Happy New Year. You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on Strategy, Defense, and Foreign Affairs.

Marine Commandant General David Berger was kind enough to have me over for a discussion on the future of the service he leads.

We focused on two of the transformative documents he has put out.

Talent Management 2030 and Force Design 2030.

These documents, which can be found in this episode's show notes, opened up a portal to a wide-ranging conversation about what the Marine Corps needs to become in order to remain a world-class top-tier fighting force as rising great powers and new technologies reshape warfare presenting

Marines with new challenges as the 9-11 Wars come to a close. General Berger discussed

how the Marine Corps seeks to reform personnel policies in order to give Marines more control over their careers

while allowing the service to do better at retaining personnel and accessing specialized skills.

He also provided his views on China's military challenges and even discussed what he would like to see Marines debating and writing about in public for us such as Warren the rocks.

And he closed with some poignant thoughts on the powerful, exhilarating, and, as we were reminded with the loss of

12 Marines and a Navy corpsman during the withdrawal from Kabul, sometimes tragic nature of

military service and life in the Marine Corps. I'd like to start by hearing your vision for all these changes that are enacted in your talent management strategy, a future force, what, you know, how is the Marine Corps you're trying to realize by 2030 different from the Marine Corps today?

Part of it is process as we describe in there, but you're talking about what's the

aim point sort of what is the product that we're after. I think it's not a

radical departure from today, but it is a force that has the maturity, the judgment, the experience matches

what we think they're going to have to do.

And by that, I mean, if you assume that we're going to have to do. And by that, I mean, if you assume

that we're gonna need to operate more distributed,

more spread out, and that presumes then

that more junior leaders are making decisions that were a level or two up

previously then they have to have not just the authorities but they got to have the

experience the judgment to make good

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