MARSOC Marines shift focus beyond Afghanistan

CPL. KYLE MCNALLY / MARINE CORPSA member of 3rd Marine Special Operations Battalion gives a "thumbs up" during parachute training. Operations with 3rd MSOB have spanned the globe, from the Arctic Circle to the Brazilian rainforest.

By Gina Cavallaro 

The boomerang rotations to Afghanistan that most Marine special operators have been on for years will soon shift as operations there shrink and the special operations community turns its attention to the rest of the globe.

For Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command, the other-than-Afghanistan deployments have long been the purview of 3rd Marine Special Operations Battalion out of Camp Lejeune, N.C., whose critical skills operators quietly have gone about building foreign relationships and gaining military and cultural experience.

Except for sporadic support for the Afghanistan mission, 3rd MSOB’s operators have deployed in small teams to remote locations, without benefit of the established military logistics supply chains and mobility resources in Afghanistan.

Marines going to the war zone “are husbanded all the way to a point in Kabul, or wherever they’re going,” said 3rd MSOB commander Lt. Col. Darren Duke, whose battalion consists of about 350 troops. “Our guys are on a team level — a captain and 11 or 13 Marines and sailors, and that captain will take his small band of merry men and make his way to a small Pacific island or small base in the middle of the rainforest in Brazil.”

The teams’ deployments are training evolutions that fall under the Joint Combined Exchange Training program, or JCET, a U.S. Special Operations Command program in which special operations forces from each service component work and train overseas with foreign military forces, a traditional SOF mission.

It is more than likely that as things wind down in Afghanistan, greater numbers of operators from 2nd MSOB at Lejeune and 1st MSOB based at Camp Pendleton, Calif., will deploy in support of the JCET mission.

What that means for MARSOC is the growth of a deeper bench of operators and support personnel who understand the ways of the world’s military forces and the particularities of the way their countries do business.

“As our cultural immersion capacity increases, so will our reach,” said MARSOC spokesman Maj. Jeff Landis.

Operators assigned to 3rd MSOB have spent up to two months at a time in Brazil, the Philippines, Malaysia, the Dominican Republic, Thailand and Indonesia. Marines are teaching and learning.

The Philippines, for example, “is a wonderful opportunity for us to get out as amphibious creatures and practice our amphibious capabilities in terms of boats and working in and around the water,” Duke said.

Operators may deploy to an austere base in Africa, where the nearest military support facility is 3,000 miles away, or to a remote Pacific island with no airfield, forcing the team to move equipment and personnel via barges or boats.

The mission, Duke said, “matures our operators and our Marines who provide support.”

“It makes them more cosmopolitan in a military sense,” he added. “Somebody who’s traveled the world makes better decisions.”

Training for JCET deployments, Duke said, takes place in locations all over the country, and in some overseas locations, such as the Arctic Circle. Marine operators were there in 2010 to train with British and Norwegian forces.

To get them ready for that event, the Marines conducted survival training in Alaska.

“We wanted them to show up capable of integrating into combined forces, like the Brits and Norwegians who operate routinely in those locations,” Duke said.

Language and cultural understanding also is learned up front, with native role players who work with the Marines in the U.S. in anticipation of JCET deployments.

MARSOC recently sought to contract Tagalog speakers to act as role players in scenarios intended to simulate the Philippines. The training was to take place at Camp McCrady in Eastover, S.C.

“We give them training on the region and culture before they go,” Duke said, “When they get there, they are not starting from scratch.

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