No ‘bank shots’: Marine Corps chief tells industry to keep pitches focused on Marines’ needs

Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Eric Smith speaks with Maj. Jesse Hume, Organic Precision Fires Team Lead, during the Organic Precision Fires – Light Range Day, Dugway, Utah, April 23, 2025. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Joshua Bustamante)

MODERN DAY MARINE 2025 — Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Eric Smith today urged the defense industrial base to keep their pitches for him narrowly tailored to the direction and priorities the service is highlighting — for everything else, funding will be sparse.

“I’m interested in buying what I need, not buying what you’re selling,” he told attendees today at the Modern Day Marine Exposition in Washington, DC. “What I need is lethal capability that’s affordable, that’s light, that’s getting more autonomous, that matches the needs that I have with the Marine Corps. If you’re in difficult budget times, if you’re looking for us to invest in something, it’s got to match my priorities.”

As one of the only major trade shows in DC focused exclusively on the Marine Corps, Modern Day Marine attracts the service’s specific slice of the defense industrial base. This year the show floor, perhaps less crowded than expos dedicated to other services, still featured countless defense products, arms and vehicles from dozens of defense firms.

Smith’s message to them today was clear: Your pitch “can’t be a bank shot.”

“Well, if you did this and if you change your formations, this would work,” he said. “It’s got to work for the formations that I have. It’s got to work for the capabilities that I need.”

The message is particularly pertinent this year as the new administration is pressing the Defense Department — and the rest of the federal government — to trim any and all excess costs that aren’t essential to their core missions. Just hours before Smith took the stage, the Pentagon publicized a new memorandum from Secretary Pete Hegseth that, among other things, will merge a number of US Army commands and cut units.

The Marine Corps has historically been the smallest service in the Pentagon, prior to the establishment of the Space Force, with a budget to match. With that in mind, in 2019 then-Commandant Gen. David Berger pitched his original Force Design with the goal of self-funding the plan, which meant cutting less relevant items in exchange for what he viewed as capabilities important to a future fight in the Indo-Pacific.

Smith was Berger’s No. 2 for many of the initial changes implemented under the first three years of Force Design and has publicly supported the ongoing effort even after his former boss retired. But Berger’s cuts were not made under the kind of pressure that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has exerted on federal agencies over the last few months.