Marines turn attention to traditional skills.

Traditional Marine Corps missions--such as launching attacks from the sea --are being neglected as units prepare for urban combat, and officials worry that important skills are eroding.

"The Marine Corps, out of necessity, has been focused on Iraq and Afghanistan, but we have a larger responsibility to the nation, to be that force of readiness for higher-end type missions," said Lt. Gen. Keith Stalder, commanding officer of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force.

The Corps plans to increase its size by 27,000 Marines during the next five years. The boost will allow the force to shift back to traditional skill sets, including combined arms integration, fires and maneuver on a large scale, which the nation will require in the future, Stalder said at a recent industry conference.

Bolstering the number of Marines in the Corps would allow units more time to train for those higher end missions, he said. "I think all the services have that same challenge ... If they had more capacity, they would be able to get those higher-end missions into the training."

Some of those missions--combined arms integration and forcible entry from the sea--are niche capabilities that the Defense Department absolutely cannot do without in the future, Stalder said.

The U.S. military expects to become more expeditionary in nature as overseas bases dwindle. The Marine Corps' ability to operate from the sea could become essential, he added.

"It's going to be an interesting 10 to 15 years for the Defense Department," said Mike Lowe, operations officer for the Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities, a think tank at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory in Quantico, Va. "I think we will see some major rudder steers within the Marine Corps."

But which direction that may be remains unclear. "I think you deal with uncertainty by being ready across that spectrum, with your training, with your tactics and with your equipment," said Stalder.

Deterring nations that possess nuclear weapons is among the emerging missions, he said. "That argues strongly for conventional forces."

The Defense Department will have to be prepared for a wide range of conflicts, said Lowe.

Current operations not only have constrained training opportunities for traditional missions, but also they have curtailed the availability of troops to participate in training experiments.

"One of the problems that we have right now with the war going on is that we don't have any operational forces available to experiment, so we've had to scale down the size of what we're doing," said Jim Lasswell, technical director of the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory.

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While the lab typically focuses on future concepts and technology requirements for battalions and companies, it recently has shifted the emphasis to the needs of platoons and squads. The change reflects the experience in Iraq, which has become a squad leaders' war.

"It gives us flexibility with the technologies. It also allows us to work on improving the tactical capabilities from the bottom up instead of the top down," said Lasswell.

But he noted that focusing on small ground combat units also means that other areas are being overlooked, such as aviation.