​“Lack of Integration Between Marines/Navy in Recent Years Results in Gap Leaving Amphibious Forces More Vulnerable and Less Lethal”

Marine Corps has drifted away from the Navy over the last two decades. Shortages of amphibious shipping combined with a need to justify force structure gave birth to shore-based SPMAGTFs.

The new Commandant of the Marine Corps said in his planning guidance, “…there is a need to reestablish a more integrated approach to operations in the maritime domain.” By virtue of their range and speed, aviation assets are inherently able to bridge gaps. Amphibious forces usually take this as meaning between the sea and the land, but it also bridges gaps between forces at sea.

Amphibious ships can no longer serve merely as transportation for their embarked Marines. In the future anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) environment, they have to be part of the open-ocean kill chain. If the naval services are to enhance their survivability and lethality against the medium- and high-threat fights of the future, they have to combine their efforts and their assets. The keystone of that effort will be the aviation assets of the Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) and Expeditionary Strike Group (ESG). They must be reconfigured to better exploit aviation platforms such as the V-22 and F-35B, and turn the Corps into a force for sea control.
 
The strength of the Navy and Marine Corps team is the use of seaborne mobility to achieve effects on land. New aviation platforms can reinvigorate this for the 21st century, making both the Navy and Marine Corps more survivable, deadly, and integrated.
 
In Marine terms, “distributed operations” mean small units scattered throughout a given ground commander’s area of responsibility. In Navy terms, distributed maritime operations are those within a naval commander’s area of responsibility. Rarely are the two domains intertwined, but now they need to be.
 
Marines routinely practice distributed operations within the ships of an Amphibious Ready Group (ARG) – performing “split-ARG” ops at widely separated locations. But this is much less common among the ships of the larger Expeditionary Strike Group, which adds attached surface combatants and often a submarine.
 
It is virtually unheard of to detach Marines to other ships, such as those in a carrier strike group. The ARG typically does not integrate much with the rest of the Navy, but in the future, it will need to in order to survive. To that end, why are Ospreys tethered to ships at all, much less particular ships? Ospreys are easier to maintain on land. With the two KC-130Js normally assigned to the MEU, they can reach anywhere in most theaters within hours.

With the right preparation, much of the Navy’s fleet could become staging areas for Marines.
 
 

The Marine Corps and the Navy are sometimes working past each other.. The Marines field small tactical platforms and the Navy seeks to enhance sea control with larger systems. Neither of those efforts reaches the other, nor provides top cover for the critical period when Marines transition ashore.

In the future, we can’t assume that we will possess uncontested sea control, whether in the objective area or in transit. The ESG may have to fight its way there. Every asset aboard every ship, including manned and unmanned aircraft, whether they have “Marines” or “Navy” painted on the side, must work in concert. We need to move beyond the construct where the Navy exists only to move Marines to an objective, into one where elements of both are a cohesive fighting team from embarkation to debarkation.
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Once we stop thinking of the Navy and Marine Corps as operating in distinct domains, the survivability and lethality of the ESG and the MEU, and even carrier strike groups and surface action groups will be increased. Employed correctly, emerging Marine and Navy aviation platforms, such as the F-35B, CMV-22, and MUX, combined with the assets of the MEU, ARG, and ESG, will make the integrated Navy-Marine team more capable and deadly.
 

Training now means more than mock squad grass drills behind the barracks. Technology is finally getting to a point where soldiers can enter a simulated world and run through combat-like scenarios on the actual terrain where they will fight, whether that’s boots on dirt, flying in the skies or firing from remote platforms.

Soldiers, Marines try out new device that puts ‘mixed reality,’ multiple functions into warfighter’s hands. The system melds navigation, targeting, situational awareness and communications into a single device with advanced thermal and night vision.
 

​Future Operational Battlespace will challenge future warriors’ abilities to command and control their warfighting systems. For example, Multi Domain Operations are expected to be composed of vast formations of unmanned, robotic, and autonomous systems that depend on massive amounts of data and rapid, assured communications across the spectrum, from tactical to strategic battle areas.


Consider scenarios where such capabilities can enhance command and control during MDO:

A battlefield truck driver needs to give a status report to operations centers, from the strategic to the tactical support areas. What communications are available along the route? What onboard technology will feed into the report? Must the driver find a friendly command post or a commercial node to transmit his report? Is there a single channel, line-of-sight, or beyond line-of-sight option mounted to the truck? AI assured capabilities knows instantly and will automatically establish network connections, provide assured communications, and send the status report to the proper recipients.


The result is war fighters and command posts receive ‘on the move’ and ‘at the halt’ communications. AI assured capabilities also requires terrain mapping of potential command post locations, to include improved buildings and unimproved field locations that can support ‘at the halt’ and fixed communications requirements. AI assured capabilities overlays command post locations upon access points so warfighters can establish command posts at a location with the best network connectivity.

Future Operational Battlespace will challenge future warriors’ abilities to command and control their warfighting systems. For example, Multi Domain Operations are expected to be composed of vast formations of unmanned, robotic, and autonomous systems that depend on massive amounts of data and rapid, assured communications across the spectrum, from tactical to strategic battle areas.


Consider scenarios where such capabilities can enhance command and control during MDO:

A battlefield truck driver needs to give a status report to operations centers, from the strategic to the tactical support areas. What communications are available along the route? What onboard technology will feed into the report? Must the driver find a friendly command post or a commercial node to transmit his report? Is there a single channel, line-of-sight, or beyond line-of-sight option mounted to the truck? AI assured capabilities knows instantly and will automatically establish network connections, provide assured communications, and send the status report to the proper recipients.


The result is war fighters and command posts receive ‘on the move’ and ‘at the halt’ communications. AI assured capabilities also requires terrain mapping of potential command post locations, to include improved buildings and unimproved field locations that can support ‘at the halt’ and fixed communications requirements. AI assured capabilities overlays command post locations upon access points so warfighters can establish command posts at a location with the best network connectivity.

Marine Corps is experimenting with artificial intelligence to improve the way it deploys its forces and spot potential weaknesses years in advance.

The Marines built a tool that crunches data on personnel and equipment to measure how prepared individual battalions are for combat. The tool could ultimately help top brass deploy some 186,000 active-duty Marines and countless pieces of military hardware.

Allocating the service’s resources is an imperfect science. Leaders map out deployment strategies years or even decades in advance, but situations will invariably arise that throw a wrench in those plans.

Planners are constantly forced to “reshuffle the deck” as crises flare up in different places and figuring out which units to move around is a complicated process. Numerous factors—training, deployment history, equipment readiness and others—affect how prepared a group is for a given situation.

Today planners rely on spreadsheets, whiteboards and basic applications to track readiness and manage forces, but artificial intelligence can offer them a better understanding of the resources at their disposal and the long-term effects of the decisions they make.

The tech crunches both structured and unstructured data from multiple force management applications to create a real-time image of how prepared each unit is for combat. The tool specifically aims to build a five-year management plan for the Marine infantry battalions.

Tool has two primary functions: It flags the units that are most ready for action and explains why others come up short. Armed with that knowledge, commanders can proactively train and invest in less prepared groups before they fall even further behind.

“A lot of times Marines only invest more when the problem arises. Now they can see it ahead of time and say ‘OK, we’re going to take action now to prevent that from occurring.’”

The tool sheds light on how deployment decisions will affect forces in the long run. By analyzing historical trends along with real-time data, the tool could show how a unit’s readiness would change if it were, for instance, moved to a new location or given additional resources.

Marines are also building a separate AI system that ranks course of action plans based on those extrapolations, which could one day be merged with the readiness system.

“You integrate that all together and you get a full view of readiness across your force. Now you can really make some data-driven decisions.”

The next stage of the effort will include parts of the Marines’ aviation and logistics units, bringing about half branch into the purview of the program. With that additional data, the AI would further refine its processing rules to deliver better results.

So artificial intelligence is tasked with managing the particular deployments of troops in battle, moving them around in new and unexpected ways.
 

“Why would an AI allocate forces in distinct areas of the battlefield? It could intermingle them and manage them at a granular level. Its categories are way more numerous, in the way that a warehouse AI manages categories at the shelf level.

Instead of distinct groupings of armor, air support, infantry, and artillery, a system run by artificial intelligence and managing a battle could coordinate a single helicopter with a pair of howitzers and an infantry platoon, directly grouping each in the same way that a warehouse worker finds an assortment of items to place into the same package.


 

Objective is to develop and test a semi-autonomous wide area threat detection capability for site security using networked low-power, multi-modal signal acquisition nodes combined with machine learning for event classification and determination of hostile intent.

Our fixed sites face a wide area of security threats including traditional asymmetric weapons such as snipers, artillery, rockets & mortars, and more recently, the coordinated multi-agent “swarm” of low-cost drones. Other threats include physical incursion, vehicle-based improvised explosives, etc. Battlefield sensor technologies have been developed to provide threat reports to central command posts.

Typically, these systems are used to indicate the threat point-of-origin, and corresponding track if available. For area-target weapons, such as mortars, rockets, and RPGs, the point-of-impact locations may also be resolved. In many cases, the weapon type may be determined, which is vital to deploy countermeasures effectively.

Traditionally, sensor node locations are placed at fixed sites often constrained by availability of power and network communications. Once commissioned, surveillance systems are usually static, but the threat remains dynamic based on the conditions outside the fixed site and within the fixed site as critical assets are moved/relocated.
 
Using the capability of the multi-agent technology in networks could enhance most of the military applications like target tracking, urban control systems, firefighter assistant, data aggregation, detecting and monitoring the events, and intrusion detection. Mmulti agent systems have become an essential part of the real-world applications of networks like Swarm Sense robotics-based systems.

A common drone swarm system could consist of two drones unmanned aerial vehicle/over thousands of drones. The required autonomy increased to control such systems without any manual pilots, when the number of drones in a swarm system exceeded a predetermined threshold. Therefore, it is vital to create the autonomous drones which manage themselves automatically, effectively, and robustly in any anti-access, bandwidth-limited, and area-denied environments.

Due to the interconnection of multi agent systems and wireless networks, group of drones can be enabled to cooperate and coordinate them to perform the missions automatically, which require a large-area coverage, immediate data processing, efficient deployment without exact pre-planning, and uninterrupted cooperation and coordination during the emergency operations.

This project proposes technology for wide area surveillance in-and-around fixed sites providing mobile, semi-autonomous sensors which may be continually relocated/repositioned in lieu of changing threats or environmental factors.
 
Distributed artificial intelligence is concerned with interaction, especially coordination between agents exhibiting auto behaviour. Since distributed network solution strategies are spreading very rapidly due to tech advances, commanders have pressing needs for distributed techniques in mission readiness determination.
 

Advanced Battle Management System is a key technology the service is banking on to connect the information collected by various platforms into a complete picture of the battlespace to rapidly share data about a simulated attack.

That information, as well as other data from platforms participating in the exercise, was then pushed to a control command post where leaders could watch updates in real time.
 
 
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​“Commanders on the front line need to quickly identify and assess threats to their forces. “To do that accurately, they need a system that can rapidly collect and fuse data gathered from every available sensor – regardless of domain – and quickly share the information with them. The goal is to speed up how fast data moves from sensor to the executing platforms, such as aircraft, artillery or jamming systems.”

Getting all these systems to work together over such distances is hard enough within a single service like the Army. Getting different systems’ technology to trade data is harder still. That’s true even for an aircraft like the F-35, which is so packed with advanced electronics and data-fusion software.

The concept is coalescing around a key idea — one that requires tossing decades of traditional thinking out the window. “As opposed to what many leaders have been doing their entire career, the biggest difference is that in the future there will be no lines on the battlefield.”

The current structure is all about dividing areas of operations. “Wherever we go, if we have to fight, we established the forward edge of the battle area, we’ve established the fire support coordination line, the forward line of troops, and we say: ‘OK, Army can operate here. Air Force can operate here.”

“Everything is about lines” now. But to function in modern contested environments, “those lines are eliminated.”
What does that mean in practice? Pentagon has put forth a vision in which every force can both defend itself and have a deep-strike capability to hold an enemy at bay, built around a unified command-and-control system.
“A naval force can defend itself or strike deep. An Air Force that can defend itself or strike deep. The Marines can defend itself or strike deep. “Everybody.”

The current force is vulnerable to precision fires cued by visual and electromagnetic signatures, which threat forces use to target formations from the top down. The Army should move the small tent cities onto highly mobile platforms that come equipped with built-in electronics and communications suites.

The command centers of the future must be capable of rapid displacement with the ability to maintain scalable mission command. In order to reduce signatures, it is also in the interest of developers to hone communications suites with dedicated bandwidth that can reach back to processing, exploitation, and dissemination cells in the consolidation area.

No tent can replicate the mobility of mission command on wheels. Even the smallest, most mobile tents still take upwards of twenty to thirty minutes to break down and set up, even with practiced crews. Achieving this kind of mounted mobility may compel the Army to sacrifice vehicle armor for expandable capability.

We need viable frameworks to get intelligence to “move at the speed of decisive action” while performing key tasks to inform commanders’ decision-making processes. The transition to reduce vulnerable forward footprints with condensed, modular systems will take time and vision.

At the core of this shift should be a sustained commitment to maneuver supported by precision fires. The Army will not perpetuate these successful institutional norms without more maneuverable BCT and battalion headquarters and complementary fires development to protect units from long-range artillery.

Pairing on-the-move mission command with at-the-halt capabilities hampers commanders’ ability to maintain tempo. Mobility enhancement and dispersion enable commanders to reduce the threat to command posts and keep vulnerable elements out of the range rings of the enemy.

Project Convergence pointed the Army in the direction it must go if it wants to shape a force for future conflict, but the effort also pushed the service toward a major cultural change.

“It’s OK to fail. We’ve done some touchpoints with soldiers, and soldiers aren’t used to failing and it actually drives them crazy when you put a piece of immature technology in their hands that doesn’t work exactly like they expect it to work.

“That’s part of the culture change: It’s OK. “You’re learning, growing and making better decisions, investments, as you continue to mature this technology. This is absolutely the way forward.”

Army has linked together experimental drones, super guns, ground robots and satellites in a massive test of its future warfare plans. The service mounted the first demonstration of Project Convergence, brought in some 34 fresh-out-of-the-lab technologies.

The goal: to show that these weapons and tools—linked and led by artificial intelligence—can allow humans to find a target, designate it as such, and strike it — from the air, from kilometers away, using any available weapon and in a fraction of the time it takes to execute that kill today.

Unity among military branches and a combined, all-domain effort could be the difference in winning large-scale, multi-domain battles the Army expects to fight in the future. To help achieve that goal, is developing of Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or CJADC2, which will impact units in both branches.

Services aim to establish CJADC2 at the most “basic levels” by defining mutual standards for data sharing and service interfacing designed to deliver CJADC2 capabilities to the warfighter quicker and to promote “shared” understanding of concepts and capabilities.

“We’re going to have the capability for long-range precision fires at ranges that we’ve never even considered before. “And this will give us a cross-domain capability to work with the joint force and coalition partners, and give us capabilities that are really going to make a difference.”

In an unprecedented level of collaboration, Project Convergence has throttled the needle forward and sped the kill chain from minutes to seconds, combining over thirty technologies to alter the speed, complexity, and overall geometry of the battlefield. To be sure, the experimentation was not perfect, but the aggressive use of machine learning and artificial intelligence to sense, detect, and assign shooters to service targets was fast and rather remarkable.

“We started with a lot more technology than we demonstrated today. It was a very deliberate process of determining things that would be ready and things that would not be ready.” In some cases, the Army overshot its goal, literally. In several instances, the video of the target after the launching of effects showed the target still standing.
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“Aided target recognition, it’s brittle. We need more work, more sets, to continue to train and solidify that and do it on the move with rough terrain and stability systems. The air-to-air coordination and air-to-ground, that worked extremely well. The mapping worked very well. But we all have our eyes wide open.This is a first step. We can now look ourselves in the eye and say we know exactly where we’re starting.”

​To better prepare battalions for large scale combat operations, we’re working on sending more battalion commanders to combat training centers so they can be leaders in coordinating installation logistics for supporting power projection e.g. equipping Soldiers as they deploy.


 
Distributed Operations concept supplements traditional sea and land basing options with “mobile forward arming and refueling points” for resupply mid-mission. A separate mobile distribution site would serve as the location for Marines on surface connectors or host nation forces to stage fuel and weapons that will be brought to the mobile forward arming and refueling points. Importantly, all these sites are considered “mobile” and are intended to maintain elements of “deception and decoy” – in keeping with the idea that the aircraft are supposed to be distributed and difficult to find and target.
 
 

 
In this particular Warfighter exercise, the division observed that the terrain limited options for ground maneuver. A single penetration, though conservative and often effective, would not achieve the commander’s intent. The penetration presents the enemy with one problem—a problem that other units have presented repeatedly. Dilemmas are not the same as problems. A problem is a situation regarded as unwelcome or harmful that must be dealt with and overcome.

A dilemma, by contrast, is a situation in which a difficult choice has to be made between two or more alternatives, especially equally undesirable ones. To present the enemy with multiple dilemmas across multiple domains and in multiple locations, the division combined penetrations with audacious turning movements and tactical deceptions, complemented and reinforced with nonlethal effects.

The turning movements were achieved by conducting air assaults across the coordinated fire line and up to the fire support coordination line. To avoid enemy air defenses, these air assaults were often offset by several kilometers and at least a major terrain feature away from their intended target.

The targets were often key points of overwatch for particular underground facilities suspected of housing long-range artillery, or points of domination that could cover major avenues of approach. Timely execution of these air assaults forced the enemy to divert resources and attention from the advance of our armored formations along heavily defended avenues of approach and thereby dislocated the main enemy defenses.

In the cases where we were successful, the division forced the enemy to react to our operations and enter the fight on our terms. More importantly, we were able to achieve tempo not just through the sustained geographical advance of the forward line of troops,

But by persistently presenting complementary dilemmas to the enemy in unexpected ways to diminish adversaries decision space and disrupted their understanding of its own plan. By the time the enemy observed and oriented on one dilemma, the division sought to present another, thereby causing the enemy to not render a decision on the initial dilemma.
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​Artificial intelligence could pull together data from multiple sensors, each seeing the same target in different wavelengths or from a different angle, to build a composite picture more precise than its parts.

“We’re moving past just simple concepts of sensors and shooters. How do we get multiple sensors and shooters integrated do we get more out of them than an individual item could provide?”

“It’s not a specific sensor to a specific shooter. On a future battlefield… just about everything is going to be a sensor. So how you do you store that data and how do you enable a smart distribution of data to the right shooter? Because we can’t build architectures that are relying upon huge pipes and just massive bandwidth to make it work.”

AMBS needs to be a cutting-edge, constantly improving network of radars, observers, and battle management to allow position of limited resources for maximum effect, aimed at exploiting the power of networked information to enable a limited force to prevail.

“If we can bring them together, you can use a sensor the Army already developed, bought and fielded to spot targets for one weapon – say, the Q-53 artillery radar – to feed targeting data into a totally different type of weapon – say, a Patriot battery.

The Army wants to plug in its new anti-aircraft and missile defense systems to the Network, but those technologies are at a critical juncture in their own individual test programs.

Army is also running tests with systems including aerial scouts, long-range missile launchers and armored vehicles.

So far, Air Force “experiments” have focused on connectivity across platforms, domains, and services. But these highly scripted and rigid kill chains simply move data; they are not exploring the stickier problems of actual battle management. Instead, what must be demonstrated is how these ABMS technologies support future operational concepts.

ABMS will be successful if completely aligned with the air defense concept of operation. It can’t just be a collection of sensors and networks randomly closing kill chains. Leaders need to understand the larger battlespace to prioritize the threats, manage available assets, and link capabilities as the battle unfolds. It is this broader functionality that will enable the services to maximize its limited assets to prevail.

Air Force should focus its experimentation on the fusion and decision functions of a battle management system. How does the system function with multiple targets and multiple assets with varying potential effects? What about the many support assets and actions? Experiments must also be tested with current platforms and tactics to be both backward- and forward-compatible.

The principal commander first determines the mission and the specific tasks required to accomplish the mission. An example of a typical set of mission tasks might be planning, establishing a command post, securing routes, providing perimeter defense, and establishing locations for providing assistance.

New Pentagon network projects seek to capture more data about real-world battlespace — then train computers to out-think human captains.

Even today’s best sonar technology doesn’t give a sub captain a very good sense of the battlespace. “What the submariners get is a low-dimensional picture. So if you are towing an array, you get information like bearing and sometimes frequency information.

There’s a lot of potentially valuable data that towed sonar doesn’t capture because it’s only collecting one type of data and only at one point. If you could collect and properly analyze sound and wave data from other points in the ocean, you could develop a much better sense of what an adversary is doing.

The strike group commander knows the strike group best. We know what we did here during deployment, and this was a lot of air-to-ground, but we didn’t do a lot of air-to-air, and we didn’t do a lot of war at sea, and we didn’t defend myself against missiles.

So we develop a scenario that will get the training required. … They did a live missile ex, shooting at supersonic targets with jamming and all high-end types of things here, to do that, the missile shot.

And there was a lot of air-to-air fighting, both live, but we also inserted virtual. So now the sailor on the scope sees five aircraft coming in, but there’s only one real one coming in for our guys to fight against.

And commander will see missiles coming in, constructive missiles. So we are pushing our live, virtual, constructive – that’s how we are accelerating along here the capability curve. “We put in that investment and that got their training up, and their readiness ratings were all green.

Network security technologies of yesterday are too large and expensive to deploy, leaving tactical networks unequipped with the mobility and scalability needed in a networked warfighting environment. Without the right technologies in place, Soldiers' views into the threat landscape can be restricted and even at times inaccurate, as real-time situational awareness of network threats is impaired.

Mission command is in part command empowering subordinates to act based on local initiative. Yet, there remains conflicting conceptions of what command and control means and what mission command even is. The military needs to reestablish a shared understanding of command and control.

The military decision making process is accomplished by members battle staff and participants from the different processes and occurs as needed. The output from this process is a division order. It is followed by a separate military decision making process that results in the commanders order for its subordinate units.
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Command is what commanders do. Command and control is how they do it. Communications are the means by which they do it.