Corps has grown to nearly 204,000 Marines - Marine Corps News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Marine Corps Times

Corps has grown to nearly 204,000 Marines

The Corps’ size has jumped to nearly 204,000 active-duty Marines, but that’s no cause for alarm, Marine officials said.

The growth is part of the service’s plan to expand to 202,000 active-duty Marines by the end of the fiscal year, said Maj. Shawn Haney, a spokeswoman for Manpower & Reserve Affairs. The Corps had 203,768 Marines as of July 10, but that number is expected to decline between now and Sept. 30 as Marines retire and reach the end of their contracts.

The Corps expects that its end strength for fiscal 2009 will be between 202,000 and 203,000 Marines. Manpower planners “will continue efforts to shape the force to meet our authorization of 202K,” Haney said.

“We are completely within normal end-strength plans at this point,” she said. “There’s a plan, and we’re going to get close to 202K by the end of the fiscal year.”

The Corps has been growing steadily since January 2007, when Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced a plan to add 22,000 Marines. At the time, the Corps stood at about 180,000 active-duty troops.

When Gates announced the 202K plan, it was under the expectation that the service could add 5,000 Marines per year, eventually reaching 202,000 in 2011. Through a combination of robust recruiting and retention, the Corps was able to make the goal two full years early.

Last month, Commandant Gen. James Conway told Congress that as long as the number of Marines in Afghanistan doesn’t top 18,000, the Corps should be able to reach its goal of giving troops 14 months at home for every seven months deployed, a 1-to-2 dwell-time ratio.

“We are comfortable with 202,000,” Conway told the Senate Armed Services Committee in June. “We think the 1-to-2 [ratio] is achievable and reasonable with our current war-time scenario. My outright response is that we don’t need to increase our strength.”

There are about 10,000 Marines in Afghanistan. Conway has said he hopes, as the U.S. withdraws from Iraq over the next two years, to see a force of between 15,000 and 18,000 Marines deploying to Afghanistan.

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