Freshly minted reconnaissance Marines were showing up to their first units less prepared than expected, service leaders said. To fix that, the Corps is overhauling how it trains them.
The changes were first rolled out in April, but Marine Corps officials on Monday offered a clearer picture of the problems the restructure is designed to solve and how the new training pipeline will better prepare participants.
Maj. J.K. Bender, who commands the service’s Reconnaissance Training Company, said the change reflects long-standing concerns within the reconnaissance community that new Marines were starting their careers without a strong enough infantry foundation.
“What we’re seeing is, the battalions that just didn’t have that strong baseline — they were kind of struggling,” he said, adding that “it took them additional time for the recon battalions to train the Marines.”
Instead of going through Marine Combat Training, or MCT, reconnaissance hopefuls graduating recruit training will now go through the service’s Infantry Rifleman Course before attending two new programs: the Ground Reconnaissance Course and the Amphibious Reconnaissance Course, if they pass the former. All others will continue to attend MCT.
“The only occupational field that is affected are the 0321 Marines,” said Maj. Gen. Michael A. Brooks, the top general at the service’s training command. “Over the past few years, [Marines have] been graduating boot camp, going to Marine Combat Training and then showing up at Recon Training Company. ... We changed their progression from boot camp to the infantry training battalion, where they undergo ... what an 0311 rifleman would go through. Once they’re qualified as an 0311, then they go to the ground reconnaissance course.”
The two new reconnaissance courses, each nine weeks long, replace the Corps’ 12-week Basic Reconnaissance Course.
The shift also stems from a rethink of how the Corps trains its reconnaissance forces.
Maj. Gen. Brooks said the overlap between infantry scout roles and reconnaissance missions provided an opportunity to consolidate training and choose the best candidates for reconnaissance ranks.
“We’re building the Marine that we want at the end of this pipeline,” he said, emphasizing that the new structure redistributes skills over a different timeline but it does not eliminate any core competencies.
“When you parse the standards, you will find that nothing has become easier,” Brooks stressed, adding, “hopefully it feels easier for the candidates because they’re more prepared than they’ve ever been.”
The GRC begins with an individual skills phase covering land navigation, demolition and call-for-fire, followed by a communications block focused on radios and imaging equipment, said Bender.
Marines then complete several days of live-fire marksmanship before finishing with a patrol phase. The first GRC started in late April.
Bender said the service is still working through the specifics of ARC, but right now it is broken into three different blocks beginning with a pool phase and then progressing to scout swimmer techniques before a final culminating exercise.
The courses will also incorporate robotics and sensors to familiarize Marines with emerging technologies in both the classroom and the field, an addition to the core skills already being taught.
Officials also acknowledged interest in making the scout specialty into a primary MOS, a move that would put scouts on similar footing with other infantry roles like machine gunners or mortarmen.
If that were to happen, GRC would become that role’s primary course, they said, declining to specify a timeline of when that decision would be made.
Eve Sampson is a reporter and former Army officer. She has covered conflict across the world, writing for The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Associated Press.
