During large-scale exercises in April, the Marine Corps will test and evaluate 100 new technologies to help it poke holes in enemy coastal defenses and clear the way for future amphibious forcible-entry operations.

In cooperation with the Navy, the Marine Corps is launching the Advanced Naval Technology Exercise, or ANTX, at Camp Pendleton, Calif., in April, where 50 or so new technologies from electronic warfare systems to unmanned assault amphibious vehicles (AAVs) will be tested during a simulated amphibious landing. Another 50 or so technologies will be on static display at the exercise.

Col. Daniel M. Sullivan, chief of staff at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory and deputy director of the futures directorate, said periodic ANTX events will be a way to evaluate existing technologies while simultaneously informing future development programs.

“You can think about this as a way to go fast, a surge effort to get after a particular problem,” Sullivan said at a briefing for reporters. “We’ve been doing technology development for a while, but not like this. It’s face-to-face, kneecap-to-kneecap, go-fast.”

Finding a replacement for older amphibious dock transport ships such as the USS Harpers Ferry (LSD-49), above, is among the issues the Marine Corps, Navy and industry are working through right now regarding the amphibious ship fleet. Photo courtesy U.S. Marine Corps.
Finding a replacement for older amphibious dock transport ships such as the USS Harpers Ferry (LSD-49), above, is among the issues the Marine Corps, Navy and industry are working through right now regarding the amphibious ship fleet. Photo courtesy U.S. Marine Corps.

“I see this as a very large-scale effort to inform requirements for future systems going forward,” he added.

Technologies that pass muster at ANTX will be fielded during Bold Alligator amphibious exercise at Camp Lejeune, N.C., in the fall. Others will be evaluated for inclusion in other ongoing or future development programs.

“The immediate outcome of the exercise will be those technologies that are most valuable, the most ready for prime time, we’re going to go ahead and insert into an exercise in the fall where instead of having the contractor or the engineer operate it, we’re going to try to get Marine’s actually operating it, Sullivan said.

From there, the Marine Corps has a couple options to rapidly prototype and field certain systems in larger numbers. That includes extended user evaluations by deployed Marines and sailors.

The Marine Corps will also have all of its “combat developer” engineers and scientists on hand for ANTX. They will be monitoring technologies for possible inclusion in larger future development programs like the AAV, Sullivan said.

“A subset of these things will wind up in extended user eval. in the fleet,” Sullivan said. “The rest of it will inform requirements going forward and evolve into programmatics.”

Navy and Marine Corps officials working on the exercise are not reticent about what the services are preparing for. The capabilities being tested at ANTX would be needed in a war with Russia or China. Sullivan said watching those two adversaries flex their military muscles in their respective regions “concentrates the mind” of U.S. military planners.

Capt. Chris Mercer, director of rapid prototyping and experimentation for the deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, said adopting new technologies was “the imperative” for the naval services.

“You can look at any mission and at any force and the threats from potential adversaries and see why it’s an imperative for us to increase our speed of innovation and technological introduction into our forces,” Mercer said. “We see what our adversaries are doing even within one budget cycle. We have to be able to get the agility to do the same.”

Identifying capability gaps in the Navy and Marine Corps fell to Doug King, director of the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory’s future-thinking Ellis Group. King oversaw a series of war games that pitted the Marine Corps – with its current and anticipated capabilities – against the known and perceived fighting acumen and equipment of potential adversaries like Russia and China. King’s group identified areas where the Marines were weak or deficient compared to those adversaries and presented those “problem sets” to scientists and engineers.

A total 124 submissions were gathered from a variety of traditional and non-traditional contractors. Those submissions were categorized and ranked and whittled down to the 100 or so that will be demonstrated at the ANTX.

The exercise focuses on identifying technology to fill five main capability concepts: ship-to-shore maneuver, amphibious fire support, clearing amphibious assault lanes, command-and-control and information warfare.

There is no silver-bullet technology that will solve the Marine Corps’ future problems performing forcible entry from the sea against a technologically sophisticated near-peer adversary, Sullivan said. But reliance on robotic and autonomous systems is a theme that permeates the field of candidate equipment, King said.

In the lineup are at least 13 different unmanned aerial systems, as well as unmanned underwater vehicles, and remotely driven AAVs. Teaming those robotic systems with manned platforms is key to the Marine Corps’ future operating concept, as it is for the Army, Navy and Air Force.

“We’re looking at autonomous systems, robotics systems, that maybe has to do that initial fighting that has to be done,” King said.

The Marine Corps fast-tracked the ANTX event, completing technology selection and set-up within about eight months of putting out the call. Through that process, Navy and Marine Corps leaders realized that their own processes need to be streamlined if the services are to receive technologically relevant equipment.

“We like to complain about how slow the acquisition process is, but we need to scrape some barnacles off our own bureaucracy,” Sullivan said.

The ANTX event will be replicated periodically as new capability gaps are identified and as new technologies emerge. Mercer said the exercise is designed to give industry – large and small – an entrée to doing business with the naval services and for the services to experiment rapidly and often with equipment, weed out what it doesn’t need and keep the gear that can potentially offer a battlefield advantage. Transitioning a specific technology into a program of record is not the measure of success.

“If we don’t fail, we didn’t do our job,” Mercer said. “This is the time to fail.”