Marine Raiders are not expected to conduct Arctic operations in the near future because they are busy in other theaters, said Maj. Gen. Peter D. Huntley, who leads U.S. Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command, MARSOC.
Currently, MARSOC has a persistent presence in the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and U.S. Central Command theaters as well as East Africa, Huntley said in a statement to Task & Purpose.
“MARSOC deploys forces persistently to the three regions, and also conducts episodic engagement and training in other combatant commands,” Huntley said.
“We know that’s coming, but right now it’s not the alligator closest to the boat,” Huntley told reporters on Tuesday during this year’s Modern Day Marine exhibition in Washington, D.C.
Activated in 2006, MARSOC is the Marine Corps component of U.S. Special Operations Command. Since then, they have deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, the Philippines, and elsewhere.
The Pentagon released its Arctic strategy last year amid an increase in military cooperation between China and Russia in the region, including a joint patrol near Alaska in 2023.
In February, the Army released a tactical manual explaining how soldiers and Marines should operate in Arctic weather, based in part on lessons from World War II, when the Army’s 7th Infantry Division suffered more casualties from the cold weather than the enemy while retaking the Aleutian island of Attu in Alaska from the Japanese.
On Monday, Huntley told reporters MARSOC knows that eventually individual Raiders and their units will both have to develop the capabilities needed to “live, thrive, and survive” in an Arctic environment.
“For us, we are definitely thinking about that,” Huntley said. “Currently, our day job is the theaters that we’re employed in right now. That’s got all of our attention, but what we recognize is in the future we are going to have to operate in Arctic, High North-type environments. But right now, at least for the near term, we don’t see ourselves doing that.”
The pace at which Raiders deploy has remained roughly the same since the height of the Global War on Terrorism, but MARSOC now gives Raiders more time at home between deployments, allowing them to train and helping to avoid burnout, Huntley said.
Huntley also said he does not expect the command will grow significantly beyond its current size of roughly 3,000 personnel.
“I think we’ve hit kind of our sweet spot,” Huntley said. “We’re small, but it also allows us to keep quality very high on both the operators’ side but also on the enablers’ side. We could always grow, but if we got too big, I think that would water us down a little bit. Being small, I think, is the essence of [special operations forces]: High quality. So we’re pretty happy there.”
Since MARSOC was established, the U.S. military’s focus has shifted from fighting insurgents and terrorist groups to preparing to fight a war against China, which has the world’s largest navy and a formidable arsenal of missiles.
When asked how Marine Raiders might conduct direct action missions — short-term operations by special operations forces to destroy, capture, exploit, or recover enemy targets — in the Indo-Pacific region, Huntley said such operations would be “rough and brutal.”
“The people that are going to be in the fight at the tactical edge, it’s going to be very similar to what our grandfathers saw in the Pacific campaign,” Huntley said. “It’s going to be freaking rough and nasty and all that stuff like that.”