Marines Will Restructure Infantry Battalions by September

The Marine Corps will reconfigure all of its infantry battalions and shrink them from roughly 900 to just over 800 Marines by this fall as part of the service’s ongoing Force Design modernization effort.

The units will also have more medical and reconnaissance capabilities, as well as loitering munitions—changes that came out of the service’s Infantry Battalion Experiment as it prepares for future conflicts. The changes were announced Monday as part of the service's Force Design Annual Update.

The Marines in 2020 began the Infantry Battalion Experiment, or IBX, to see if they could rework infantry battalions to be smaller while at the same time having Marines trained to use a variety of weapons in a distributed environment. Commandant Gen. David Berger has said Force Design 2030 was necessary to get the force ready for potential operations in the Pacific and elsewhere.