SOF- USMC MEU Integration? What's in it for us?

pic via USNI News.

via USNI

The SOFLE enabled the MEU’s Recon Company, a robust group of about 75 Recon Marines and support personnel, to do more, Trollinger said. The liaisons “advertised capability and said, ‘Here’s what we can do for you. We have Reconnaissance Marines – they’re not SOF – but they do have some similar capabilities. Let’s look at leveraging those capabilities.’ So the SOFLE did a lot of work identifying, and then actually planning, coordinating different activities that my reconnaissance Marines were able to do with different SOF entities while we were deployed.”
“If we did not have the SOFLE, we would not have been able to do, in my opinion, the different activities that we were ultimately able to do,” he said.

Read it all here.

I understand why Special Ops is so hungry for this teaming.  Check this out from FM71-3..

Limitations of SOF:

*Depend on the resources of the theater Army to support and sustain operations.

*Cannot conduct conventional combined arms operations on a unilateral basis.

*Their capabilities are limited to advising or directing indigenous military forces conducting this type of operation.

*Do not have organic combined arms capability. They habitually require support or attachment of other combat, CS, and CSS assets.

*Cannot provide security for operational bases without severely degrading operational and support capabilities.

What I don't understand is this.  What's in it for the MEU?  The article is laced with a massive pile of bullshit.  Each Combatant Commander has an inhouse Special Ops Liaison Team.  Deconflicting areas and making sure that the MEU is informed of what a particular SOCOM Unit is doing (assuming its not classified) should already be covered. There simply is NO need for a team led by an 0-5 to compete for limited berthing aboard our amphibs (oh and make no mistake about it...for every person added, another person is left on the beach...the same applies to equipment).  If advertising that we have Recon Company aboard ship is the best that we can offer a Combatant Commander, then we need to totally rethink the briefings that we give on the capabilities of the MEU.

My take on this?  The counter insurgency zealots in the Corps have won.  Maritime Raid Force move over.  You're no longer the "master" of the MEU. There is a new element in town...and they come from Tampa.