I remember reading a historian describe the Marine Corps as the ultimate force for fighting "non-Western enemies." Basically saying that both in the Corps' history and their current organization, they were optimized for light-infantry war against non-mechanized enemies in difficult or urban terrain. To a degree, this is true - even with the Abrams tank and the AAV or EFV "maneuver element" a MarDiv still does not and will not have the TO&E designed to fight an enemy mechanized division. It probably could do so within the MAGTF concept, but that's not what it's optimized for.

This is an interesting idea, but I don't think it's going anywhere, because of (as Ken White would say) parochialism and turf wars. That Vietnam attitude of "it ain't much of a war, but it's the only one we got" means that everyone will want to get their piece of the pie, even if a service isn't optimized for it (see the AF and COIN operations). The Army wouldn't stand on the sidelines if a pair of MEUs conducted ops in Somalia, say, and the Marine Corps wouldn't allow itself to stand on the sidelines if the Army had to fight the North Koreans. No service will willingly relinquish a particular mission, particularly one so currently important as IW/COIN because it means loss of pride/prestige and loss of funds.

Nonetheless, the advantages are numerous:

-minimizes capability and mission redundancy between USA and USMC
-takes advantage of MAGTF concept and MEU deployability
-would institutionalize small wars within an entire service, and perhaps shape training, equipment procurement, and doctrine towards those missions
among others. . .

The disadvantages I see include massive increased strain on Marine Corps deployment schedules (as such crises requiring intervention could be a constant fixture of the geopolitical landscape), encouraging the Army to ignore COIN and prepare for the "big war," and potentially weakening the Marine Corps ability to prepare for high-intensity conflicts like a forced entry or Korea-style conflict.

The main concern I have is that I think the US has too many interests and too many potential conflict scenarios to afford the luxury of optimizing a 200,000 man force specifically for IW/COIN. We must keep shaping and molding our GP forces, allowing them to be jacks-of-all-trades (and masters of none) rather than risk being caught flat-footed and unprepared for a particular threat.

The Army and Marine Corps will forever complement each other's capabilities, and that isn't a bad thing.

Matt