Wednesday, November 02, 2005
Posted by: Hugh Hewitt at 5:51 AM
The Washington Post has an account of something Secretary Rumsfeld mentioned in passing yesterday: The creation of a new unit in the United States Marine Corps, "a force of about 2,600 highly specialized Marines intended to address a shortage of elite troops available for counterterrorist operations and other missions requiring exceptional skills."
Read the whole thing, and this article as well. I'd like to hear from active duty Marines what they think about this. As I recall, a similar effort to brand a force as "elite" in WW 2, the "Raiders," was later abandoned as contrary to USMC doctrine, but that Force Recon has emerged over the past few decades to serve pretty much the same role.
The Pentagon is home to some very old turf fights, and this one had to be intense. Bill Gertz could easily get a best seller out of this one.