USMC Order of Battle: How it's Budgeted

Second Battalion, First Marines Supply Section

I joined the Marines when I was a naive teenager. I didn't know an officer from an enlisted person and I had no idea of how the military operated. Of course, I began learning all that on Parris Island. But, it wasn't until nearly ten years later, when I was a supply and fiscal officer for an infantry battalion (1/9 and 2/1) where I learned how military budgets worked. One supply chief I worked with used to tell me, "Sir, just take last year's budget and add 10%." While that was a great estimate, I still had to submit detailed calculations to support our budget requests.

Order of Battle

In our infantry battalion, we had close to 1,000 people, nearly all Marines except for about 70 U.S. Navy personnel for medical and religious support. Unlike the other services of the U.S. Armed Forces, every Marine is a combatant, so the Navy would support us with non-combat specialties. (There is one case that comes to mind of when a Marine would be considered a non-combatant and that's if they are captured and classified as prisoner of war.)

The Marine Corps likes to organize maneuver elements into groups of three:
Three Marines form a fireteam (plus a fireteam leader).
Three fireteams form a squad.
Three squads form a platoon.
Three platoons form a company.
Three companies form a battalion.
Three battalions form a regiment.
Three regiments form a division.

In practice, each unit requires leadership and support. A squad has a squad leader. A platoon has platoon commander, a platoon sergeant, and a guide (the guide marches at the front of the platoon carrying the guidon). The larger the unit, the more leadership and support is required.

Our infantry battalion had the typical five companies. Three were line companies used as maneuver elements, meaning that they'd engage in combat as a single unit on the front lines. The other two companies were support units. One was the weapons company, which is a maneuver support unit that provides organic fire support to the three line companies. The weapons company wouldn't see action as an entire company. Rather, they'd be split up into smaller elements (detachments) and attached to the line companies (as reinforcements) with their crew-served weapons (weapons requiring more than one person to operate such as a heavy machine gun or mortar).

Supply Support

H&S Company organizational chart (c. 2017)

As a supply officer, I was a part of the other support unit, Headquarters and Service Company (H&S). This company is where the commanding officer and his staff, which I was a part of, were organized. Supply officers are sometimes referred to as secondary staff officers since they usually report to the logistics officer who was considered primary staff. (For details on staff work see #3 Leading vs Staff Work.)

As a supply officer, I typically had one to two dozen Marines reporting up to me. On the battlefield, moving supplies around requires coordination via a trained logistics expert. Whereas, on a ship in the Navy the reverse is typically the case; a naval supply officer oversees logistics operations since it's not as challenging to move supplies from one part of a ship to another.

In addition to the commanding officer's staff and the supply section that I previously mentioned, an H&S company is also comprised of communications, motor transport, maintenance, armory, and cook sections that are administrative or technical. H&S does have one tactical unit, the scout sniper platoon, used for organic reconnaissance and engaging select targets.

The beauty of the Marine Corps is that every Marine's a rifleman. So, it's fairly common for cooks or communications Marines to go on patrol or be used to provide security around a base.

So, how is all of this budgeted and paid for?

Paying for War

As a second lieutenant, I learned, on the job, how budgets work but my knowledge was limited to the scope of my experiences.

There are two basic forms of military budgeting that I was involved with. Baseline budgeting, for training during peacetime, and contingency budgeting for wartime.

Contingency Budgeting

4th LAR Supply Section

Contingency budgeting is simple. Simply buy what you need, regardless of cost. It's like throwing out the checkbook register. Since it's war, money is not a big concern, especially at the battalion level. I experienced this when I served with 4th Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion (4th LAR) after their return from the "March to Baghdad" in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. We simply ordered all the repair parts we needed to refit our battalion. I don't recall how much that totaled, but the division headquarters was keen to let us know that we ran up the highest bill of any other unit in 4th Marine Division. But, that was expected since we were the only "heavy" (mechanized) battalion that was entirely mobilized from the Marine Corp Reserves.

Baseline Budgeting

Baseline budgeting is a bit more tedious than contingency budgeting since we had to figure out how much our training was going to cost, ahead of time. Luckily, we had the Redbook. The Redbook is a manual of cost factors used to "cost out" training events. There is a lot of paperwork involved when repairing anything in the military, and for a good reason. Maintenance Marines typically don't realize it when they're filling out the repair forms, but the paperwork they submit captures specific details of the maintenance costs for every item repaired, from an M-16 to a tank. All of these costs are captures and averaged across the First Marine Division. The Redbook would give me, as the supply and fiscal officer, a reference to know that, on average, for every day an M-16 is used, we should plan to spend 2¢ on maintenance (not counting the ammunition) or for each day an M-1 Abrams tank is used it would cost $185.

With the Redbook, I would simply layout our peacetime training plan and figure out which units and equipment would participate in each event. Unfortunately, I had create the spreadsheets from scratch and keypunch the data, myself; this would typically take about ten days to complete. Luckily, I didn't have to budget for payroll and food since that was a fixed cost managed by the Marine Corps, at the highest level (there's no overtime in the military). Ammunition was budgeted for in terms of numbers of rounds, but not dollars, so that, too, wasn't a concern of mine.

Although baseline budgeting was tedious, it was a rewarding document to send up the chain of command. If we were short funds, we had hard data to make our case for additional money. Since Marines change billets every two to four years, most everyone is new to their current job position, including the commanding officer. Presenting this level of detail to my commanding officers made them keenly aware, if they were asked to participate in an unscheduled exercise or task force, that their first question should always be, "Who's paying for this?" Even in the Marines, it was pay-to-play. Semper Fi.