Top Marine General Let Emails Leak Amid Border Funding Fight so Service Families Would Not Be Forgotten: Sources

Source: Newsweek | April 3, 2019 | James LaPorta

The Marines’ top general allowed internal memos to leak out of the Pentagon to bring attention to service families living among hurricane-ravaged military installations as the Trump administration tries to bankroll the southwest border with defense funds at the expense of combat readiness.

General Robert Neller, the commandant of the Marine Corps, let two internal Defense Department memorandums leak to The Los Angeles Times and NBC News in the past two weeks, two Pentagon sources, who asked not to be named due to U.S. military media regulations, told Newsweek.

The letters underscore the fiscal challenges the service is facing as it struggles to support security operations at the southwest border while “unplanned/unbudgeted” line items plague the general’s fiscal agenda, a burden Neller asserts is an “unacceptable risk to Marine Corps combat readiness and solvency.”

When asked why Neller would allow internal memorandums to leak to press outlets, one Defense Department source expressed bluntly, “Because he didn’t want the Marines and families at Camp Lejeune [in North Carolina] to get f***ed.”

Six months after Hurricane Florence first made landfall at Wrightsville Beach in North Carolina, roughly an hour southwest of Camp Lejeune, the base is still waiting on funding for repairs.

In Neller’s letters, unexpected service spending bills, including for President Donald Trump’s southwest border operations, left the Marine general no choice but to cancel or significantly drawback planned military training exercises. The Marine commandant canceled the Integrated Training Exercise, known to Marines as ITX, for II Marine Expeditionary Force. ITX is a large-scale, combined-arms training exercise in the Mojave Desert at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, California. 

Exercises Northern Edge, the Marines joint exercise with allied partners aimed at preparing combat forces for operations in the Indo-Asia-Pacific region were significantly reduced, among other canceled or scaled-back training drills.

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