, which specializes in operational maneuver from the sea, re mains, in theory, a force that penetrates, performs, then departs. Marines say: The nation needs the Army, Navy and Air Force, but it wants the Marine Corps as an expeditionary power, more than just a miniaturized Army.

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