MARINE CORPS BASE QUANTICO, Va. – The Marine Corps is preparing for war in a complex future where it will need to reinvigorate atrophied skills like maneuver warfare from the sea while developing new capabilities for war in complex environments like megacities and cyberspace.

Through “continuous and progressive examination” of its current capabilities, potential adversaries and the expected advancement of technology, the service has come up with a Marine Corps Operating Concept (MOC) that prescribes how it will fight future wars beyond 2025 and what it will need to win.

Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Robert Neller unveiled the document at the Modern Day Marine tech expo here on Sept. 28. As it stands, the Marine Corps is well trained and equipped to fight counterinsurgency battles in landlocked nations but has forgotten some of its fundamental skills like expeditionary maneuver from the sea and finds itself outmatched in complex urban environments and online, Neller said.

“We have been fighting counterinsurgency, stability fight … since 2004,” Neller said. “We’ve trained, equipped and organized a force to do counterinsurgency and fight an insurgent … that was brave and courageous and gave us a handful, but that insurgent didn’t have electronic warfare. That insurgent didn’t have an air force. That insurgent didn’t have effective indirect fire. That insurgent couldn’t direction-find our locations. That insurgent didn’t have the ability to take down our networks and jam our comms. That insurgent didn’t have armor formations that can maneuver across the battlespace. That insurgent didn’t have a sophisticated information-operations plan to deceive not just our force but the American people.”

U.S. Marines with 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, Special Purpose Marine Air Ground Task Force - Crisis Response - Central Command, prepare to board MV-22B Ospreys from Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 363, SPMAGTF-CR-CC, during a Tactical Recovery of Aircraft and Personnel rehearsal drill in the U.S. Central Command area of operations, Oct. 25, 2014.
U.S. Marines with 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, Special Purpose Marine Air Ground Task Force – Crisis Response – Central Command, prepare to board MV-22B Ospreys from Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 363, SPMAGTF-CR-CC, during a Tactical Recovery of Aircraft and Personnel rehearsal drill in the U.S. Central Command area of operations, Oct. 25, 2014.

Future war with potential peer or near-peer nations like China, Russia or Iran will likely require forcible-entry from the sea followed by long-range maneuver warfare in a highly complex environment that involves space, cyberspace and social media as combat domains, Neller said. The MOC is designed to ferret out any weaknesses the Marine Corps has in those areas and prescribe fixes.

The question was put to the future-thinking war gaming outfit called the Ellis Group, which wrote the Marine Corps Force 2025 document and then polished and enhanced it into the MOC. Ellis group conducted a series of weekly tactical-level war games that pit the existing Marine Corps against potential adversaries and the capabilities each country is understood to have.

“When we get kicked in the teeth, we stop and we figure out why we got kicked in the teeth, and then we maybe add a capability or change a tactic or we change the way we’re doing things and then we come at it again,” said Ellis Group director Doug King.

The declassified MOC does not specify requirements for future weapons and equipment the Marine Corps will need to overcome the shortfalls found during these exercises. The classified version that will go to senior Marine Corps and Defense Department leadership will list capability requirements like weapon range or vehicle speed, but will stop short of recommending specific platforms or vendors, King said.

As Ellis planners continuously added capability to the Marine Corps arsenal, it drew from existing programs of record, commercial off-the-shelf systems, weapons already in use by other militaries and systems that are in development and expected to be available for fielding before 2025.  

“We start out with the future enemy threat and pit it against the current day Marine Corps capabilities and play that out and allow it to fail to look for the shortfalls or capability deficits,” Maj. Edmund Clayton,  Plans Officer, Ellis Group. “Then we incrementally add capabilities as we identify gaps in the war games in order to bring us on par with the enemy and gain overmatch.”

Maj. Brian Davis a planning officer with Ellis Group, listed several future challenges with which the Marine Corps is not currently equipment to deal.

“More and more countries or non-state actors have access to technology because it is cheaper, because it is more distributable, it’s easier to acquire,” Davis said. “We have not just one or two adversaries we have to worry about. We have multiple adversaries that we have to worry about that are more lethal because of the technology proliferation.”

In an environment where information itself is a weapon and any outgoing or incoming electronic signal is a vulnerability, the service must find ways to mask its own signature while locating and suppressing enemy transmissions.

“Every stinkin’ war game that we do at the tactical level highlights the problem that we have with signatures,” King said. “You’ve got to be able to mask your signature. In complex terrain an adversary is going to hide. … How do I elevate their signature? How do we draw them out? We have to elevate their signature at the same we are masking ours.”

Complex terrain turned out to be a particular Achilles heel for the modern Marine Corps, which enjoys technological superiority against a conventional enemy that will fight open-terrain maneuver battles. That advantage shrinks considerably when Marines are drawn into close-quarters battle with an enemy that is increasingly well trained and technologically savvy, the Ellis war games showed.

“Why complex terrain? Because that’s where people want to fight us,” King said. “They don’t want to fight in the open. … The reason they want to fight in complex terrain is if you do the numbers on it and you look at the kill ratios, it’s a one-to-one loss. We don’t have a distinct, huge advantage like we do in open spaces.”

“We over time have dedicated a lot of money and a lot of technology to how we are going to do high-tech things like aviation and seapower and we have improved the ratio and survivability of our airplanes and our ships, King added. “When we get into a close fight in a city, in the mountains, it’s just person-on-person. … You don’t get all those distinct advantages that you once held.”