
CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. – A new initiative at the Marine Corps’ West Coast bases is dedicating money to needed barracks repairs, air conditioners for rooms that lack cooling, and a stocked warehouse for do-it-yourself fixes.
Under a joint program by Marine Corps Installations West and I Marine Expeditionary Force, Marines, sailors and unit leaders are rolling up their sleeves to do inspections, minor repairs and clean-up at the barracks they call home, officials told USNI News.
They described the locally-driven initiative, called “Operation Clean Sweep,” as a stop-gap program that will help catch up on immediate needs that can include moldy walls, water leaks and inoperable appliances heavily used by barracks residents. Each unit will do the barracks’ work over staggered, two-week periods that continue into December, as can be accommodated with their training and deployment schedules. The inaugural, six-phase program runs from Sept. 5 through Oct. 30.
“Like all Marines do, we run to the sound of guns, and that’s what we’re doing right now with Operation Clean Sweep,” Col. Matthew Mulvey, commander of Combat Logistics Battalion 17, said Oct. 17 outside a quad in the base’s 14 Area, home to nine barracks with 3,100 rooms. “What you’re seeing right now is the phase of Operation Clean Sweep where Marines are fixing things, focusing a lot on self-help.”
“This is not simply a quality-of-life issue. It’s an operational readiness imperative,” Mulvey said, noting that barracks’ living conditions can factor into junior Marines’ decisions to reenlist. “You want Marines to have a comfortable place and a safe place to sleep before you put them behind the controls of heavy equipment or before you put them in an aircraft or on a range employing a weapons system. So it’s not just making the barracks look nice – it’s about making Marines more combat effective.”
MCI-West includes five bases and stations: Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, Marine Corps Air Station Camp Pendleton, MCAS Miramar, MCAS in Yuma, Ariz., and Marine Corps Logistics Base in Barstow, Calif. Tenant commands include several Navy units, and all barracks fall under the initiative, which extends to several I Marine Expeditionary Force units at the Marine Corps Air-Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, Calif. Camp Pendleton alone is home to 120 barracks buildings, officials said.
I MEF officials acknowledge that “years of deferred maintenance has resulted in living conditions that are far from acceptable. Issues such as mold, malfunctioning heating and air conditioning systems, and security concerns have become all too common,” a I MEF spokesman, 1st Lt. Sean Waterman, said in an email. “While we cannot change past resource decisions, we can improve our current position. I Marine Expeditionary Force recognizes the impact this has on our service members and is committed to addressing these challenges head-on.”
For the initiative, MCI-West and I MEF commands contributed just over $6 million from Fiscal Year 2024 funds to cover $2.2 million worth of backlogged repairs, equip a self-help warehouse in the 22 Area at Camp Pendleton, and buy window locks and nearly 6,200 air conditioners for rooms in barracks built without A/C.
“We couldn’t fund absolutely everything. We had to prioritize, but one of the bigger priorities was air conditioners, because it’s climatically gotten hotter around here. So we purchased $2 million worth,” said Lt. Col. Robert Hillery, operations officer with I MEF G-4 logistics.
That contract and installation are pending. “We’ll see those start rolling out over the next four or five months or so. They should be installed by the time it gets warm again,” Hillery said.
Meanwhile, MCI-West and installation officials are working with base public works and contractors to start bigger maintenance or deferred repairs that can be done locally and require less red-tape than those typically covered through the military construction program budget, officials said. They continue to pore over mounds of data from inspections and repair requests. Currently, barracks residents can raise issues and make repair service requests via electronic requests to the base public works, but officials said they hope the Marine Corps develops an app that can streamline and track the process, as it’s something residents requested.
“Through the Barracks 360 Reset initiative,” Waterman said, “I MEF aims to improve the living conditions and operational readiness of Marines and sailors through increased oversight by command teams, a dedicated effort to reduce the maintenance backlog and shared ownership of the barracks.”
Prioritizing Barracks

It’s not the first time local commanders took the initiative to spur improvements for barracks residents, as leaders at installations such as MCAS Miramar in San Diego have done in recent years to get after the backlog of repairs and maintenance work.
The quality of life for residents in the Marine Corps’ barracks is among the top priorities for the service’s leaders, and earlier this year, the Marine Corps was moving on its Barracks 2030 vision and initiatives under the Installations and Logistics 2030 framework. The Marine Corps has sought some $642 million to renovate, repair and modernize its existing barracks, but it remained in the service’s unfunded priorities list.
“Marines don’t ask for much. They just ask for decent pay, decent housing, a quiet place where they can recover at the end of a long training day,” Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Eric Smith, told a Brookings Institution audience in Washington, D.C., in July. “So Barracks 2030 is our most comprehensive barracks investment plan we’ve ever undertaken. It’s several hundred million dollars, but the Marines are worth it.”
Today’s needs include upkeep of barracks built nearly 20 years ago, as the service deployed tens of thousands of Marines to the combat zones in Afghanistan and Iraq. “We let a lot of things lapse, and that’s come home to roost now,” Smith said. “We have to prioritize our barracks, and we’re doing it.”
But full funding remains elusive.
In a letter to Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro, two congressional members last week implored him to support unaccompanied housing improvements, including full funding of the Marine Corps’ Barracks 2030 plan in the Department of the Navy’s upcoming Fiscal Year 2026 budget proposal.
“We urge you to prioritize unaccompanied housing … that ensures enough funding to refurbish existing barracks units and fully modernize and rebuild these structures in a way that our service members desert,” Reps. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) and Gregory Murphy (R-N.C.), whose districts include Camp Pendleton and Camp Lejeune, respectively, wrote in their Oct. 17 letter. “We also ask that you support your installation commanders in this endeavor who remain hard at work in advocating for the wellbeing of our sailors and Marines. The health, safety and morale of our service members are paramount, and we must take swift action to address these critical issues.”
Last week, Marines and sailors with 1st Marine Logistics Group at Camp Pendleton spread across their campus-like setting to paint, plug up holes in drywall, and clean trails and brush. Various units of 1st MLG, which at Camp Pendleton is spread across several areas, are spending the last two weeks of October doing various repair and tidying tasks. The region’s other installations “are tasked with planning and executing their own phase four Clean Sweeps, which they’re going to do between November and December,” Mulvey said.
“The MEF commander has surged some additional money to fund basically a contracted labor team to come in and knock out some of the longstanding service requests and the higher priority type items, similar specialty items, plumbing, electrical, that type of thing,” said Mulvey, who noted the Marines and sailors in the 14 Area completed about 850 self-help projects, ranging from replacing window screens, towel racks and door locks to drywall repairs and even changing light bulbs, over several days last week.
Don’t call it field day, though.
“It’s more than just getting up and sweeping and cleaning,” Mulvey said. “It’s doing the self-help projects, replacing screens, changing light bulbs, fixing door locks, window locks, patching drywall, all the things that if we can free up our professional workforce that’s part of the base, we can take that off their plate. Then we can get them working on the harder jobs, the plumbing, the electrical, you know, the overhead drywall that your typical Marine wouldn’t be able to do.”
“And it’s not just a field day inspection of going in the room like we’ve done for years and years and years, but getting into the mechanics of their rooms. Hey, does this faucet work properly? Is there hot water coming out of it? Is your toilet flushing properly?” he said. And “we’re retraining our junior leaders to get in and really take part of an active field day inspection, not just a cleanliness field day inspection.”
The program funding included about $600,000 for an initial buy of self-help supplies, Hillery said, and Fiscal Year 2025 money will provide for restocking high-demand items, based on data collected.
An In-house Initiative

The idea for Operation Clean Sweep began earlier this year. “We started a joint partnership with MCI West back in April. It initially started as an Operational Planning Team that was led by 1st MLG, and they did that for about three to four months,” Hillery said. By late July, a cross-functional Tiger Team from ground facilities, public works, unaccompanied housing, comptroller and other departments finalized the plan, which led to a joint policy between MEF and MCI-West and a letter of instruction implementing the goals of Clean Sweep.
Construction battalion sailors with Naval Beach Group 1 in Coronado, Calif., have joined in the project. “We’ve had some great help from the Seabees. They’ve come out and they’ve helped us do some things,” Mulvey said. “They’re essentially an expert advisor or consultant, so they’re like leading the self-help project teams.”
Officials envision Clean Sweep as a semi-annual event, with the next set for March or April. That will ensure minor fixes and issues are tackled sooner, reducing chances of pricier repairs later on, and build a greater sense of ownership for the Marines and sailors residing there.
“As this policy was being developed … we had a red team that was constantly looking at the policy. We took it back to the tenants in the barracks, like, what makes sense, what doesn’t make sense?” Hillery asked rhetorically, describing “a very spirited conversation” with corporals, senior noncommissioned officers and barracks’ managers. “That helped us put a better product out, because we were getting some really bottom-up refinement on the concepts we were developing.”
Residents’ Rights and Responsibilities

A broad goal of the initiative is instilling a sense of responsibility, not just ownership, for the Marines. So barracks’ residents now are assigned to their room and signing for it much like they would with a rental lease off base. That “sounds kind of odd, that we haven’t been doing this in the past,” Mulvey said. “But we assign a Marine to every rifle, right? And that rifle’s typically about, on average, roughly $700 or so.”
A Marine or sailor renting a one-bedroom apartment locally might pay roughly $2,000 a month under a signed lease. “When you start thinking about why haven’t we been assigning folks to rooms, it just makes sense that we’re doing that – and we’re teaching these Marines what it’s like to be on the end of a lease,” he said.
“You have responsibilities when you sign this agreement. You come in the room and your room should be clean and it should be safe,” he added. “And those are all the things that they should expect from us and what we’re holding our leadership accountable to provide for them.”
Each resident is “responsible for maintaining that room,” said Mulvey. “So they’re doing a very strict inventory, just like anybody would when they sign a lease, or like I do when I sign for base housing. By teaching these Marines how to do those self-help projects – change a light bulb, fix a drywall hole, maybe even change a fixture or something in their room – these are things that they’re going to have to do for the rest of their life, and we’re going to help.”
“We charge a Marine when they lose a canteen and it comes time for them to check out. Now, if you’ve got a hole in your wall, you know, you may be liable following the results of an investigation to pay for someone to come up and patch that hole in the wall,” he noted. But now, “we’ve taught you how to do that with self-help.”
Resident councils and unit and recurring barracks commander conferences will provide feedback to officials and to the new Barracks Commanders Board, chaired by the two commanding generals. The board is a mechanism that can drive new ideas and issues for Marine Corps headquarters, if necessary, Mulvey said.
Already, the process has led to other benefits. As officials worked on the A/C contract, the final cost came to $180,000 less than expected. That savings will get eight 24-hour “Micro Marts” operated by Marine Corps Community Services placed inside barracks in camps that don’t yet have one, Hillery said.
“It sounds small, but we’re getting basketball nets replaced on the courts,” added Mulvey. “We’re getting new rims, new backboards, volleyball nets, cleaning up the horseshoe pits, and new ropes for our obstacle courses. These are all things that we’ve asked for some assistance from MCCS to help reinvest back into the barracks.”