How the Adversary Reads the Impact Force

In a recent Defense News opinion piece, Lyle Goldstein surveys Chinese-language assessments of Marine Corps posture in the Western Pacific and draws a clear conclusion: the United States should “rely less on forward defense” and the Marines should embrace “the strategic depth of the Pacific” in a “less costly, less risky, more sustainable, and clearly defensive strategy.”

It is a valuable piece. Goldstein has done what too few American commentators do, which is to read what the other side is actually writing about us. And the Chinese analysts he cites raise real issues: logistics, air and missile defense, and the problem of operating forward without air superiority.

But the evidence he presents tells a different story from the conclusion he draws. Read carefully, the Chinese assessments do not show a Marine Corps concept that has failed. They show an adversary that has identified exactly what the Marine Corps is becoming and is worried about it. And they point to where the real competition now lies.

In my book Building the Impact Force: Marine Corps Transformation in an Age of Chaos, I argue that the Marine Corps is evolving from a crisis management force into an impact force: a force that generates effects disproportionate to its size by serving as a sensing, targeting and command-and-control enabler for joint and coalition kill webs. Viewed through that lens, the Chinese material Goldstein assembles is less an indictment than a confirmation, with some important warnings attached.

What the Chinese analysts are saying

Goldstein summarizes several strands of Chinese commentary. A Global Times editorial decried the deployment of anti-ship missiles close to China. A 2025 Modern Ships assessment noted with alarm Marine experimentation with unmanned surface vessels and their role as forward scouts fixing targets for long-range U.S. fires, while calling Marine air defense “precarious.” A 2026 Shipborne Weapons article characterized the Marine Littoral Regiments as campaign preparation to intervene in China’s unification, acknowledged that the new mobile launchers are “not easily discovered,” and concluded that the concept is vulnerable because the U.S. “has no way to quickly establish air superiority” (Defense News).

The most significant piece is the one translated by the China Maritime Studies Institute at the Naval War College. Written by three PLA Navy senior captains, it originally appeared in November 2023 in Military Art, an internal PLA publication (CMSI Translation 32). The authors argue that the stand-in force concept “will erode our land-enabled advantages in sea denial, make it more difficult for us to breach island chain blockades, induce rapid depletion of our combat resources, and complicate our operating environment.” Their response is to “adopt a proactive offensive posture, aggressively expand our operational reach, project forces forward,” and to “extend undersea combat capabilities as far forward as feasible” (CMSI Translation 32).

Goldstein reads this as a security dilemma: American forward posture provoking a more aggressive Chinese posture, and an escalatory spiral. That is one reading. It is not the only one, and I do not think it is the most persuasive.

The critique is aimed at the 2019 concept

The first problem with the “stranded on beaches” framing is that it targets a version of Force Design the Marine Corps itself has already revised.

The original concept, as Brigadier General Christopher Haar put it candidly, “was all about killing ships for the stand-in force.” Through the Campaign of Learning, the Corps concluded something different: “we’re better as the JTAC for the joint force, using our sensors, using our eyes, killing occasionally, but using our time and our capabilities to enable the rest of the joint force.” Haar was explicit about why: “it’s going to be so challenging to get everything into place, to be the shooters, that with our unique sensor capabilities and our placement, maybe it’s better if we’re identifying the targets and then helping close the kill chains.”

That is the core of the shift I describe as the move from an inside force to an impact force. An inside force is measured by its ability to survive and strike from within an adversary’s weapons engagement zone. An impact force is measured by how much it amplifies the lethality and decision speed of forces that may be hundreds or thousands of miles away. The October 2025 Force Design Update reflects this evolution, along with the retention of 4th Marines as an infantry regiment and the quiet restoration of breaching capabilities that had earlier been divested.

A critique built on the image of isolated missile batteries waiting on beaches for air cover that never arrives is a critique of the inside force. It is much less effective against a force whose primary contribution is sensing, targeting and enabling.

The Chinese are worried about the impact force

The more interesting point is that the Chinese assessments are themselves focused on the impact force functions, not simply on Marine shooters.

The senior captains highlight Marine units deploying “hydro-acoustic arrays and other assets to establish barrier zones and monitoring areas to track Chinese submarine operations,” and the use of drone swarms “to overwhelm our radar tracking capacity” (Defense News). They describe stand-in forces conducting “surveillance and reconnaissance, gain long-range target custody, and engage in interference, deception, littoral zone harassment” (CMSI Translation 32). The Modern Ships analysis worried about unmanned vessels serving as forward scouts that fix targets for long-range U.S. fires.

This is the sensor-shooter-node role. It is precisely the contribution the Marine Corps has concluded it is best placed to make. What alarms Chinese naval officers is not that Marines will sink a large fraction of the PLA Navy from island positions. It is that Marines will help the joint force see, track and hold at risk Chinese forces across the near seas, and will do so persistently, across the competition continuum.

The countermeasures the senior captains propose make this even clearer. They call for offensive cyber and electromagnetic capabilities “which can effectively paralyze U.S. maritime command and control networks,” for using China’s large civilian fleet to “overwhelm U.S. SIFs with massive information overload,” and for developing cheap unmanned systems so that China does not engage “small capabilities with large capabilities, or resource-intensive assets against lightweight assets” (CMSI Translation 32).

In other words, the PLA Navy authors want to attack the kill web: the networks, data flows and decision cycles that connect Marine sensors to joint shooters. They understand that this is where the value lies. And their explicit warning against spending large, expensive assets to chase small, light ones is an admission of cost imposition. That is the disproportionate effect by which an impact force should be measured.

Where Goldstein is right

None of this means the critique can be dismissed. The Chinese analysts have identified real vulnerabilities, and the Marines have identified them too.

In Steel Knight 2025, which I observed and which serves as the campaign laboratory for my book, logistics proved to be the binding constraint. Distributed nodes remained “a little bit too heavy.” Air Force C-130s were crucial; without them, the exercise would have looked dramatically different. The Marine Corps does not have enough KC-130Js, MV-22s, CH-53Ks or F-35s to fully execute distributed operations without joint support. One squadron commander described flying to the Philippines and coming within 500 pounds of a mandatory tanker plug-in, with no certainty the tanker would show up.

The air defense problem is also real. Steel Knight exposed a basic tension for ground-based air defense: when air defense elements transmitted sensor data continuously, they created signatures an adversary could target; when they went quiet to survive, they could not contribute to the kill web. One participant noted that a 32-second radio transmission could bring adversary fires within two minutes.

So Goldstein and the Chinese analysts are pointing at genuine problems. The disagreement is not about the facts. It is about what follows from them. Impact force design does not eliminate risk; it trades one set of risks for another. The question is whether the trade is worth making, and whether the vulnerabilities are being worked down fast enough.

The air superiority interval

The most serious challenge in the Chinese material is the claim that the United States cannot quickly establish air superiority, and that this “could take weeks or months and would entail massive losses” (Defense News).

This matters more for an impact force than for an inside force. If the value of forward Marine sensors lies in enabling joint shooters, then the period before the joint force can bring its full weight to bear is the most dangerous one. Sensors without shooters do not create much impact.

The answer is not that this problem has been solved. It is that the impact force concept is built around operating in exactly that interval. Retired Lieutenant General Hedelund has framed the issue around nodes with built-in shelf lives, or time stamps, rather than nodes that expect to be extracted: “How do we fight with the nodes that we have at the moment that we have them?” Distributed aviation operations, emissions discipline, mobility provided by the MV-22 and CH-53K, and long-range joint fires from Navy, Air Force, Army and allied platforms are all designed to let a force contribute before the air battle is won, rather than waiting for a permissive environment that may never come. Steel Knight was built on precisely that assumption: no permissive force-closure phase, dispersion from the opening moments, and survival through signature management and movement.

Whether this works at scale remains unproven. But the right response to the air superiority problem is to invest in the enablers that make forward sensing survivable and connected, not to pull the sensing back to a distance where it can no longer see.

Is there really a security dilemma?

Goldstein’s strongest strategic claim is that the forward lean in American strategy is producing a more aggressive Chinese naval posture.

The timeline complicates that reading. China’s large-scale reclamation in the Spratly Islands began in late 2013 and, according to the Congressional Research Service, created around five square miles of artificial landmasses on which China built military infrastructure and deployed advanced anti-ship and anti-aircraft missile systems. That buildup predates the 2019 Commandant’s Planning Guidance and Force Design 2030 by several years. The Marine Corps concept is better understood as a response to an already expanding Chinese forward posture than as its cause.

There is also a question of how the PLA authors should be read. Chinese analysts have every incentive to portray U.S. concepts as simultaneously threatening and doomed: threatening enough to justify investment and resolve, doomed enough to reassure. Taking both claims at face value, as Goldstein largely does, risks missing the tension between them. A force that is truly stranded on beaches does not require a “proactive offensive posture” and a forward-deployed undersea campaign to counter it.

And it is worth noting what the senior captains actually recommend. Much of their program is defensive in character: better near-seas surveillance, integrated early warning, mitigation of weaknesses, cheap unmanned systems. That is the behavior of a force that has had its planning complicated, which is what deterrence by denial is meant to do.

Strategic depth and the impact force

Goldstein’s alternative is for the Marines to “embrace the strategic depth of the Pacific and its myriad island archipelagos (e.g. the Philippines)” (Defense News).

I agree that strategic depth is central. But the impact force is the mechanism for exploiting that depth, not an alternative to it. The hub-spoke-node logic of distributed aviation operations, the elevation of aviation ground support to a formal function of Marine aviation, and the effort to connect dispersed Marine units to Navy, Air Force, Army and allied fires are all about turning geography into an operational advantage. Notably, the photograph accompanying Goldstein’s own article shows Marines conducting a counter-landing exercise on Palawan, in the Philippines.

The real disagreement is narrower than the headline suggests. It concerns how far forward Marine sensing should sit, and whether it should be persistently present in competition or held back until crisis. On that question, I would argue that a force which arrives only after a crisis begins will find the sensing picture already shaped by the other side. The Chinese authors seem to understand this as well: their own prescription is to “maintain and normalize forward-deployed forces” (CMSI Translation 32).

There is also a limit to how “clearly defensive” any credible posture can appear from Beijing. The senior captains describe even submarine-tracking sensors as “continuous penetration and encroachment into our near seas.” If sensing itself is read as encroachment, then no meaningful forward contribution will satisfy the standard of being seen as defensive by the PLA. The choice is not between provocative and unprovocative postures. It is between postures that complicate PLA planning and those that do not.

What the debate should focus on

The value of Goldstein’s article is that it forces a sharper question. If the Chinese military has correctly identified the impact force functions as the threat, and is planning to attack them through cyber, electronic warfare, deception and cheap unmanned systems, then the decisive competition is over the kill web itself.

That points to the priorities that matter most:

• Lighter, more mobile nodes. Steel Knight showed that current nodes are too heavy and that fuel and lift remain the binding constraints. Aviation ground support, heavy lift and maritime autonomous logistics are not peripheral programs; they determine whether forward sensing survives.
• Resilient networks under attack. If the PLA intends to paralyze U.S. maritime command and control, then digital interoperability must be designed to degrade gracefully, and units must be able to operate in disconnected conditions.
• Mission command as lived practice. Steel Knight showed Marines physically distributed but commanded through hub-centric structures that slowed operations when links degraded. An adversary targeting the network will exploit that gap.
• Joint and coalition integration. The impact force is only as valuable as the shooters it can enable. Closing the air superiority interval requires joint and allied long-range fires that can act on Marine targeting data early in a conflict.

Goldstein closes by warning that it would not be the first time Marines were deployed haphazardly in East Asia at great cost. That is a fair warning, and the Marine Corps should take it seriously. But the record of the past five years is not one of a service clinging to a flawed plan. It is one of a service testing its assumptions, discovering that its original ship-killing concept was necessary but not sufficient, and adjusting toward a sensing and enabling role.

The Chinese planners Goldstein cites have noticed that shift. Their analysis is less a case for pulling back than a guide to what they intend to attack. That is where the Marine Corps, and the joint force it serves, should be focusing its effort.