The Changing Roles of the U.S. Marine Corps in Twenty-first Century Conflicts and Beyond
Marine Corps University Press, 2025, 316pp, Open Access
Editor: Joanna Siekiera
Reviewed by: Jason Kirkham
Is the United States Marine Corps (USMC) transforming swiftly and intelligently enough to win the next major war? Joanna Siekiera’s Evolution on Demand tackles this question in her edited collection by fellows of the prestigious Brute Krulak Centre for Innovation and Future Warfare. By analysing a diverse scope of future warfare challenges, Siekiera details how innovation, adaptability and cooperation will be the most critical building blocks to operational success in an increasingly complex world.
The book consists of thirteen chapters that cover four themes: force design, logistics, asymmetric capabilities, and wargaming. Each chapter analyses a preeminent challenge that is shaping the evolution of warfare and provides recommendations to the USMC and like-minded allies on how to meet these challenges.
The book features a fresh and gripping analysis of force design transformation in the shadow of looming great power conflict in the Pacific. Three chapters in particular question the suitability of the USMC’s order of battle and mindset for contemporary threats. Leo Spaeder, Zach Ota, and Austin Duncan persuasively contend that the USMC must adopt a defensive, lightly equipped, and geographically distributed posture. Brian Kerg develops this line further by underscoring the USMC’s criticality to the Stand In Forces warfighting concept, whereby an ‘immediate line of scrimmage’ is generated to challenge regional aggressors. These chapters provide grounded, insightful and refreshing perspectives that bear strong relevance to Australia.
The complex discipline of combat logistics also receives welcome attention. Drake Long invokes uncanny parallels between the Burma campaign of 1943 and today's geo-strategic setting to highlight logistical frictions that will likely re-emerge in a future Pacific conflict. Sidharth Kaushul proposes that logistical burdens can be greatly reduced if the USMC reorganises into a strike-centric contact layer that is lighter, smaller, and therefore easier to sustain. His argument relies on excessive optimism regarding the ability of unmanned submarines and heavy-lift drones to sustain widely dispersed marines across a contested battlespace. Despite this, both authors’ efforts to advance logistical thinking are commendable.
The book also explores a range of topics that can be categorised under asymmetric capabilities. Kelly Greico and Maximilian Bremer effectively illuminate the growing importance of the air littoral as a major disruptor to traditional airpower, and the urgent need for the USMC to expand its capabilities there. Preston McLaughlin effectively places irregular warfare within the context of the USMC’s newest warfighting paradigms, namely Expeditionary Advanced Basing and Distributed Maritime Operations. Less compelling and evolutionary are Kurtis Kjobech’s chapter on stability policing, and Arun Shankar’s on cyber warfare. Both authors eloquently define their topics, but their contributions are more retrospective than prospective. They give less attention to presenting recommendations for how one might apply their disciplines in new, nuanced and inspired ways to gain advantage in today’s complex warfighting environment.
The book finishes with two excellent chapters on wargaming. James Fielder addresses wargaming’s long and unfortunate image problem and presents recommendations to more effectively embed it into USMC culture. Kevin Williamson then narrows the aperture onto the cutting-edge arena of digital wargaming. He neatly presents the advantages in education, open-source intelligence and collaboration that can be gained in this emergent space. Both chapters provide fresh perspectives to help address a challenge in professional military education that is common to many militaries, including the Australian Defence Force.[1]
The book's greatest strength is that it delivers on its promise of providing recommendations to a complex problem. For comparison, Tim Sweijs and Jeffrey Michaels ’s Beyond Ukraine is a fantastic but largely theoretical analysis of future war.[2] Evolution on Demand is, on the other hand, grounded in tangible, actionable recommendations of contemporary relevance. It covers an impressively diverse scope of multidomain and interdisciplinary topics, which serves to amplify its relevance and utility far beyond the USMC and into an international and interagency readership.
Like many edited collections, the book’s primary shortfall is its minor inconsistencies across certain chapters. Chapter 11 (‘Artificial Intelligence and the Nature of War’), for example, does not provide specific recommendations to the reader on its topic of cyberspace, nor does it convincingly argue why cyberspace will become a ‘win-or-lose asset in future warfare’.[3] Additionally, the content of Chapter 9 (‘Military-Technological Innovation in the Digital Age’) is based almost entirely on examples from the Global War on Terror without a robust linkage to the USMC’s current warfighting concepts, contemporary adversaries, and geographic challenges.
Evolution on Demand is an important contribution in the context of the USMC’s controversial Force Design 2030 transformation.[4] It acts to counterbalance the tumultuous attention that Force Design has received by offering clear-eyed perspectives from a diverse group of experts, many of whom are not military. The book exists in a very large body of future war literature. It is less concerned with a revisionist perspective on war and its increasingly blurred definition, as in Lawrence Freedman’s The Future of War: A History.[5] Nor does it entreat the reader to reimagine traditional military power structures through a technocentric lens, as in Christian Brose’s The Kill Chain.[6] Evolution of Demand resides somewhere in the middle, offering a multidisciplinary but balanced perspective on many factors that are shaping future war.
Evolution on Demand exemplifies the USMC’s identity as an adaptive and forward-thinking warfighting institution. It is an excellent assortment of robustly analytical and visionary analysis that details how innovation, adaptability, and cooperation will be pivotal to operational success as the world grows evermore complex. It highlights the deepening importance of deliberate force design, logistics, asymmetric capabilities, and wargaming to the conduct of future war.
This book greatly deserves the attention of military leaders, public servants in international policy and diplomatic fields, and anyone seeking to enhance their understanding of future war.
Endnotes
[1] Jim Bryant, ‘Are We a Thinking Army?’, in Australian Army Journal 3, no. 2, (Winter: 2006): 191-199
[2] For a review of Sweijs and Michael’s Beyond Ukraine, see: Jason Kirkham, review of Beyond Ukraine: Debating the Future of War, ed. Tim Sweijs and Jeffrey H. Michaels, Australian Army Journal 22, no. 1 (2026): 191 - 199
[3] Arun Shankar and Joanna Seikera, ‘Cyberspace as a Critical Component of Future Marine Corps Missions: Why the U.S. Marines Can Be Used as a Role Model for Other NATO Allies and Like- minded Partners in This Domain’, in Evolution on Demand: The Changing Roles of the United Sates Marine Corps in Twenty-First Century Conflicts and Beyond, ed. Joanna Seikera, (Virginia: Marine Corps University Press, 2025), p. 213
[4] Grant Newsham, “US Marine Force Design 2030: hatred and hubris”, Asia Times, March 5 2024, https://asiatimes.com/2024/03/us-marine-force-design-2030-hatred-and-hu…
[5] See Lawrence Freedman, The Future of War: A History (London: Penguin, 2018).
[6] See Christian Brose, The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare (New York: Hachette, 2020)