NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. –Potential adversaries have outpaced the Marine Corps’ assumed technological superiority in a high-end fight while the service has been focused on two counterinsurgency conflicts over the past decade and a half, according to the assistant commandant of the Marine Corps.
Gen. John Paxton said traditional nation-state competitors like Russia and China have invested in defense unopposed while the U.S. military was focused on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the nation’s longest and still unfinished conflicts.
“We haven’t quite left the first one we went into – we’re still there – and we’re about to go back into the one we thought we had stabilized and left. And we have new enemies that evolve all the time.
Senior Army leadership, to include Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, have sounded the same alarm, warning that Russia and China have met or exceeded U.S. capabilities in cyber and electronic warfare. Russia has demonstrated advanced tactical technologies in the Syrian Civil War, in Ukraine and Crimea. China is flexing its muscle by building militarized islands in the South China Sea and bullying the navies and commercial fleets of neighboring countries with legitimate rights to the territory, Paxton said.
“They have cyber capabilities, electronic warfare capability, armor capability, aviation capability, submarine capability that we believe rivals or exceeds ours in certain areas,” Paxton said. “Whether it’s in the South China Sea, Black Sea or the Baltic, wherever they are, we are challenged. We’re challenged technologically. We’re challenged in training. We’re challenged equipment-wise.”
Perceived deficiencies in U.S. capabilities exist at both the strategic and tactical levels, Paxton said without specifying to what degree the Marine Corps and its sister services are outmatched. The Army has listed anti-unmanned aerial system weapons, tactical cyber and massed artillery fires as capabilities where Russia may have gained a technological edge.
“Some of these, we’re not going to make public so they don’t know they have the advantage,” Paxton said. “But we watch them in terms of their ability to integrate, their ability to accelerate, their ability to navigate. There are areas where we believed we had a distinct advantage and now we watch to see what they do,” he said. “They are evidencing capability–-whether offensive or defensive–that perhaps we haven’t seen before.”
All the services have an internal obligation to secure their networks in a major conflict that involves cyber warfare and exploitation of the electromagnetic spectrum, Paxton said. All services must then act collaboratively to integrate their networks into a joint architecture that facilitates interoperation during battle, he said.
The Marine Corps specifically can provide signals intelligence and communications capabilities to the joint force during a conflict.
Though the U.S. military may be behind–or less far ahead–in certain technological areas, that “does not mean impossible,” Paxton said. “We can get there because we have the technological wherewithal in our country.”