Mediterranean Marines: The Challenges of Forward Deployment, 1948–1958

The experience of Marine battalions rotated through the Mediterranean in the early Cold War illustrates the challenges of forward deployment, which became an increasingly common experience for the American military due to the militarization of containment. Examining the first ten years of these deployments shows how the Marine Corps worked to overcome some of these challenges while others remained intractable. The deployments reflected the broader contours of American defense policy: growing forward deployments as Truman’s containment of the Soviet Union came to rely more on military power, the novel operational demands of regularly training with allies, the subordination of secondary activities to support operations in Korea, and the economizing effects of the New Look.