In the middle of an emergency operations center exercise, all the landline telephones stopped working. The entire base staff immediately stopped being able to coordinate response actions. My cellphone rang, and I learned that the main telephone switch had lost power. My Marines did not know if the switch would survive the power loss. We waited as the switch began to reboot, with non-operational telephones and the exercise in shambles. In this moment, I found myself unable to lead. I did not possess the technical knowledge to effect positive change.
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1. “Mission tactics is just as the name implies: the tactics of assigning a subordinate mission without specifying how the mission must be accomplished.” Marine Corps, MCDP-1: Warfighting, 87.
2. Marines may receive the following error message when attempting to login to MOL: “Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) is an attack that forces an end user to execute unwanted actions on a web application in which they’re currently authenticated. CSRF attacks are not data theft, since the attacker has no way to see the response to the forged request. With a little help of social engineering (such as sending a link via email or chat), an attacker may trick the users of a web application into executing actions of the attacker's choosing. If the victim is a normal user, a successful CSRF attack can force the user to perform update requests like transferring funds, changing their email address, and so forth.”
3. “We must have some larger scheme for how we expect to achieve victory. That is, before anything else, we must conceive how we intend to win.” MCDP-1, 82.
4. “Based on the mission, the commander then develops a concept of operations, which explains how the unit will accomplish the mission, and assigns missions to subordinates.” Marine Corps, MCDP-1, 90.
5. “The relation between officers and enlisted men should in no sense be that of superior and inferior nor that of master and servant, but rather that of teacher and scholar.” Marine Corps, MCWP 6-11, 97.
6. My first platoon consisted of more than 150 Marines and a Consolidated Memorandum of Receipt valued at $35,376,271.00.
7. The other courses available, the “MAGTF Communications Planners Course” and the “Cybersecurity Managers Course” are entirely too broad in scope to be considered a technical course to the same degree as the technical academic fields discussed later. Marine Corps, MARADMIN 530/19.
8. “Only by their physical presence—by demonstrating the willingness to share danger and privation—can commanders fully gain the trust and confidence of subordinates,” Marine Corps, MCDP-1, 80. I propose that the parallel experience in the information environment is to “share the console.”
9. “The Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO), now Computer Network Operations, structured as S32 is a cyber-warfare intelligence-gathering unit of the National Security Agency (NSA). It has been active since at least 1998. TAO identifies, monitors, infiltrates, and gathers intelligence on computer systems being used by entities foreign to the United States.” Wikipedia.
10. “A non-PMOS that has a prerequisite of one or more PMOSs. This MOS identifies a particular skill or training that is in addition to a Marine's PMOS, but can only be filled by a Marine with a specific PMOS,” Marine Corps, Marine Corps Order 1200.17, Enclosure (1), revised 8 August 2013,” X.
11. Marine Corps. “MARADMIN 607/17”; Marine Corps, “MARADMIN 382/18.”
12. Marine Corps, Marine Corps COOL.
