Sea Power - February-March 2017

As the Marine Corps considers a possible
future conflict against a near-peer adver-
sary, it is confronting two conflicting
operational requirements.

To reduce its forces’ profile and complicate an adversary’s targeting challenge, the Corps will need to conduct distributed operations, with small units deployed at considerable distance from each other, and from their senior command and support elements, while executing a coordinated campaign plan. Ideally, that would require access to the global communications network providing a constant flow of command and control, current intelligence, and precision navigation and targeting data, which primarily come through space-based satellites.

But intelligence analysts warn that in a conflict against an adversary with 21st-century technology, they likely would be forced to operate in a “ satellite-denied” environment, with degraded or no incoming long-distance information, and the knowledge that any electronic emissions could enable the enemy to locate and target their units.

To prepare for that future conflict, the Marines are working on multiple levels to shed the comfortable habits they have fallen into during a decade-plus of counter-insurgency operations against a predominantly low-tech enemy and prepare to fight without the assured connectivity the global information network provides.

To do that, service leaders are driving a combina-
tion of “back to the future” training in field craft that
was second nature to Marines half a century ago, and
rediscovery of the post-Vietnam “maneuver warfare”
They also are working to produce a cadre of Marines
with the skills to prevail in a conflict in which a burst
of ones and zeros could be as effective as kinetic fires.
That is one aim of the Marine Force 2025 study.

The major force behind these efforts is Commandant Gen. Robert B. Neller, who remembers the tactical lessons he learned from the Vietnam veterans who trained and mentored him as a young officer, and who has little patience with the generation of Marines who cannot remember a world without the Internet and cell phones.

“These guys have been operating in an environment where if they didn’t have access to the network, it was ‘how can that be? What do you mean my iPhone doesn’t work,’” Neller told the Surface Navy Association Annual Symposium in January. His blunt warning to those Marines: “You’re not going to be able to do that.”

His Marines will have to learn how to protect the network, how to function without it and how to mask their electronic signature.

“If your signature can be detected, you can be killed,” he said.

Much of the work to conceive, test and provide the equipment, concepts and tactics needed to operate in that network-degraded environment is being done in the Combat Development and Integration (CDI) Division and the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory (MCWL), which are parts of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command (MCCDC).

Four officers from those organizations discussed those efforts recently with Seapower at MCCDC’s Quantico, Va., headquarters.

One important starting point for the evolution is Neller’s orders to begin training to use paper maps and compasses to navigate and to locate friendly and