The 2018 National Defense Strategy warns that U.S. adversaries are actively challenging the long-standing rules-based international order, thus “creating a security environment more complex and volatile than any we have experienced in recent memory.” Building on the Pentagon’s observations, Gen. David H. Berger, then-commandant of the Marine Corps, released his seminal 2019 Commandant’s Planning Guidance, in which he proposed sweeping changes aimed at transforming the Corps from its established land-focused role in the Middle East into a naval expeditionary force-in-readiness primed for active engagement in contested maritime spaces within the Indo-Pacific region...