Units of Action

Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance in the stand-in force

To implement the concepts supporting Force Design 2030 (FD2030), the Marine Corps must revise what it considers its key units of action while studying the emerging characteristics of modern warfare. Traditionally, the Marine Corps focuses on the infantry battalion and flying squadron as units of action for all basic measurements of capability and readiness. Those capabilities, however, do not provide what the Stand-In Forces (SIF) and Reconnaissance Counter-Reconnaissance (RXR) concepts need—especially during competition. They may in fact distract from the principal object of operations. Instead, in competition, infantry battalions and flying squadrons are enablers for the key capabilities of SIF and RXR: intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) collection resulting in targeting. The purpose-built SIF force performs operational-level ISR on behalf of the maritime and Joint Force: “Stand-in forces’ enduring function is to help the fleet and joint force win the reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance battle at every point on the competition continuum. Stand-in forces do this by gaining and maintaining contact (establishing target custody and identifying the potential adversary’s sensors) below the threshold of violence.”1 The units of action for that type of activity are the platforms and teams in the Marine Corps that perform intelligence and reconnaissance collection and the cells, teams, and units that perform intelligence analysis and support to targeting. Before the Corps can close with and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver, if that ever becomes necessary, it must locate that enemy. 

The heart of the SIF and RXR concepts is ISR collection and analytical support for targeting. The Marine Corps fields such elements today in the MEFs. The MEFs have light infantry reconnaissance teams, maritime sensor elements, counterintelligence-human intelligence detachments, signals intelligence/electronic warfare teams, meteorological and oceanographic detachments, and increasingly cyber mission elements and space capabilities. Furthermore, the FMFs have the analytical specialties to support fusion and targeting as well as the transport and encryption of sensitive compartmented information and are performing these missions. Fixed-wing and unmanned squadrons can also perform ISR under the reconnaissance mission of Marine Aviation, just as light armored reconnaissance and engineers can, but most other squadrons and battalions are enablers to these functions, and none of them have the core mission essential task to execute ISR or intelligence on behalf of the fleet or Joint Force. They could provide the transport, security, or simply the cover story for ISR units of action. 

The Marine Corps, however, does not customarily assign ISR as a main effort, much less employ dedicated intelligence assets in support of anything other than the local commander. ISR does not appear as part of the core mission essential task list (METL) for the MEU; for example, it only appears as “Plan and Direct Intelligence Operations” on the METL for the CE.2 Despite what the concepts say about providing eyes and ears for the fleet and the Joint Force, there are no tasks requiring a commander, especially a MAGTF commander, to do that. For a SIF performing RXR, however, those dedicated intelligence and reconnaissance assets might be both the main effort and the only employable force.

The FD2030 original concept evokes a force “optimized for naval expeditionary warfare in contested spaces, purpose-built to facilitate sea denial and assured access in support of the fleets.”3 This suggests that this force will perform, above all else, maritime domain awareness (MDA) by sensing and making sense of their immediate environs. For the stand-up of the 12th Marine Littoral Regiment (MLR) in Japan, the Commandant assured Congress that “this unit will possess advanced ISR capabilities as well as long-range precision fires capabilities, improving both maritime domain awareness and our ability to deter potential adversaries.”4 In competition and crisis short of shooting conflict, that description means a force with a particularly acute ability to sense and make sense: an exceptionally strong ISR force that can do all the necessary work to constantly and consistently hold potential targets at risk. Under maritime strategic doctrine, there is a direct correlation between this kind of targeting and intelligence. The principal challenge for the maritime reconnaissance force “relates to the difficulty of locating the objective accurately. It is obvious that for this kind of operation, the most precise intelligence is essential, and of all intelligence, the most difficult to obtain in war is the distribution of an enemy’s fleet from day to day.”5 

Whether employed as part of a larger formation, as in the proposed MLR in Japan, or as independent assets, the Marine Corps needs to perfect its concepts against the characteristics of the real world to see whether it can bring the capability sets together to accomplish them. For the larger formations, the Service follows a logical progression beginning with the 3rd MLR in Hawaii, inside the confines of the United States, and then proceeding to the 12th MLR in the first island chain and weapons engagement zone (WEZ) for the pacing threat envisioned—the People’s Republic of China.6 If the 12th MLR does indeed possess “advanced ISR capabilities,” it will be able to execute real-world ISR in competition and practice exercise targeting cycles in its zone of crisis action. For ISR and intelligence support to targeting, the task of perfecting against live opponents is easier than for any other participants in the targeting cycle because the possible adversarial target sets are abundant, and real-world and realtime missions can be executed short of conflict. 

Stationing in the main competition space will develop familiarity with the problem set, but it is a conflict that provides the best driver of innovation, even conflict elsewhere. “A military force wins by seeing how general principles apply to a specific situation and being creative with combat solutions.”7 ISR, while sometimes provocative, could be employed on behalf of allies, partners, or the Joint Force without engaging the rest of the force in crisis or contingency. The fusion and analysis of the intelligence collected could produce both innovation and action. “There has been no dearth of reporting on the changing character of war and the potential for disruption by new technology to alter the landscape of conflict.”8

The pacing threat also surveys current conflicts to evolve its planning to match probable warfare trends. Before the Russians began their current campaign in the Ukraine, for example, it was clear that “Chinese strategists face an economic security problem in the Malacca Dilemma, describing the threat of a naval blockade of vital Chinese sea lines of communication in the Indian Ocean.”9 China—however confrontational it has been in the Taiwan Straits and South China Sea, demonstrating tactics and procedures—is not currently at war. Another peer adversary, Russia has begun to explore new operating concepts in realtime conflict in a resource-constrained environment in the Ukraine and Black Sea. Because the war in Ukraine involves a peer competitor—Russia—that conflict would appear to provide an ideal case to inform FD2030. While it is possible that a robust classified effort is occurring, there is little public evidence that the Marine Corps is doing much more than accepting public lessons learned from Ukraine. 

With increasing multi-domain drone implications, Ukraine provides a hotbed of military innovation.10 “As drones started to be used extensively, new operational concepts started to evolve, radically transforming armed conflict. This is especially visible in the Russo-Ukrainian War, where drone usage dominates most of the highlights of the conflict.”11 Ukraine is also exercising littoral sea operations in the Black Sea, with particular success in the first few weeks of 2024 using surface drones against warships.12 Over that few weeks, a landing ship, a missile-armed patrol vessel, and a corvette were sunk by a special operations unit according to Ukraine as well as several Russian patrol craft.13 In 2022, Ukraine sank the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, the Moskva, using Neptune anti-ship missiles. Public reporting indicates that without a single warship of its own, Ukraine has sunk nearly a third of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.14 It is notable that the announcements of successful targeting have come first, and sometimes exclusively, from “Ukrainian Intelligence.”15 How this has happened, and how the targets were located and analyzed, ought to be of paramount importance to Marines, especially how the Ukrainians developed the maritime awareness through ISR to execute the actions.

There is an opportunity to support Ukraine alongside NATO allies in Europe. With another force doing the fighting, ISR from a distance and observation of procedures is still possible and best performed from a position of direct support. Ukraine also possesses a Marine Corps, organized into brigades, trained for the most part by the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Norway.16 While it is not clear that Ukrainian Marines participated at all in recent Black Sea littoral-control operations, these forces in size and formation more closely resemble the Marine Corps than the commando forces that have volunteered to train them. If Ukrainian Marines participated in Black Sea maritime operations, however, the Marine Corps has not been training them at scale through its typical units of action and so has minimal relation to the results. 

The other possibility, then, for learning from the conflict would be through participating in Black Sea MDA by employing ISR and intelligence analytical units of action. There is no public evidence of such activity by Marines. Although two-thirds of the FMF is devoted to U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, the lack of attention to a peer-competitor conflict exhibiting the characteristics of contemporary littoral warfare seems particularly striking: “In times of war, front-line practitioners are agents of innovation and change if only through necessity. Because there is no way to fully anticipate what a dynamic and evolving adversary will do in a conflict, the fog of war requires adaptation.”17 Marine force concepts appear to ignore this aspect of contemporary conflict, instead developing the force focused exclusively on a perception of a pacing threat not currently at war. 

Three current Marine Corps trends converge to generate this inattention to current crises. First, the pressure of transformational innovation that FD2030 created, especially in terms of those within the Service who stand to gain or lose, required a particularly singular rationale: that the most dangerous potential adversary translated into the requirement. Divestments in any organization result in difficult decisions, so the Corps turned to its pacing threat to justify them. Cuts, the Commandant explained, are “sizing the force for what you need, what you think you’ll be asked to do in the future.”18 The tension created by divestment resulted in a singular focus for justifications, even as the force struggled to balance its SIF identity with its accustomed crisis response identity. Something had to support the case for predictive change. The singularity of focus resulted in resource decisions that have had consequences on the global availability of Marine forces, impacting the balance of force innovation and crisis response capability. Forces involved in innovation have not been available for crises elsewhere because the SIF is meant to be a standing capability forward deployed. Likewise, surging capacity in elements of non-core units of action like ISR, targeting fusion, and intelligence analysis for a crisis elsewhere has been out of the question. 

The second issue is the stress assumed by the force when setting aside units for experimentation, continuing to maintain existing global force management requirements, the deliberate reduction of the force, and the retention problems that followed. This kind of stress leads to readiness issues when a reduced number of units attempt to respond to the same or a growing number of requirements. Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, analytical, and targeting support Marines tend to be high-demand, low-density assets, meaning the stress to the force overall is particularly acute among these specialties. As a result, units at all echelons, but especially the MEFs in this case, seek to husband their resources to preserve readiness by avoiding non-core mission requirements. Even if the MAGTF had a METL that included performing ISR on behalf of the fleet and Joint Force (which it does not), conflicts that do not directly involve the United States or its Marines are not core requirements, however interesting the lessons from them may be. So, the MEFs avoid smaller requests, like intelligence collectors or intelligence targeting cells to support Ukraine, that seem reasonable at first but rapidly deplete high-demand, low-density specialties in the formation. 

The third issue and the key to this discussion relates directly to the example of force stress mentioned earlier: correctly identifying modern units of action, especially concerning the SIF and RXR concepts. Marine Corps thinking might occasionally extend to artillery or logistics units but never to intelligence as a unit of action. It does not think of the types of intelligence and reconnaissance collection teams who perform the key sensing tasks of the SIF and RXR as anything more than adjuncts to a local commander. The Service thinks even less of analytical and targeting teams, the groups that make sense for the SIF in RXR, as usable units of action. For this reason, the Service resists requests for support involving collections or analysis alone, viewing them exclusively as enablers for the traditional pacing units whose focus is the local commander. Other Services, however, have begun to recognize an ability to apply portions of a unit against specified problem sets outlined in requests for support. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) has organized echelon III and IV headquarters intelligence sections into usable Analytical Support Elements. The Analytical Support Elements of a unit can be applied to a problem set with which the remainder of the unit is not otherwise involved. Furthermore, the Army and Air Force are organized into global ISR enterprises, respectively in INSCOM and the 16th Air Force, able to both support Service units and source support globally. No such entity exists in the Marine Corps. 

The Marine Corps, then, has not manned, trained, or equipped itself to provide an ability to sense and make sense of producing MDA. The Marine Corps instead has deemphasized and subordinated its intelligence apparatus into a new information warfighting function that it has yet to fully define.19 To create new information specialties including cyber Marines, all of whom require clearances akin to intelligence specialties, the Service took the easy path of converting the intelligence structure. The Marine Corps leads no national or military intelligence programs on behalf of the DOD and so receives orders of magnitude less intelligence budgeted funds than all other Services except the Coast Guard. Fielded Marine intelligence formations fall under the MEF Information Groups with unclear lines of authority between the staff intelligence and fielded intelligence capabilities, still less between the DOD agency functional managers (Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, etc) and the units. Having purchased the MQ9a Reaper Group 5 unmanned aerial system, explicitly an ISR platform as previously employed by the Air Force and U.S. Central Command, Marine public statements emphasize instead its use for command and control: “the service also plans to have a capability on their Reapers which transforms the UAVs into relay nodes for forces to communicate and receive information.”20 It is possible that this is why the Service did not buy the increased payload capability of the MQ-9b, which could have carried more intelligence collection. Only the Marine Corps has no independent director of intelligence, having combined the duties into the Deputy Commandant for Information. Even the United States Coast Guard has an Assistant Commandant for Intelligence (CG-2).21 Since the Marine Corps is the only Service that does not promote colonels into Joint O7 positions, that means that no further intelligence officers are likely to form any part of leadership for the Service in the future, clearly demonstrating Service priorities. 

The question, then, is why any warfighting combatant command would choose a Service without emphasis on intelligence to fulfill an intelligence requirement in the WEZ in the first island chain? The SIF and RXR role and mission, akin to a kind of joint tactical air controller for the fleet and Joint Force, only provides value with an organic ability to sense, make sense, and fuse and correlate data into intelligence. If the SIF merely provides command and control for sensors and fires that are not organic to it, then there is no point in placing it at risk in the WEZ. For the analogy, the only reason for a joint tactical air controller is to provide positive confirmation by direct observation. Consequently, the ISR sensing and intelligence sense-making capabilities of the SIF are critical to its potential and deterrence value. As a result, a combatant command would likely choose a Service with an emphasis on intelligence. Why would the combatant command not pick the Army, for example, whose INSCOM and multi-domain task forces practically guarantee a measure of MDA coupled with a deep ability to support fires? The Army has been conducting demonstrations of maritime fires since 2018: “The 17th Field Artillery Brigade, alongside the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force, conducted its first live-fire exercise here, July 12, during the biennial Rim of the Pacific, or RIMPAC, exercise. The Naval Strike Missile was the first to launch as a land-based asset.”22 Likewise, the Defense Policy Review Initiative caps Marine forces and reinvests them away from the first island chain (“More than half of the billions of dollars of contracting for the construction of facilities to accommodate the relocation of U.S. Marine units to Guam from Japan has been awarded”),23 the Air Force is moving fifth-generation aircraft to Kadena Air Force Base on Okinawa, which could serve as the eyes and ears as well as the fires for the fleet and Joint Force.24 

The Marine Corps requires a clarifying review to connect its operating concepts based on current events to its force capabilities. The current conflict, like that in the Ukraine, is the closest thing that military studies have to a proving ground. It is intelligence that analyzes the multi-domain operating environments in which the Service seeks to assert itself to generate the assessment that supports adapting to pertinent conditions for imminent conflict. The units of action for intelligence are the forward-deployed collectors and advanced analytical and fusion units that make meaning from the mass of data. Collectors can indeed be any Marine unit given for its main effort and standing tasks intelligence collection operations. Providing for that mission and the fusion and analysis that supports it within formations like infantry battalions only makes those battalions more formidable, especially in competition where an adversary must suspect any Marine element of providing “the eyes and ears for the Joint Force”25 at scale. While information, as a warfighting function, produces only an anomalous interplay of contradictory messages that may or may not bear on actual facts on the ground, intelligence has for its primary purpose establishing the actual facts on the ground and obscuring them from the adversary. Unlike mere information, intelligence derives meaning from raw data and information to create actionable insights in support of the commander’s decision making.26 Furthermore, intelligence is supported by a multi-agency, cross-government community, budgetary and procurements processes, and standing authorities and legal basis. The capabilities that the Marine Corps needs to emphasize above all else to achieve the vision set forth for a SIF conducting RXR are ISR and intelligence capabilities: these are the key units of action.  

The Corps, however, has spent several years de-emphasizing and drawing resources from precisely these communities. As a result, the Service at the moment possesses insufficient ISR and intelligence resources and does not consider those that it has produced to be units of action to implement its own concepts. Force Design coupled with stresses to the force has set in motion a cycle of processes that myopically focus on a version of the pacing threat provided by someone else without sufficient contemporary references to be relevant. There are several current examples of SIF performing RXR in the littorals of the world. One of them is a partner nation force at war with a peer competitor in Ukraine, but Marines are barely participating in support of that force, unlike the Army who will learn the lessons there along with the British, Dutch, and Norwegian Marines training the Ukrainian Marine Corps. 

The Marine Corps has made it abundantly clear that it prefers only to close with and destroy the enemy, not to locate the adversary in competition. If that is the case, then Marines cannot be the SIF in the WEZ performing RXR. If the Service seeks to alter course to achieve its SIF and RXR vision, then it will have to find a way to make culture-adjusting investments in ISR and intelligence immediately. Marines would need a Service-wide intelligence structure, strategy, and architecture among many other major changes. A good starting point in such a change, however, would be for the Service to recognize its basic ISR and intelligence units of action and to give its major formations the core task of performing operational ISR and intelligence on behalf of the fleet and Joint Force. 

>Col David is the Deputy Director for Intelligence Division under the Deputy Commandant for Information/Director of Intelligence.

Notes

1. Gen David Berger, A Concept for Stand-In Forces, (Washington, DC: 2021). 

2. Headquarters Marine Corps, NAVMC 3500.99, (Washington, DC: 2012).

3. Gen David Berger, 38th Commandant’s Planning Guidance, (Washington, DC: 2019). 

4. Gen David Berger, “Statement of General David H. Berger Commandant of the Marine Corps on the Posture of the United States Marine Corps Before the Senate Appropriations Committee,” Marines.mil, March 28, 2023, https://www.cmc.marines.mil/Speeches-and-Transcripts/Transcripts/Article/3360019/statement-of-general-david-h-berger-commandant-of-the-marine-corps-on-the-postu.

5. Julian Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books, 1991).

6. Jim Garamone, “Official Talks DOD Policy Role in Chinese Pacing Threat, Integrated Deterrence,” DOD News, June 2, 2021, https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/2641068/official-talks-dod-policy-role-in-chinese-pacing-threat-integrated-deterrence. 

7. Brian A. Hester, Dennis Doyle & Ronan A. Sefton, “Techcraft on Display in Ukraine,” War on the Rocks, May 16, 2024, https://warontherocks.com/2024/05/techcraft-on-display-in-ukraine.

8. Susan F. Bryant and Andrew Harrison, “Finding Ender: Exploring the Intersections of Creativity, Innovation, and Talent Management in the U.S. Armed Forces,” Strategic Perspectives 31, (2019). 

9. Lucas Myers, “China’s Economic Security Challenge: Difficulties Overcoming the Malacca Dilemma,” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, March 22, 2023, https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2023/03/22/chinas-economic-security-challenge-difficulties-overcoming-the-malacca-dilemma. 

10. Kristen D. Thompson, “How the Drone War in Ukraine Is Transforming Conflict,” Council on Foreign Relations, January 16, 2024, https://www.cfr.org/article/how-drone-war-ukraine-transforming-conflict. 

11. Gloria Shkurti Özdemir and Rıfat Öncel, “The War in Ukraine Has Revolutionized Drone Warfare,” The National Interest, January 11, 2023, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/war-ukraine-has-revolutionized-drone-warfare-206095. 

12. Svitlana Vlasova and Brad Lendon, “Ukraine’s Drones Sink another Russian Warship, Kyiv Says,” CNN World Europe, March 6, 2024, https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/05/europe/russian-warship-destroyed-ukraine-intl-hnk-ml/index.html. 

13. Associated Press, “Ukraine Claims It Has Sunk Another Russian Warship in the Black Sea Using High-Tech Sea Drones,” Politico, March 5, 2024, https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/05/ukraine-warship-russia-black-sea-00145037; and Newsweek, “Video Shows Moment Russian Black Sea Ships Destroyed in Naval Drone Attack,” Newsweek, May 30, 2024, https://www.newsweek.com/russia-black-sea-fleet-magura-v5-naval-drones-crimea-1906280. 

14. Lauren Frias, “Ukraine Wiped Out Nearly a Third of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet without Even Having a Real Navy, These Are the Warships Russia Lost,” Business Insider, February 7, 2024, https://www.businessinsider.com/warships-in-russia-black-sea-fleet-that-ukraine-wiped-out-2024-2. 

15. “The War in Ukraine Has Revolutionized Drone Warfare.”

16. The Ministry of Defense, “British Commandos Train Hundreds of Ukrainian Marines in UK Programme,” Gov.UK, August 21, 2023, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/british-commandos-train-hundreds-of-ukrainian-marines-in-uk-programme.

17. Nina Kolars, “Genious and Mastery in Military Innovation,” Modern War Institute, April 3, 2017, https://mwi.westpoint.edu/genius-mastery-military-innovation. 

18. Meredith Roaten, “Marine Corps Commandant Defends Equipment Divestment, End Strength Cuts,” National Defense, September 1, 2021, https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2021/9/1/marine-corps-commandant-defends-force-size-divestment.

19. There is no definition of “Information” as a warfighting function given in MCDP 8, Information—only characteristics are described. Headquarters Marine Corps, MCDP 8, Information, (Washington, DC: 2022).  

20. Aaron Matthew Lariosa, “First Marine Corps MQ-9A Reaper Squadron Now Operational,” USNI News, August 8, 2023, https://news.usni.org/2023/08/08/first-marine-corps-mq-9a-reaper-squadron-now-operational. 

21. United States Coast Guard, “Assistant Commandant for Intelligence,” United States Coast Guard, n.d., https://www.dco.uscg.mil/Our-Organization/Intelligence-CG-2.

22. Capt Rachel Jeffcoat, “Army Conducts 1st RIMPAC Joint Live-fire Sinking Exercise as Multi-Domain Task Force,” U.S. PACOM JTF Micronesia, July 25, 2018, https://www.pacom.mil/JTF-Micronesia/Article/1584462/army-conducts-1st-rimpac-joint-live-fire-sinking-exercise-as-multi-domain-task/#:~:text=The%2017th%20Field%20Artillery%20Brigade,as%20a%20land%2Dbased%20asset.

23. Frank Whitman, “Boudra: ‘We Have to Respond from Within the Theater of Operations’,” Pacific Island Times, November 16, 2022, https://www.pacificislandtimes.com/post/boudra-we-have-to-respond-from-within-the-theater-of-operations. 

24. Unshin Lee Harpley, “Kadena Adds More Stealth Fights Amid ‘Increasingly Challenging Strategic Environment’,” Air and Space Forces Magazine, May 1, 2024, https://www.airandspaceforces.com/kadena-more-stealth-fighters-strategic-environment. 

25. Eric Smith, “Statement of General Eric M. Smith Commandant of the Marine Corps on the Posture of the United States Marine Corps Before The Senate Appropriations Committee,” Marines.mil, April 16, 2024, https://www.cmc.marines.mil/Speeches-and-Transcripts/Transcripts/Article/3759255/statement-of-general-eric-m-smith-commandant-of-the-marine-corps-on-the-posture.

26. Congressional Research Service, “Defense Primer: Intelligence Support to Military Operations,” Congressional Research Service, May 9, 2024, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10574. 

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