Marines Marching Into a Budget-Hungry Future : Military: The corps is being forced to make painful cuts in personnel and to scramble for equipment outlays.

During eight tense minutes on a recent moonlit night, six fanatical hostage-takers holed up in a sprawling waterfront warehouse met their deaths at the hands of the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit.

In the elaborate training exercise, which transformed Charleston’s historic dockside district into the fictional Third World republic of Altunia, the Marines didn’t surround the place, kick in the front door and spray the room with bullets. Instead, they set off a pair of deafening diversionary explosions; then, with a deftly placed third detonation, about a dozen Marines rushed through a side door and plucked out two live hostages.

In Marine Corps argot, the operation was an “insertion” of Marines and an “extraction” of hostages.

The surgical metaphors are no accident. In fact, they represent new watchwords for a shrinking Marine Corps--a band of warriors that hopes to ensure its future by staking a claim to missions requiring deftness and speed rather than brute strength and staying power.

“Sometimes you need a screwdriver, and sometimes you need a sledgehammer,” said Gen. Carl E. Mundy Jr., who is plotting the Marines’ march into a budget-hungry future. “We can be the screwdriver. We can be the sledgehammer at times, too. But when you want the Sunday punch, then you want B-52s and an armored division. And we don’t do that.”

For Mundy, who became corps commandant last July, the challenge will be to sharpen that instrument, and keep it deployed close to the Altunias of the world, at a time of painful cuts in personnel and a competitive scramble for equipment outlays.

While Mundy and other advocates appear resigned to the inevitability of a smaller Marine Corps in a post-Cold War world, some experts say the downsizing has significant implications. The anticipated personnel cuts will require Marines to spend considerably more time on maneuvers, making it more difficult to attract and keep qualified personnel. Shrunken hardware budgets may prevent the corps from replacing aging amphibious landing equipment, undermining its ability to conduct the kind of storm-the-beaches operations for which it is famous.

Over Mundy’s objections, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney has directed the corps to slim down from almost 200,000 personnel in the mid-1980s to 159,000 by 1997. The reduction is far less severe than the 30% manpower cuts the Air Force and Army are facing, but it is enough to elicit howls of pain and protest within the usually stoic corps.

“Why are we going to have a 159,000-person Marine Corps?” asked Mundy. Not because the demands on Marines have changed or because the demise of the Soviet threat has lightened their burden, he said, but because he has been ordered to save money.

“That’s not a criticism,” he demurred. “That’s a fact of life.”

As he reluctantly presides over that shrinkage, Mundy said he will concentrate the Marine Corps’ focus on smaller missions, ranging from hostage rescues to seaborne evacuations to simply “standing in the door”--and holding it open for heavier forces that take longer to arrive.

For the Marines, who some say were miscast in the role of armored fighting units in the Persian Gulf War, these missions represent something of a return to roots. Established in 1775 as the nation’s “expeditionary force in readiness,” the Marine Corps, by order of Congress, was ordered to be ready “to suppress or contain international disturbances short of war” and “to hold aggression at bay while the American nation mobilizes.”

In keeping with that, Mundy has ordered the corps to reduce the number of heavy tank battalions, each of which consists of about 1,020 Marines, from three to two. He also has directed the service to equip two more battalions of about 890 men each to operate from the “light-armored vehicles” that swim ashore and maneuver particularly well in urban areas.

As demonstrated in Charleston, those are the areas where the Marines expect to be called upon to conduct many of their operations. Over the next 20 years, the Marines estimate that 80% of the populations of developing nations in Latin America, Africa and the Pacific Rim will be concentrated in urbanized coastal regions. As instability and conflict boil over in those coastal crucibles, the Marines expect orders to get there fast, and to move quickly once ashore.

“It’s going to be a force that’s faster-moving, not harder-hitting in firepower, but quick and agile,” said Mundy.

From a bureaucratic perspective, he conceded, that focus should have two effects. It will distinguish the Marine Corps in the competition for funds from the bulkier but more durable Army forces, and it will keep it in high demand, even in peacetime.

Mundy likened this month’s training operation to three of the Marines’ most recent venues of operation: the evacuation of U.S. civilians and diplomats from intertribal strife in Liberia and in Somalia, and the distribution of humanitarian support in the wake of last April’s devastating cyclone in Bangladesh.

“This is Liberia and Somalia and Bangladesh,” said Mundy. “These are what the United States is likely to do the most of. We don’t fight wars very often. We do a lot of these little things.”

But in rounds of testimony on Capitol Hill, where he is openly appealing to some of the Marines’ most ardent backers, Mundy has warned that doing “these little things” with almost 20% fewer Marines is going to exact a heavy toll on the men and women who join the corps. To maintain even a smaller force afloat, Marines who now spend an average of 157 days per year on deployment will be asked to spend 200 days a year on maneuvers away from their families.

That kind of pressure, said Mundy, could drive some of the corps’ most talented warriors out of the service.

Mundy clearly hopes that Congress will overrule Cheney and place a floor on Marine Corps personnel at what he calls “the magic number” of 176,000.

Congressional sources said that Mundy also continues to appeal quietly for restoration of funding for the Marines’ highest equipment priority: the V-22 Osprey aircraft designed to ferry Marines ashore from ships docked “over the horizon” in an amphibious operation.

In one of his first actions as defense secretary, Cheney canceled the V-22 program, delivering the first of several major blows to the Marine Corps’ ability to conduct amphibious operations. The Navy has since decided to retire its whole fleet of four battleships, which would deliver naval gunfire to Marine landing zones, and to cut its fleet of amphibious ships from 62 to 53.

The Marines’ main landing assault vehicle, the 1960s-vintage “Amtrack,” is due to be replaced by the year 2004. But its replacement faces one of the most hostile budget climates in recent years, and many believe it will never be built in large numbers under a new Pentagon acquisition policy that stresses research and development over large-scale procurement.

All of that affects the Marines’ ability to conduct what many believe to be their defining mission--an amphibious assault like those on Inchon in the Korean War and Iwo Jima during World War II. And some warn that if they lose that ability--especially at a time when other branches of the armed forces are competing fiercely for money--the corps will quickly become little more than the State Department’s police force.

That fear became particularly acute in the wake of the Gulf War, when the corps drew fire from critics who complained the Marines may have lost their ability to fight their way ashore.

When the anti-Iraq coalition threatened to send the Marines ashore in Kuwait, the result was to pin at least eight Iraqi divisions down at the coast, relieving pressure on coalition forces fighting elsewhere. But critics, including many Army officers, have said the decision not to land the Marines in Kuwait was a vote of no confidence in the corps’ ability to conduct a massive amphibious assault against heavily defended beaches.

Mundy, in an interview, conceded that to some extent, the critics are correct; but they are also unfair, he said.

The Marines, he said, no longer plan to fight their way onto defended beaches: Like the Marines of the 26th Expeditionary Unit, a landing force would prefer to blow a hole in a side door and sneak in where it is least expected.

That emphasis on deftness over brute force may be the key to the Marines’ continued health in the face of cutbacks, said one sometime-critic of the corps.

“The Marines are facing a crisis in troop-carrying capabilities, and that’s going to affect their ability to conduct large amphibious assaults,” said Jeffrey Record, a Washington-based defense analyst and expert on the Marines. “But they will always be able to conduct an amphibious assault somewhere. The question is how quickly they’ll be able to do it and how big an assault they can do.”

The Marines’ March of Attrition

From a peak of almost 200,000 personnel in the mid-1980s, the U.S. Marine Corps has been asked to shrink its size to less than 160,000 by 1997.

1987: 199,000

1988: 197,100

1989: 194,900

1990: 195,900

1991: 193,700

1992*: 188,000

1993*: 182,200

1994*: 176,400

1995*: 170,600

1996*: 164,800

1997*: 159,100

* Projected

Source: U.S. Marine Corps