Marine Corps
Training and
Advisory Group
The way ahead
by LtCol Thomas E. Grattan
The Commandant of the Marine Corps (CMC) has identified the need for an organization to provide conventional advisor forces. Conventional advisor forces figure prominently in
current and projected operations as a
means to build partner-nation capacity
to prosecute the global war on terrorism. Advisor teams, employed as units
or as augmentation to general-purpose
forces, work in support of host-nation
security forces (HNSF). The transfer of
the Marine Special Operations Advisor
Group, the erstwhile Fleet Marine
Training Unit, to Special Operations
Command leaves the Marine Corps
without any single organization to formalize its conventional advisor capability. To fill this void, CMC took the
initial step of creating a small cadre of
Marines as Phase I in the establishment
of the Marine Corps Training and Advisory Group (MCTAG). In fiscal year
2008 (FY08), a 42-personnel MCTAG
Coordination Element Headquarters
stands up to coordinate forming, training, and equipping Marine Corps advisor and training teams. Its collateral
mission is to conduct detailed planning
in order to support CMC decisionmaking processes and doctrine, organization, training, material, leadership
and education, personnel, and facilities
analyses as they relate to Service advisor
capabilities.
On behalf of Deputy Commandant, Plans, Policies, and Operations,
and the Commander, Marine Forces
Command, an operational planning
>LtCol Gratten is currently assigned
as the Deputy Director, MCTAG.
team (OPT) convened at Headquarters
Marine Corps to build on existing mission planning efforts and develop
courses of action (COAs) with supporting concepts. The OPT reviewed
the coordination element structure,
MCTAG mission statement, and the
way ahead as programmed in the plan
to build the force to 202,000, which
apportions 747 total structure spaces to
MCTAG as follows: 42 spaces for the
coordination element headquarters no
later than the second quarter FY08,
605 spaces scheduled for second quarter FY11, and another 100 spaces in
the fourth quarter FY11. The OPT
also identified January 2009 as a decision point by which MCTAG facilities
and location(s) should be determined
in order to achieve full operating capability in FY12.
Several COAs on how to implement
MCTAG were developed for consideration. One COA places all MCTAG
structure within a single command assigned to the conventional joint force
provider, Commander, U.S. Joint
Forces Command (CDRUSJFCom).
Another COA apportions structure between CDRUSJFCom and Commander, U.S. Pacific Command in
The mission of training foreign forces requires the Marine Corps to have a training and advisory
unit it can task directly. (Photo courtesy of the author.)
