Marine Corps Commandant Hagee: Projecting Power Faster, Better

Gen. Michael W. Hagee, commandant of the Marine Corps, previously was the commanding general of I Marine Expeditionary Force during the lead-in to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Before becoming the top Marine, Hagee in 2002 was instrumental in developing the war plan that created a spearhead of more than 75,000 Marines who drove 600 miles into Iraq. This large Marine air-ground task force joined a coalition that mauled five regular Iraqi divisions and four Republican Guard divisions, bringing down Saddam Hussein's military regime. A graduate of the Naval Academy's Class of 1968, Hagee has been called "John Wayne with remarkable brains and tremendous integrity" by former deputy defense secretary John M. Deutch, to whom Hagee was a senior military assistant. Here the commandant shares with Sea Power his take on the war's lessons, as well as his ideas for improving the way Marines organize and fight.

The Navy is changing, becoming more focused on being able to surge to combat and rotate forces quickly. Are there changes in store for the Marine Corps?

Hagee: The Navy is enhancing the capabilities of its aircraft carrier battle groups and the amphibious ready groups. We have just deployed an expeditionary strike group, including Navy ships carrying a marine expeditionary unit, from the West Coast, including three amphibious ships, three surface combatants, and a submarine. That delivers quite a bit of additional combat power for the combatant commander to use as he sees fit. It also provides the platforms upon which to build a joint task force.

One of the exciting things that the Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Vern Clark has talked about is reassessing how we do maintenance on the large-deck and small-deck amphibious ships. If a ship is needed, he wants to take it out of maintenance and deploy quicker, to surge. I think that is absolutely the right concept. We can do something similar with our marine expeditionary units. How we deploy and get back, how we do that faster--we have got to work on that.

We have an old system that was designed to very methodically put the force together and to deploy it. Those days are gone. We need a system to quickly identify the forces that are available, to identify transportation that is going to move them quickly, and to be able to deploy those forces wherever they need to go. All the services, along with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are going to work on that. Let's say a situation like the recent civil conflict in Liberia comes up, and there is not a marine expeditionary unit nearby. Can we surge capability to that particular area? In some cases we can. But as we bring on new high-speed vessels that can travel at perhaps greater than 40 knots, we are going to have a better capability. So the solution to this challenge not only requires new platforms, but also tactics, technique, procedures, and training. We are experimenting and working with that right now. This is similar to what we did with the advent of helicopters in the 1950s. We started working with the idea of 'vertical envelopment' before the Marine Corps received its first helicopters. When helicopters arrived in the force during the Korean War, we had already worked out some of the tactics, techniques, and procedures.

What operational challenges are in the Marine Corps' future?

Hagee: One of my concerns for the future is the ability to get access. As you know, we had some problems getting access during Operation Iraqi Freedom. We should have the capability to project power ashore regardless of whether we have access or not. We cannot do that today because we don't have the platforms that we need. One of the platforms that we need is, of course, the tiltrotor, the MV-22 Osprey. That technology in Afghanistan would have allowed us to project power all the way to Camp Rhino and then on up to Kandahar, from the sea. Before Afghanistan and Task Force 58, we estimated that we could project combat power ashore probably about 200 miles inland. In Afghanistan we projected combat power more than 400 miles inland. We did a really good job there. The combatant commander needed a force in there to stop the Taliban who were flowing from the east to the west. The only force that could get in there in the time that he [the combatant commander] needed it was the Navy/Marine Corps team, and we did that. But Pakistan allowed us to set up an intermediate support base. Without it, we would not have been able to do that.

What other new platforms are required, besides the MV-22?

Hagee: There are several platforms that we need, from the Navy's new ships to new combat vehicles and aircraft. Our job in the Marine Corps is to be able to quickly project sustainable combat power ashore; that is what we will do for the combatant commander as part of the joint force, with systems such as the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle. In the Marine Corps, our long-range artillery, the real punch that we have, comes from the integration of our ground units and aviation. What makes the Marine unit on the battlefield such a powerful force is the way we integrate our fires. The Joint Strike Fighter is going to give us tremendous additional capability in this area. It can reach out there and does not have to have the tanker support that is needed by the AV-8B Harriers and the F/A-18 Hornets today. Other platforms that we need include Navy programs, such as the Littoral Combat Ship. The Navy's DD(X) new surface combatant is also important, for its ability to provide surface fires during the assault phase of an operation. The follow-on to the LHA amphibious assault ship, the LHA replacement, is likewise important.

From Operation Iraqi Freedom, what lessons should the Marine Corps be learning?

Hagee: The military as a whole needs to do better on fratricide: 'blue-on-blue.' That means a truly integrated command-and-control system. What we lack is the ability to bring diverse data, whether from human intelligence sources [or] from national intelligence assets, and deliver the information electronically to a site, fuse the data, and then have a machine help decide what the Corps-level commander needs compared to what a battalion-level commander needs. We need to quickly be able to move this information around the battlefield. We have come a long way when you think about Desert Shield/Desert Storm. The secure Internet for all practical purposes did not exist in 1990-91. So a lot of the command and control was done by voice communications. During Operation Iraqi Freedom, the command and control was largely done over the classified Internet. At the I Marine Expeditionary Force command center, they were holding daily video teleconferences with the major unit commanders spread out through Iraq, Kuwait, and back in California. They were all looking at the same map and were able to talk off of it. We need to be able to do that jointly. At a higher level, one of the things we need to work on is the sharing of information with our allies. That has always been a challenge.

In what way did Operation Iraqi Freedom highlight supply system challenges?

Hagee: We need to work on the ability to get supplies quickly to a requesting unit. We did a good job during Operation Iraqi Freedom; we never ran out of ammunition and fuel. But we could do a whole lot better. We moved at unbelievable speed compared with past operations. We also moved units around the battlefield. Our system, the communications infrastructure, was not set up to quickly identify where the requesting unit had gone so that the parts could get to the right location. We are going to work on that.

How would the Navy and Marine Corps improve strategic mobility and supply?

Hagee: We are looking very closely at what sort of maritime prepositioning ship for the future we need. If you agree that access could be a problem in the future, then, in my opinion, you need the ability to come in from the sea, to do the arrival and assembly at sea, essentially to do the reception, staging, onward movement, and integration at sea, cross the line of departure at sea, and then project that combat power ashore. We can't do that today.

What is the Marine Corps' involvement in the Navy's plan for basing forces at sea?

Hagee: Sea Basing, as Adm. Clark has defined it, is not just about building a mountain of supplies at sea. In my mind, Sea Basing is not about platforms. It is a collection of assets at sea, and they break down into four types: sustainment capabilities, strike capabilities, defensive capabilities, and command-and-control and communications capabilities. We expand and contract those capabilities depending on what the mission is. Essentially Sea Basing is about using the ocean as a vast maneuver space. For example, what would have happened during Operation Iraqi Freedom if Kuwait had not let us come in? Could we have brought I Marine Expeditionary Force into the Persian Gulf, done the arrival and assembly at sea, and then could we have projected them into Iraq? Not the way we should; not the way I believe we will be able to in the future. That's the high end. What about the low end: How do we structure our marine expeditionary units such that we can respond faster to a situation like we had in Liberia? We are looking at that as well.

You mentioned at the outset the importance of developing new tactics, techniques, and procedures for a surge force. How will the Marine Corps do that?

Hagee: During a recent experiment, we constructed a network-centric architecture out of surrogate technologies used to move data around the battlefield. A company commander participating in the experiment spotted an enemy tank platoon coming toward his unit. He alerted the network system to the tanks, and immediately everyone in the joint task force saw that tank platoon. Not surprisingly, everyone in the joint task force wanted to take that tank platoon out. Because everybody wanted to get in on this, we saw that we did not have the procedures to de-conflict that. We had never had that network-centric capability before. It will require that we change some of our tactics, techniques, and procedures in order to really use it. We are going to do an experiment in October 2004 out in Camp Pendleton, Calif., called Sea Viking '04. We are working with the Office of Naval Research, with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, with Joint Forces Command, and with others trying to press the envelope on technology and capabilities. What do we think the battlefield is going to look like in 2015, or 2025; and what are some of the platforms and procedures we are going to need? Those are the questions the Marine Corps needs to answer. *