Initial Look at Distributed Operations Reveals Potential and Problems

By SUE A. LACKEY, Associate Editor

Commanders are beginning to see vast potential for interagency cooperation and intelligence sharing in Distributed Operations (DO), the Marine Corps’ new operational concept. The plan is a major change in how the Corps deploys in response to unconventional warfare threats.

Driven by cutting-edge communications technology, DO is now in its second month of an estimated 18-month experimentation cycle prior to implementation. But that technology may pose a management risk to the very forces it seeks to empower.

Gen. Robert E. Schmidle, director of the Expeditionary Force Development Command at Marine Base Quantico, Va., said the Corps developed DO in response to the rising global threat of terrorist and insurgent armies.

“That kind of enemy is not going to come at us in conventional formation,” Schmidle said. “He’s going to come at us in small, distributed, dispersed, decentralized kind of teams. Marine forces must be able to operate in that same kind of decentralized manner.

“We are the forces that are capable of operating in both the traditional and the nontraditional realm. … What we are talking about is training Marines to standards that will allow them to have more specialized skill sets, but not at the expense of being able to perform their traditional missions.”

DO hinges on the empowerment of small teams, able to operate independently and miles apart within the battlespace. Teams would be linked by satellite communications and Global Positioning System capability. Theoretically, the teams would be able to make tactical decisions and gather intelligence to be fed into a larger network.

Through this communications network, commanders would have an accurate picture of battle conditions over a larger area and be better able to exploit actionable intelligence. If necessary, commanders would then be able to “swarm” units together into clusters as operational requirements dictated, or aggregate the entire group into a conventional fighting force.

Commanders saw the need for changes in communication technology on the battlefield in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Marine commanders were physically moving further away from one another than they had in the past, with regiments operating as much as 50 miles apart. As the battlefield became increasingly dispersed, the requirement for a stable and robust communications network and corresponding architecture was even more significant, Schmidle said.

However, he also sees where the all-encompassing communications networks themselves may create problems.

“We’re going to have to find ways to mitigate the tendency of people to reach down in the network to levels well below where they normally would be, and to try to influence decisions at a much lower level. There is a level of discipline that is required of senior commanders of all grades and types — civilian or military. Even though you know you can access information at that lowest level, there may be times when it is just not appropriate to do that,” Schmidle said.

The inherent chaos of the battlefield may be made worse by a vastly increased pipeline of information flowing at a rate beyond the ability to assimilate it, particularly at command levels. One of the ways to deal with that ambiguity is to encourage decision-making at the tactical level. DO is designed to do just that, giving increased decision-making powers to small units, trained to a higher standard than ever before.

“That young Marine squad leader, he knows what he has to do. He’s been given his mission orders, he’s been given his commander’s intent, and when an incident comes up, these kids, day in and day out, are making the right decisions out there,” Schmidle said. “If you take that decision, though, and you put it into a network and somebody says ‘let’s bubble this up until it gets to the battalion or brigade commander,’ all of a sudden that decision may not be nearly as clear-cut.

“There may be occasions where there is something occurring at that small unit level that is going to have, or has had, an effect way out of proportion to the tactical event, and the only person who really can understand that is the commander himself. The danger is that somebody is going to reach down and say, ‘I want to see this video this kid’s got down on a street corner in Fallujah, and then I, because I am the great all-knowing Oz, will make a decision here in the Pentagon that will be better than anything they can do out in the field.’”

As experimentation and development of the DO concept unfolds, commanders are seeing even broader applications than the tactical changes first envisioned. Schmidle sees implications for operational interagency cooperation in insurgent warfare and greater intelligence-sharing capabilities.

“Historically, what we know about successful efforts against insurgencies is that it requires an effort that is not just military; it has to be a military and interagency effort. Where that occurs is at the operational level of war. You have a tactical level to fight the insurgency, but there has to be a place where the senior decision-makers in the civilian sector and the military decision-makers have to have a dialogue. Taking all these distributed capabilities from the agencies and the military side and melding them together into an integrated plan is what historically has proven to be effective in dealing with insurgencies.”

DO is intended to produce a highly trained Marine capable of participating in large unit amphibious forcible assault, who can also operate at a level previously seen only in Special Operations units. But this increased level of training may overburden a pipeline with finite capabilities, especially if the Corps has a significant increase in manpower. What effect DO will have on that pipeline, and how long it will take to streamline the system, are questions the Marine Corps hopes to answer during the experimentation process.