The Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory (MCWF) spent the better part of two years conducting Limited Objective Experiments (LOE) that focused on company-level operations, all in preparation for this summer’s Advanced Warfighting Experiment (AWE) in Hawaii.
MCWL commanding general Brig. Gen. Kevin Killea said a lot of elements of the test went well, a couple did not, but the Marine Corps learned a lot about what it will take for smaller units to successfully operate forward and dispersed from one another, as called for in the new capstone concept Expeditionary Force 21.
Killea told Defense Daily in a Sept. 4 interview that his experimentation division was ahead of the capstone concept development and already looking at dispersed company-level operations after noticing a shift in that direction during operations in Afghanistan. MCWL began by hosting several LOEs to examine particular challenges faced by the companies: logistics, fire support and command and control.
Some experiments went better than others, Killea said. In July 2013, Marines tested the digital fires piece at Camp Roberts in California, and “I’ll tell you, it didn’t go well. We had a hard time getting the communication technologies to sync up with each other and get the proper information in a timely fashion down to that captain, the company commander who needed the information in real time to support his movements. Whether it was artillery or close air support, the technologies that we used out there didn’t mesh very well together. And so we brought all that back and hashed through it, and when we went out to Hawaii we simplified it, we minimized the number of technologies that we tried to integrate and we had much more success.”
Each LOE brought with it these types of lessons for the Marines to try to sort out before the AWE, hosted in conjunction with the Rim of the Pacific 2014 exercise in Hawaii over the summer.
“We did [the LOEs] in different operating areas, and what RIMPAC afforded us was the ability to bring all those limited objectives together and to do them in significantly different terrain but to exercise it with literally the seabase and Marines,” he said. “And, no kidding, we were able to stress the logistics and the command and control, the fires, like we weren’t able to do in some of those limited objective experiments.”
In the AWE, three companies departed the seabase for three separate missions in three separate parts of Hawaii–one went to Marine Corps Training Area Bellows, one to the Kahuku Training Area, and one to the Pacific Missile Range Facility. They had to figure out how to complete their missions at a distance from the seabase, and the seabase had to figure out how to support three distant companies.
“When I say supported, I don’t mean just logistics, which is a huge challenge, but also command and control, and also how do you provide them fires, fire support, all the way down to that company level?” Killea said. “We learned a lot there, and I think that probably one of the areas we took the most out of in this most recent AWE was command and control.”
Killea noted the dual challenges–the Marines need a variety of methods of communication so they can operate in a variety of environments, but too many pieces boost the chance for failure and for poor interoperability. Relying on satellite communication in a non-contested environment makes the most sense for communicating over long distances, but in a contested or opposed environment the Marines might need encrypted military specification equipment that would rely on government-owned waveforms.
MCWL will have several more opportunities to refine this complex problem. The experimentation division is already working on the next round of LOEs, which will support the Expeditionary Force 21 concept of advanced expeditionary base operations.
“That is going to pull in a lot of stuff that we’ve learned from the company landing team experiments and the advanced warfighting experiment from the summer, but it’s also going to be a lot more from the sea and it’s going to be a lot more about fires and command and control,” Killea said. “I think the Expeditionary Energy Office is going to have a huge play in that too because it’s about footprint–when you’re using advanced bases and you’re expeditionary–in other words, you’re not going somewhere and staying for a long time–then the energy piece becomes huge.”
Also coming up, MCWL has been tasked with helping Marine Corps headquarters’ Plans, Policies and Operations division look at the ground combat element structure of the future. Killea said the Marines started out doing an infantry battalion study but expanded the look to evaluate the entire ground combat element structure. MCWL will help headquarters design and execute an experiment that looks at all aspects of ground combat units–equipment, training, techniques and procedures–though headquarters is still in the process of determining its experiment objectives. Killea said the work could involve testing smaller platoons, units with less or different gear, different types of vehicles, and other variables.