The Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps (ACMC) is the second highest-ranking officer in the United States Marine Corps, and serves as a deputy for the Commandant of the Marine Corps (CMC). Before 1946, the title was known as Assistant to the Commandant.
The Assistant Commandant is appointed by the President of the United States and must be confirmed via majority vote by the Senate. In the event that the Commandant is absent or is unable to perform his duties, the Assistant Commandant assumes the duties and responsibilities of the Commandant. For this reason, the Assistant Commandant is appointed to a rank equal to the sitting Commandant; since 1971, each Assistant Commandant has been, by statute, a four-star general, making it the most common rank held among Marines serving this position. Additionally, he may perform other duties that the CMC assigns to him. Historically, the Assistant Comandant has served for two to three years.
The 33rd and current Assistant Commandant is John M. Paxton, Jr., who took office on 15 December 2012, when Joseph F. Dunford, Jr. vacated the office to become the sitting Commandant. The first Marine to hold the billet as "Assistant to the Commandant" was Eli K. Cole (Allen H. Turnage being the last), while Lemuel C. Shepherd, Jr. was the first to hold it as the "Assistant Commandant".
Famous quotes containing the words commandant, united, states, marine and/or corps:
“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”
—Donn Pearce, U.S. writer, and Stuart Rosenberg. Camp commandant (Strother Martin)
“It was evident that, both on account of the feudal system and the aristocratic government, a private man was not worth so much in Canada as in the United States; and, if your wealth in any measure consists in manliness, in originality and independence, you had better stay here. How could a peaceable, freethinking man live neighbor to the Forty-ninth Regiment? A New-Englander would naturally be a bad citizen, probably a rebel, there,—certainly if he were already a rebel at home.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Sean Thornton: I don’t get this. Why do we have to have you along. Back in the states I’d drive up, honk the horn, a gal’d come runnin’ out.
Mary Kate Danaher: Come a runnin’. I’m no woman to be honked at and come a runnin’.”
—Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)
“People run away from the name subsidy. It is a subsidy. I am not afraid to call it so. It is paid for the purpose of giving a merchant marine to the whole country so that the trade of the whole country will be benefitted thereby, and the men running the ships will of course make a reasonable profit.... Unless we have a merchant marine, our navy if called upon for offensive or defensive work is going to be most defective.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“The Washington press corps thinks that Julie Nixon Eisenhower is the only member of the Nixon Administration who has any credibility—and, as one journalist put it, this is not to say that anyone believes what she is saying but simply that people believe she believes what she is saying ... it is almost as if she is the only woman in America over the age of twenty who still thinks her father is exactly what she thought he was when she was six.”
—Nora Ephron (b. 1941)