Marines Inserting New Technology into Forces.

• Author: Tadjdeh, Yasmin
• Position: Goverment Contracting Insights

The Marine Corps is looking at ways to insert new technology into its forces earlier in order to prepare for future battles.

Key to this effort is experimentation, said Lt. Col. Dan Schmitt, head of the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory field testing branch.

Last year, the service introduced a new operating concept called, "How an Expeditionary Force Operates in the 21st Century." The document--which focused on how Marines will fight in 2025--put an emphasis on the need for the service to return to its seafaring roots, conduct maneuver warfare and fight as a combined arms force.

Since the concept's inception the service has embarked on a number of exercises and experiments, Schmitt noted during remarks at the National Defense Industrial Association's annual Expeditionary Warfare Conference in Annapolis, Maryland.

"We have a campaign of Marine Corps Force 2025 and within that campaign we have a Sea Dragon 2025 experimental process," he said. The goal is "to get our force postured for 2025, to be agile, lethal, naval and expeditionary, and we found that as we go through the experiment process, we're building closer and closer relationships with the [research-and-development] enterprises."

Testing new technologies with Marines in live experiments allows the service to realistically see if a particular system is fit for the battlefield, he noted.

"We understand that warfare is inherently, despite all of the technologies, ... a human endeavor," Schmitt said. "We want to recreate the uncertainty and fear and the danger associated with that so that we can get the best picture."

The first phase of the experiment concluded in the fall of 2017, he noted. The service took an infantry battalion and established it as an experimental force.

"[We] put them in the construct of a sea-based [Marine Air Ground Task Force] and we reorganized them, changed some of their training, their culturing, their equipment, and over 18 months we conducted a series of operations and experiments before operationally deploying them in this configuration to the Pacific," he said.

Much thought went into creating an adaptive enemy red team that reflected not what today's threats look like, but what tomorrow's would resemble based on how fast U.S. adversaries are adopting new technologies, Schmitt noted.

"Our experiment force could lose and could lose repeatedly during our experiments and we could learn from those losses," he said.

The service looked at the size of squads...