“Marines Kick Off Wargames to Build New Expeditionary Force to Balance Ship Mix/Capacity to Solve Future Battle Problems”

The Marine Corps is figuring out how to implement the guidance Commandant issued to the force, which called for a sweeping overhaul of how Marines equip, train, deploy, and occupy space in the world.

In building a vision for how to equip for an era in which its ships, aircraft, and overseas bases exist under constant threat from long-range precision weapons and electronic warfare attacks, the Marine Corps will try and go “smaller, lighter, less exquisite, more numerous.

The Corps hasn’t said much about how it’s going to move out on the plan, which questioned cornerstones of Marine doctrine like the need for 38 amphibious ships and supporting a two Marine Expeditionary Brigade-sized forcible entry force. The reason for the silence became clear: Marine leaders are just starting to do the heavy lifting to make it happen.

“We’re looking for ways to make ships more numerous, more autonomous, and more attractable with “alternate platforms” like unmanned supply ships and expeditionary basing options could partially replace, or bolster, large amphibious ships as the way Marines get to the fight. “There has to be a smarter way to do logistics and supply that we don’t need an amphib to do. We’re looking for alternate platforms to take the load off those ships.” 

We’ve heard the Marines talk about lighter, cheaper gear before, when they were deployed by the tens of thousands to the grinding fights in over the last two decades. But the desire to go light in order to move across deserts and through mountains ran into the buzzsaw of the IED threat which tore apart lighter Humvees, leading to hulking MRAPs and more body armor, slowing down troops who were tied to static bases that themselves were targets.

But operating in the expanses of the Pacific, unmanned ships that act as forward observers and equipment haulers are a necessity in such environments, as big-deck amphibious ships would offer too obvious a target.
 
Marines want to buy more things — especially unmanned ships and aerial drones, but they need to be inexpensive, since lots of them will be needed, and there’s a good chance they won’t survive long in a fight. “We’re looking for autonomy, we’re looking for manned/unmanned teaming, and we need to get lighter. 

Another way to put it is, the Corps wants its boats and drones to be and “light, lethal, and affordable.”
So, how do you do that? We want to do simultaneous exercises and allow the Corps to do more analytical work.  “We’re looking at a force — despite long-range persistent weapons — to persist forward. We’ve got to wrestle with ship mix and their capacity; there’s a balancing act.” 

One of the burning questions that has come up since the Commadant pushed the Corps reset button has been just how many ships the Navy and Marine Corps think they need. 

Many were shocked to read that the new direction the Marine Corps is moving to reject the old requirement for amphibious ships: 38 amphibs across three ship types to support moving two Marine Expeditionary Brigades ashore in a massive joint forcible entry operation. 

Calling this notion outdated in a contested anti-access/area-denial environment, the plan instead advocated looking into alternate platforms and alternate types of operations.

“We must accept the realities created by the proliferation of precision long-range fires, mines, and other smart-weapons, and seek innovative ways to overcome those threat capabilities. 

We need to do experimentation with lethal long-range unmanned systems capable of traveling 200 nautical miles, penetrating into the adversary enemy threat ring, and crossing the shoreline – causing the adversary to allocate resources to eliminate the threat, create dilemmas, and further create opportunities for fleet maneuver.”

“We understand that we need to, where possible as a naval force, be with or be similar to the Navy so that there’s not a Navy solution and a Marine solution; there’s a naval solution. We understand that when we are together with the Navy, we are at our most powerful.”

That integration is playing out now, as the Navy continues with both its 2019 force structure assessment – which determines how many of what kinds of ships the Navy will plan to buy in the coming years – and the Fiscal Year 2021 budget request with Marine Corps input.

Noting the plan’s  move away from a two-MEB joint forcible entry operation requirement, and therefore the 38-ship figure, we’re sitting at the table, and it’s an integrated force structure assessment,” with the Marine Corps conveying their ideas for how to make best use of L-class amphibious ships, E-class expeditionary ships and other alternate platforms.

Commandant also specifically called out the two-MEB lift requirement; that requirement’s been around for decades and is no longer relevant. Now what do we do? That’s one of the things we have to think pretty radically about.”

Part of the future of Marine operations on ships is that they can no longer be passive passengers. They need to help protect the ship, contribute to maritime domain awareness and sea control, and more. 

Some Marines at sea have practiced this and service is looking for more ways to employ the Marines while they are en route to a location.

Another element of these future at-sea operations includes integrating Marine Corps logistics efforts into an overall naval logistics construct. To keep up with a changing environment, the Marine Corps and the joint force are looking at “nothing short of a strategic reorientation in how we do logistics.

 Naval integration line of effort means that supply chains, concepts of operations, communications and more need to be integrated between the Navy and Marine Corps. Logistics Marines will have to get as used to doing their jobs from the steel deck of a ship as they are from a logistics center ashore.

“We talk about prepositioning programs based on very large ships that have to come in to a benign port with a lot of infrastructure. We’ve got to really flip the script on that and think differently.

Today’s “successful”  offload could take a month to several months to actually deliver gear to a MEB ashore, whereas in the future success will be measured in 48 or 72 hours if the Marines find themselves trying to blunt a peer-adversary fight.

One potential solution to the logistics problem the Navy and Marine Corps face is unmanned surface ships. Marine Corps recently conducted a simulation exercise using long-range unmanned surface vessels that were fully autonomous and had a range of several hundreds of miles.

“Something that can carry 50 tons, 100 tons, a couple hundred tons, and it’s truly autonomous. We’re very interested in that to be able to do resupply.

“So let’s just say we have unmanned surface vessels that are truly autonomous, programmed to go and avoid commercial traffic that’s out there and respond to threats and deliver the key part, the key thing we’re looking for, the key supplies. 

Because a peer threat is focused on things that are bouncing around and not focused on a frigate, or an amphibious ship, because we fuzzed up the picture and everything from above looks about the same, then three of them got through” – which means the Marines get the supplies they need and a manned ship was able to safely conduct its mission because unmanned ships deceived the adversary.

The unmanned surface ship has to while transporting goods across the sea, be telling us something, and it has to be able to look like something that it’s not, and we’ll just leave it at that for now.

 We have new focus on deception and decoys in the Marine Corps. In sum, though, “eventually we start putting a cost imposition on the adversary who’s trying to prevent us from going where we want to go.”

For the vision of unmanned vehicle operations to work, the Marines, the Navy and Congress will have to accept a fact: unmanned vehicles will be lost at sea, shot from the sky, stolen by an adversary or otherwise lost.

“Attritable” being the Pentagon’s buzz word this year, the Marine Corps is fully embracing that concept.
“Numerous and more affordable over exquisite means “we cannot continue to try to procure exquisite systems. We need kind of a cheaper …. ‘we can use and lose it’” model for procuring unmanned systems especially, as well as other gear potentially.

But there’s a big difference between exercising new concepts and actually working new drones into the force in a big way. “The initial driver for integrating robots into operations was don’t put a human being in there when you can put a machine in there, and lower the risk to the human. 

Now the additive part of unmanned is how can you make your force look bigger, operate bigger with unmanned / manned teaming? How can my wingman, or two of them, be unmanned? How does that enable me to accomplish the mission in a better way?”

That will take big changes from the top on down. “Unless you artificially demand a rate of advancement, it won’t happen. It’s not that we don’t like them, it’s just that everything is built to be manned…So unless you say, ‘Five years from now, I want 50 percent of it unmanned.’ Okay, now you’re driving it. You may not achieve that but you need a driver.”

The operators teaming with those machines will also fight differently. The Marines are exploring new “methods like expeditionary advanced bases, small units, distributed, mobile, that can re-arm, refuel, sense forward, attack forward, and then move, all with a low signature.”

Beyond just unmanned systems,  the Marine Corps overall needs to get lighter and more transportable under the priorities in commandants guidance.

“We have not gotten lighter in a long time. We’ve slowed the rate of growth of weight. We don’t want to slow the rate of growth of weight, we want to actually get lighter.

“It’s extremely hard to do, which means we have to accept some risk, and we’re willing to accept a lot of risk.”
“We can’t be in a training exercise somewhere, and something happens, and say, oh, adversary, if you could just hold for two weeks I’m going to go back to base get my stuff and then I’m ready to fight. We have to take it with us; it has to be transportable and light.

Marine Corps needed to decide which legacy systems it would divest of, to create the money to invest in new, lighter and more capable systems to support the expeditionary operations.

Wargaming and data analytics will play a larger role in charting a path forward.

“We must invest robustly in wargaming, experimentation, and modeling & simulation M&S if we are to be a successful learning organization,” We’ve been directed to focus in new areas, and this requires us to think, innovate, and change. Addressing these new missions starts with ideas, ideas are developed into concepts, and concepts that are then tested and refined by wargaming, experimentation, and M&S.”

An ongoing effort on the wargaming side, to support  vision of a more robust learning organization making smarter decisions, is to tap into operational units’ data to better inform wargaming. 

For example, in a fight-tonight scenario in a wargame, accurate and recent readiness data would show which units could actually deploy immediately based on training, material readiness and other factors. Maintenance data too could inform what operations the Marines could support, on what scale, and for how long.

The new guidance responds to those concerns by charting a distinctively new course for the Marine Corps while remaining the nation’s elite force-in-readiness. Marine Corps must be boldly transformed for the very real challenges of the future. 

The planning guidance specifically rejects the notion that the Marine Corps is a standalone fighting force that the Navy simply supports with sea transport, airpower, and logistics. 

Instead, the plan intends to forge a tight, supporting partnership with the Navy, making the Marines an essential component of all forms of naval warfare. 

Current operational concepts are no longer adequate for the wars of the future, especially given the ever-growing threat from anti-access and area denial capabilities. Since Marines will have to operate within the range of proliferating enemy precision fires, they will need to disperse into small units to avoid being targeted. 

It will require many new capabilities, including high-endurance loitering sensors and munitions, communications and radars with a low probability of intercept and detection, and advanced air defense systems. 

Marine Corps leaders want to develop precision land-based fires with ranges beyond 350 nautical miles, to attack moving targets afloat and ashore. The new guidance also notes that the Corps has already started experimenting with novel ways to use existing capabilities.

For example basing up to 20 F-35B aircraft on big-deck amphibious ships will provide more dispersed and survivable airpower to the Navy. These changes will revolutionize how marines fight well into the future.

Large and expensive manned platforms will become ever more exposed to attack and will make marines ever more vulnerable by concentrating them in too few places so Marine Corps “must continue to seek the affordable and plentiful at the expense of the exquisite and few.

The  Marine Corps needs a greater number of smaller and more specialized ships, as well as “an array of low-signature, affordable, and risk-worthy unmanned and expendable platforms and payloads.” 

Since the threat environment will require increasingly distributed operations, leaders want combined arms operations to be pushed from infantry companies down to individual rifle squads and reconnaissance teams. That means an even greater emphasis on mission command, a flexible doctrine that trusts subordinates to take a great deal of initiative to achieve their commander’s intent. 

The commandant’s guidance stresses doing everything possible to ensure that marines focus on warfighting instead of an excessive number of administrative tasks, like basic data entry and redundant processes. Even more importantly, it warns against the corrosive effects of commanders who impose too much rigidity on their subordinates while training at home. 

While every Marine is still expected to be a rifleman, the guidance makes clear that the exclusive dominance of infantry and aviation inside the Marine Corps is slowly eroding. 

The commandant’s guidance provides a revolutionary new direction for the Marine Corps, but it also presents some serious challenges to the other services as they prepare for the future fight. 

Other services must increasingly plan to work with — and perhaps even rely upon — the Marine Corps for missions to seize and protect advanced bases, provide elements of air defense, and conduct long-range fires against enemy platforms that threaten air operations. 

Increasingly dispersed Marine rifle squads and recon teams should also be authorized to call in air strikes .
Although the Navy will surely welcome the return of the Marines as full partners in naval warfare, the sharp critique of big, expensive legacy platforms deeply undercuts current Navy shipbuilding priorities. The need for platforms that are small, plentiful, specialized, and unmanned or minimally manned so that naval forces can continue to operate effectively inside the contested zone even if they absorb substantial losses. 

The Marine Corps of the future is more likely to be smaller than bigger. It will rely more on sea, air, and land drones to aid Marines storming the beach, and do more to defend warships. It will work in smaller, distributed teams with low signatures, closer to the way Special Operations Forces have worked traditionally.

The new vision of dispersed, small-unit operations closely resembles how special operations forces operate today. As the new guidance is implemented, the Marine Corps and Special Operations Command should increasingly work together to develop new operational concepts and capabilities — including weapons, communications gear, intelligence systems, and insertion platforms. 

“We have to do force design and we have to change our posture around the world. We should not be content to merely try to keep up. We should set the pace.”

The plan is to allow for better situational awareness to inform the rest of the force as the fight unfolds. It also means more effective deterrence than coming in from outside that zone.

“We have to take the gear with us.  “It has to be affordable and light.”
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“Marine Corps Design/Strategy Transform Objectives Define Focus on Changes in Activities/Initiatives”
Commandant’s Planning Guidance proposes the most radical redesign of the Marine Corps in more than half a century. According to the new Commandant, “the Marine Corps is not organized, trained, equipped, or postured to meet the demands of the rapidly evolving future operating environment.” New force design is focused on “maintaining persistent naval forward presence to enable sea control and denial operations in the presence of a peer adversary.”
The Commandant’s vision has been met, in general, with approval and even enthusiasm for its boldness and willingness to question long-held force planning assumptions. But, it has to be recognized that what is being proposed also is a high-risk gamble. Moreover, in tying the future of the Marine Corps to its ability to support Navy operations and calling for a reduction in the Corps’ focus on traditional amphibious operations, the Planning Guidance could spell the beginning of a big shift in the Marine Corps as an independent service.
The central premise of the Planning Guidance is that the return of great power competition requires a Marine Corps that is primarily organized, trained and equipped for the high-end fight against a peer competitor. A future conflict would be a battle for sea control. Adversary has growing anti-access/area denial A2/AD capability, which centers on an increasingly capable arsenal of long-range precision-guided weapons, puts at risk fixed land facilities and large naval combatants.
This assessment of the nature of future great power conflicts led Commadant to conclude Marine Corps must abandon its traditional focus on forcible entry—operations involving large-scale and protracted operations on land following the Navy's establishment of sea control. 
Instead, operations on land would involve small, agile, relatively low cost and “risk-worthy” ships and units operating inside an adversary’s A2/AD umbrella and employing advanced technologies such as the F-35B, long-range anti-ship rockets, and artillery and unmanned systems. These formations would be moved and resupplied by a fleet of small, low-signature and relatively cheap ships, some of which may be based on existing commercial designs.
The implications of Commadant vision of future war for the ways the Marine Corps will fight and the means it will employ are sweeping. In the Planning Guidance, the Commandant announced that he was abandoning the long-standing requirement to lift two Marine Expeditionary Brigades as the basis for developing amphibious ship design specifications. No longer would the force sizing metric for the amphibious warfare fleet be 38 specially designed ships.
Commadant made the case that the Marine Corps was “over-invested in capabilities and capacities purpose-built for traditional sustained operations ashore.” Among the capabilities he identified for divestment were systems associated primarily with sustained, large-scale land operations. 
What the Maine Corps needs more of are unmanned systems of all types; mobile and rapidly deployable rocket artillery and long-range precision-fires; mobile air defense and counter-precision guided missile systems; expeditionary airfield capabilities; and lethal and risk-worthy surface vessels to include large undersea vehicles.
What could be controversial to critics with a plan that promises to make the Marine Corps relevant to future conflict scenarios, liberate it from being America’s second land Army, and simultaneously give it a whole lot of new platforms and systems? 
According to the Commandant the Marine Corps will be a purpose-built force focused on the high-end fight. But what has primarily occupied the Marine Corps for the past seventy-plus years are crisis response and low-to-medium conflicts against small and regional powers. 
Today, the Marine Corps and its associated amphibious warfare fleet are designed as a full-spectrum force. Combatant Commanders consistently request more Amphibious Ready Groups and their associated Marine Expeditionary Units than can be generated with the resources available. How will the Marine Corps meet this demand, having divested itself of much of its current capabilities?
Modern amphibious warfare ships such as the LPD amphibious transport docks have an array of capabilities that make them ideal for supporting Marine Corps operations across the conflict spectrum. Inexpensive, risk-worthy ships will have to give up many of the capabilities embodied in the current classes of amphibious warfare ships. The net result may well be a less capable amphibious warfare fleet.
Plan to restructure Marine Corps  to support the Navy is not without its critics. The Navy already is planning to deploy a host of new long-range precision strike systems on ships and submarines, including Long-Range Anti-Ship Missiles, advanced Tomahawk cruise missiles, and even hypersonic weapons. 
Moreover, the additional firepower that will be provided by a smattering of land-based F-35Bs and HIMARS batteries will not equal what can be provided by expanding the payload capacity of existing classes of ships and submarines. 
A single Block V Virginia-class SSN equipped with the new payload module can deliver more than 40 long-range weapons against sea and land targets. Moreover, the costs for the new Marine Corps units, enablers, and additional ships to move and resupply units ashore are likely to be more than for the equivalent firepower at sea. At the same time, it may be more vulnerable and less flexible.
Defense budgets in the future are likely to be flat or even decline. Experts are already warning that the Pentagon will have to cut back on its ambitious modernization plans. The Maine Corps could be caught halfway between divestiture of current capabilities and acquiring new ones.
Critics of the Commadant’s vision say if Marine Corps rids itself of the capabilities and capacity for significant forcible entry and sustained land operations, how does it remain relevant? 
The Army can deploy long-range anti-ship strikes from small, mobile launchers, as its recent test of a prototype Precision Strike Missile demonstrated. The Army has the organic engineering and logistics capabilities to create and maintain small, austere expeditionary bases. The Army even has its own fleet of small, cheap vessels. 
Changes in how the Navy and Marine Corps fight together could see Marines aboard both military and commercial ships as they traverse crowded seas, accompanied by small aircraft carriers filled with unmanned drones.
Both the Marine Corps commandant and his top general at combat development are looking at new ways that Marines and an evolving Navy fleet will fight in the crowded sea space of future wars.
But the Marines may not have enough ships to train for a real amphibious assault
But the Marines may not have enough ships to train for a real amphibious assault
Today’s Navy fleet lmay be too small to afford the Marines the opportunity to train for large-scale amphibious assaults.
The planning guidance looks to move away from the unfeasible 38-amphib ship goal and instead use a mix of amphib ships, smaller expeditionary sea bases, fast transport ships and even commercial ships to move Marines.
And to meet that challenge, the Commadant says the current forward bases and infrastructure all within range of enemy weapons, are “extremely vulnerable.“ As are the large ships now in service with “large electronic, acoustic, or optical signatures.”
The shift in how Marines would fight from and back to the sea also changes how the Navy could fight.
Traditionally, naval leaders think of how Marines influence the land component of a sea battle, not the sea. But if they can have effects on sea access and deny enemies movement, then naval commanders can think differently about how to employ the ships.
All of which support recent statements from top Marine leadership that the force has to get lighter, work in smaller formations in support of naval operations.
Getting lighter pairs with “lightning carrier” experimentation ― using smaller aircraft carriers that take advantage of the F-35 capabilities. It even calls for an air wing that consists “mostly or entirely of unmanned aerial vehicles.”
Congress delegations combined changes advocated for both force design and managing and training Marines falls somewhere between, “a total house cleaning and a complete revolution for the Marine Corps.”
The long-held goal of a 38-ship amphibious force within the larger 355-ship Navy was to meet the requirement to lift assault echelons of two Marine Expeditionary Brigades. That requirement dates to 2006.
Heavy equipment out, unmanned logistics in for the US Marine commandant’s wish list
“We have to get rid of legacy things in the Marine Corps. We’ve got to go on a diet” said the Commadant and made advance notice of a large-scale review of the service will be rolled out in roughly 60 days. “We’ve got to become expeditionary again, which we know how to do.”
Asked to highlight the type of equipment he thinks the Corps must dump, Commadant called out “big, heavy things” such as manned counter-armor assets.
“Big, expensive things that we can’t either afford to buy or afford to maintain over the life of it. Things that don’t fit aboard ship, things that can’t fire hyper-velocity projectiles, things that can’t have, don’t have the range that we’re going to need, the precision, but are also mobile, expeditionary enough so we can operate from ship or ashore and move back and forth freely. Manned things, manned logistics vehicles, manned logistics aircraft — all those things we’re going to trim down.”
Areas where the Commadant said Marine Corps investments must improve, largely through high-end technologies that better match up with potential adversaries. Those include lethal unmanned aerial, ground and amphibious vehicles, large undersea vessels, and loitering munitions.
The Commandant highlighted unmanned transports and unmanned logistics systems on the ground and in the air and stressed the need to focus on logistics enablers, at one point calling logistics “the area we’re farthest behind.”
“It’s not fun to talk about, but if you’re going to operate in this contested area, you’d better be able to sustain that force. “Think unmanned, think expeditionary, think very light. Think things that we can sustain forward without a huge logistical train.”
The commandant also described how unmanned investments could benefit Marines going forward: “Picture in your mind some kind of vehicle, unmanned, perhaps autonomous, but let’s just talk unmanned — moves from this point to that point, whatever, on its own. Inside it, it’s got more unmanned systems, ground or air. It’s launching and recovering them, bringing them back as a mothership, coming back, and you have these all over the place.”
“This is your Marine Corps. We are that forward force. We got to paint the picture. We are the Marines all over the place,” the Commandant explained. “In the area we got to operate in, the Marines will absolutely be there. Just we don’t driving a truck delivering chow. If we can replace that with an unmanned platform, why would we not do that?”
Beyond equipment, the Commadant’s larger review of the Marine Corps includes going after basic assumptions such as: “What does the squadron look like? What does a battalion look like? Every part of our air, ground team. That’s what will be finished and of course associated with that, the equipment, from individual equipment to crew-served to F-35s, and everything in between. Define the force and how it needs to fight as a naval force — that directly ties to all of our programs.”
Under new guidance, the Marine Corps is working to more seamlessly integrate all its forces, to include information warfare, with the Navy.
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