Former Marine Capt. Nate Fick, author of “One Bullet Away,” a best-selling account of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, likens Marine squads to world-class dance troupes. “Everybody’s movement depends on everybody else’s,” he says.
On a recent morning at the Pentagon, I asked Marine Corps Commandant Robert Neller about these iconic squads of 13. He began by saying they had taken on “an almost mythical lore and status.” Then he placed his elbow on an impeccably polished conference table and addressed the question many Marines can’t wrap their heads around: why he wants to scrap them.
With his steady gaze, close-cropped silver hair, permanent field tan and congenital seriousness, Gen. Neller is every inch a Marine Corps general—the caretaker of a proudly insular warrior culture that has prevailed in decisive battles from Belleau Wood to Iwo Jima. Underneath that armor, however, lurks one of the most exotic leadership breeds of all—the inside outsider.
Not long after he joined the Marines in 1975, Gen. Neller says, his first commanding officer dubbed him the president of the “I don’t see why” club. As he climbed the ranks, his contrarian streak came with him.“I was always the guy in the audience throwing the metaphorical Molotov cocktail,” he says.
Few resident gadflies ever get to the top; they ruffle too many feathers along the way. But when the commandant’s job opened in 2015, the Marines had spent nearly two decades in a state of constant deployment. They hadn’t had time to fully address the shifting map of global threats or even the mandate to include women in combat roles. Above all, they needed to get a handle on technology.
Any large business in this predicament might look to the outside
for a disruptive CEO to shake things up. As a tradition-bound citadel, the Marine Corps didn’t have that option—but it did have Robert Neller. “The powers that be were almost like, ‘OK, Neller. You’ve been out here wanking for 38 years. We’re going to make you own this,’” he says.
Military leaders are often accused of preparing to fight the last war. Gen. Neller doesn’t have that problem. In less than three years, he’s reconsidered everything about the Marines, from rifles to socks. He’s brushed aside all suspicions about technology by investing in tablets, drones and laser-guided munitions. He once proposed offering enlistment bonuses to hackers.
Convinced that the Marines are in “the people business,” he’s conducted scores of town halls to encourage face-to-face interaction within the ranks and has more than lived up to his reputation for bluntness. In December, for instance, he made headlines in Norway by telling a group of Marines
to be prepared for a “bigass fight.”
When it came time to re-examine rifle squads, the Marines conducted a number of experiments and tests—but Gen. Neller didn’t believe there was time for exhaustive study. The battlefield intelligence pouring in from new forms of technology was enormously valuable, but it needed to be collected and analyzed. Traditional squads lacked the bandwidth to do this without losing focus in combat.
Like many Marine commandants before him, Gen. Neller makes no apologies for being bookish. Marines don’t get many shots at war, so studying history is a vital form of practice. “That’s how you get repetitions,” he says. In his view, the historical transition to digital warfare is just as significant as earlier shifts Marines have made from horses to vehicles or vehicles to tanks.
Gen. Neller concluded that each rifle squad needed two additional billets—an assistant squad leader and a squad systems operator focused on technology. Adding two people presented a problem, however: Marine squads were already unusually large. When Gen. Neller asked squad leaders if they thought they could manage 15 Marines at once, they said no.
In May, Gen. Neller unveiled the most sweeping changes to Marine infantry combat organization in 70 years. Not only did he add those new billets, he decided to reduce a squad’s size to 12 by eliminating one Marine from each of its three fire teams.
Gen. Neller wasn’t surprised by the pushback. Fire teams with four members were nearly as sacrosanct as squads of 13. Longtime Marines worried the changes might undermine squads in battle by disrupting their instinctive ability to maneuver together.
Gen. Neller counters that the Marines have used different squad formations before—particularly in Vietnam, where squads had to absorb heavy casualties.
It goes without saying that there’s a lot riding on this. As the sharp point of the U.S. military spear, the Marines must maintain a state of perpetual readiness. The list of luxuries they deny themselves includes the entire concept of a win/loss record. “The expectation,” Gen. Neller says, “is that we will go undefeated.”
No leader facing pressure like that undertakes major reforms lightly. For Gen. Neller, simply taking command after so many years of agitating for change was a steep challenge. “It was terrifying,” he says.
One knock on inside outsiders is that they often rush to implement pet ideas without thoroughly examining them or creating backup plans in case they fail. Gen. Neller says he’s fully prepared to restore one rifleman to each fire team if it proves necessary.
In the end, though, Gen. Neller knew that leaders must be decisive. He also believes that sometimes the biggest risk of all is doing nothing. “So I made a decision,” he says.
It’s difficult to say whether insiders are better or worse at shaking up tradition-bound institutions. But all members of this breed have one major advantage: They’re natives. They understand the people involved and what they’re capable of.
“I know I’m asking a lot,” Gen. Neller said of his squad reforms, “but Marines aren’t normal people.”
