A New Kind of Intelligence Analyst

Meeting the demands of Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations

Marine Intelligence professionals have always struggled to stay up-to-date with current developments and maintain relevancy. There is a consistent risk to the intel field of relying too much on grassroots efforts and personal talent to carry intelligence forward into tomorrow while doctrine and training focus on yesteryear’s war. Tactical intelligence traditionally focuses on establishing baselines and using intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance to detect anomalies, engage targets, and confirm or deny adversary courses of action in the battlespace. This approach is sufficient for low-intensity conflict in permissible environments, and for the past 25 years, the United States has optimized its processes through various supporting agencies. However, this has also meant military intelligence, at the tactical echelon, has not had to seriously consider the national-strategic mission their unit may be a part of and how military intelligence supports it or operates without the current level of support they are accustomed to.

With the introduction of Force Design and expeditionary advanced base operations (EABO), Marines down to the local commander level will be expected to support wider, protracted campaigns, in austere or possibly hostile areas, and across a spectrum inclusive of competition but at the other extreme involving outright conflict. Currently, Marine intelligence is not equipped or optimized to support the Naval Service as envisioned and will require these Marines at the lowest echelons to think more strategically and critically with fewer resources in their analysis to ensure that commanders and Marines can operate in these environments. Before identifying what intelligence Marines need, it is important to discuss what EABO is on paper and what EABO is de facto asking Marines to think and do. 

Expeditionary advanced base operations, as defined in the latest tentative manual, is a naval concept designed to improve maneuver, exploit control over key maritime terrain, and integrate the FMF with Navy capabilities.1 The spirit of EABO can be derived from the original EABO Handbook, which described it as an adversary-specific, cost-effective, advantage-focused concept of operations that could mitigate the risk from long-range precision fires while maintaining resilient forward forces—and thus move the Marine Corps away from relying on traditional, easily-targeted bases.2 However, another interpretation is that EABO is the enabler for larger campaigns. Supporting this approach is the nested concept of Stand-in Forces (SIF), which are forward deployed among allied and partner forces across the competition continuum. The SIF supports multi-domain awareness, information operations, and security cooperation efforts aiming to bolster partner-nation confidence and set conditions for advantage in conflict. 

Expeditionary advanced base operations are framed as an operational-level adaptation to China’s specific military threat. However, it encompasses a new approach to thinking about the crucial aspects of terrain, diplomatic, information, and even economic domains—marking the idea as more of a first step toward a geo-strategy, rather than just an operational concept. Geo-strategy has many schools of thought, but all rest on the idea that geographical factors inform and shape military planning.3 As a result, EABO requires a nuanced understanding of the key maritime and littoral areas. Expeditionary advanced base operations takes this approach in two ways: First, it is explicitly designed to maximize the use of chokepoints and the littorals, making its planning assumptions dependent on the terrain, its physical characteristics, and regional significance. For example, EABO provides a frame to understand where SIF could best operate and maximize the effect of their contribution to campaign operations across the competition continuum. Second, it assumes a certain level of austerity in its operating areas and proposes several methods in the planning process to overcome this issue. Marines may be operating in materially bereft areas devoid of much infrastructure but still must complete complex tasks as part of the overall naval commander’s campaign. 

What EABO requires of Marines, then, is ambitious. Task groups will be part of a larger interservice and multi-domain campaign, protracted and complex in its efforts to counter an adversary’s military strength or perform a variety of tasks in a minimally permissive environment—colloquially thought of as grey-zone activity. Although this campaign can be decisive, it will require interservice planning and execution at a level far more advanced than the Joint Force’s recent practical experience. Expeditionary advanced basing operations are also meant to be complemented by distributed maritime operations, a core Navy operating concept that explores dispersed, lower-signature methods of sustaining the SIF and other forces performing EABO. The littoral operations area envisioned by EABO also notes the multitude of avenues logistics may have to take to sustain units in expeditionary locations across key coastal points.4 The local commander presiding over the littoral operations area will likely find themselves in a difficult information environment. In that scenario, the commander will need to lean on military intelligence professionals. 

The requirements for intelligence support for EABO demand long-term, strategic thinking, and analysis to assist commanders in setting conditions for success across all domains of national power to enable their mission.5 Marine intelligence with SIF in these areas would need to know not only the local environment and its human terrain but how that human terrain interacts with regional, provincial, and national-level political entities, and how the implications of such actions further or hinder national strategy. This awareness is necessary to maintain access, collect relevant intelligence, and inform the wider defense and intelligence apparatus assessing the macropolitical picture. Explicitly or not, the SIF and their intel components are going to be de facto envoys of the United States. This dilemma may not appear to be an intelligence professional’s concern, but the role of intelligence in a task-organized group performing in this environment is much more complex and the Marine Corps intelligence enterprise may not be set up to easily support this. The current structure of Marine intelligence is sufficient for tactical decision making at the squad-leader level but does not provide room for serious consideration of the joint military or national-strategic mission a unit may be a part of and how their military intelligence supports it. Intel Marines may not be trained to the standard EABO tentatively asks of them and therefore cannot credibly inform the joint commander’s decision-making cycle. 

The future operating environment presents new and unique challenges to Marines. Partnering with a host nation for EABO may provide logistical advantages in remote or impermissible environments, but they are also susceptible to adversary actions beyond military means. The information environment, for example, can be exploited by an adversary to denigrate a SIF’s host nation and convince them to reduce the SIF presence, eliminate it, or redirect it away from the geo-strategic, crucial areas it was designed to operate in, effectively removing the SIF ability to serve as a deterrent. Marines on the ground may be quickly outmaneuvered by adversaries if intelligence and commanders do not understand the follow-on effects of their own actions, necessitating skills at lower echelons to hasten decision making.6 The intelligence professional supporting a SIF must understand the political risk of operating in a partner-nation territory, what the limits are on SIF operations in its borders, and how to maintain a favorable information environment. Some of these issues are further expanded on in the reconnaissance/counter-reconnaissance concept updated for Force Design.7 

At its core, Force Design, to be effective, will need the military intelligence professional to move  beyond the wars of the past two decades. With the growing role and presence of information and grey-zone warfare, the future operating environment requires intelligence Marines to add the role of geo-strategist to their portfolio. This will ultimately empower them to inform, adapt, and execute ambitious concepts—taking a more active role in intelligence preparation of the environment, rather than a passive one. The military intelligence professional in the field, supporting EABO, will more than likely be a non-commissioned officer (NCO) or staff non-commissioned officer (SNCO); therefore, these Marines must be trained, equipped, and enabled to think strategically, incorporating analytic techniques, knowledge, and expertise previously not currently associated with their grade. By better training and educating intelligence NCOs, SNCOs, and commanders, Marines at these levels can operate more autonomously in austere environments to support the wider campaign and national interests in a crisis. 

The Marine Corps could leverage the professional military education institutions at its disposal to better integrate Marines with the intelligence and policy world preemptively, and build up a deep bench of regional subject-matter expertise and technical proficiency for the future fight. For building the Indo-Pacific geostrategic expert, the Marine Corps could work with professional military education-associated research centers like the China Maritime Studies Institute or the China Aerospace Studies Institute; alternately, it could develop its own research center and mechanisms for convening outside experts. Working with academia to further intelligence training would allow the Marine Corps to better support building a deeper bench of competent and capable intelligence NCOs and SNCOs. This would be the initial step in integrating them with the fleet and intelligence community—and having them ready and equipped for tomorrow. 

>SSgt Campbell enlisted in the Marine Corps in March of 2017 from Charleston, SC. Currently stationed in the National Capital Region, he studies Strategic and Organizational Communication. 

>>Mr. Long is a Non-Resident Fellow with the Brute Krulak Center on Innovation and Future Warfare, Marine Corps University. 

Notes

1. Headquarters Marine Corps, Tentative Manual for Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations, 2nd Edition, (Washington, DC: 2023). 

2. Art Corbett, “Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO) Handbook, Version 1.1,” Marine Corps Association, June 1, 2018, https://www.mca-marines.org/wp-content/uploads/Expeditionary-Advanced-Base-Operations-EABO-handbook-1.1.pdf. 

3. Zbigniew Brzezinski, “A Geostrategy for Eurasia,” Foreign Affairs 76, No. 5 (1997).

4. Tentative Manual for Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations.

5. Ibid; and Headquarters Marine Corps, MCDP 6, Command and Control, (Washington, DC: 1996). 

6. MCDP 6. 

7. Headquarters Marine Corps, Force Design 2030–Annual Update, (Washington, DC: 2023). 

>Authors’ Note: Their views are their own and do not reflect the opinions of the Marine Corps or the DOD. 

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