Back to 13-Marine squads and a new company for infantry battalions

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. – The 13-Marine squad is back, and the Corps is creating a new company within the infantry battalion to meet its modern war-fighting needs.

Commandant Gen. Eric Smith announced those changes Monday at the Navy League’s annual Sea, Air and Space Exposition.

The fighting unit had grown to 15 Marines during infantry battalion experiments in recent years. That included adding an assistant squad leader and a squad systems operator to manage the many sensing and firing platforms being added to the unit’s arsenal.

Dropping back to the 13-Marine configuration still gives Marines more personnel than the standard nine-soldier U.S. Army squad. It also returns the squad to its previous size, but instead with a sergeant, rather than a staff sergeant in charge of three fire teams and an organic precision fires specialist in the ranks.

The infantry battalion will also see the formation of a reconnaissance and fires company outside of the headquarters and service company ranks. That new company will include the battalion’s 81mm mortars, organic precision fires, such as drones, and the scout platoon for reconnaissance assets, Smith said.

The decision was made this past week, the commandant said.

When the Corps concluded phase one of its Infantry Battalion experiments in 2023, it reduced the size of the infantry battalion from 965 Marines to 811 and added new technologies for sensing, striking, communication and power generation.

Each of the battalion’s three rifle companies hold individual operations, signal, logistics, electronic warfare and medical sections. Recent plans also called for a Navy corpsman available for each squad.

The Marine Corps first unveiled the 15-Marine configuration in 2018. Prior to that, the service had used the 13-Marine squad model since at least the 1950s, with three fire teams of four Marines and a squad leader.

In 2018, then-Commandant Gen. Robert Neller initially announced he would cut the squad from 13 to 12. That changed after his own experiments ­recommended otherwise.

The 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, had conducted six months of experimentation with new configurations and gear. Following that work, an article published in the professional journal Marine Corps Gazette recommended a 15-Marine squad.

Iran uses an even larger formation — a 16-soldier squad with a squad leader, sniper, a two-soldier rocket team and three fire teams of four soldiers, all with automatic rifles, according “Infantry Building Blocks,” published in a 2018 issue of Military Review.

The same article described China’s dismounted infantry squads as formations of nine to ten soldiers devoted to anti-armor missions.

Before the Ukraine War, Russia had centered even their dismounted squads around the use of either a BMP infantry fighting vehicle, which is tracked, or a BTR wheeled armored personnel carrier, according to “The Russian Way of War,” published by the U.S. Army University Press.