Naval integration is a hot topic among senior leaders in the Sea Services. The term is widely used in many recent Navy and Marine Corps documents, including the triservice maritime strategy Advantage at Sea, the Navy’s NavPlan 2021, and the Marine Corps’ Commandant’s Planning Guidance.1 These documents lay out the need to improve service integration to compete with and defeat peer adversaries in a contested maritime environment. Each describes different facets of what naval integration looks like, using terms such as synchronize, align, and distribute, and identifies areas for integration across programs, war games, exercises, technology, and command relationships.
Although aspirational, these documents do not truly define what naval integration means or what is required to achieve it. Naval integration manifests itself differently in each echelon of the military, but the common thread across theaters and levels of command is that it requires proper institutional constructs, a maritime mentality, and a flexible organizational mind-set.
Large Scale Exercise 21 (LSE-21), conducted by U.S. Fleet Forces Command, U.S. Pacific Fleet, U.S. Naval Forces Europe, and U.S. Naval Forces Southern Command in August, was “designed to refine how we synchronize maritime operations across multiple Fleets, in support of the joint force.”2 During the exercise, planners and staffs of Fleet Forces Command/Naval Forces Northern Command and Marine Corps Forces Command/Marine Corps Forces Northern Command executed integrated operations at the Echelon II level (component commands), seeking to shape the environment and operations in support of Echelon III forces (fleets and Marine expeditionary forces).
The exercise provided an opportunity for the two staffs to gauge how the combined command’s naval integration campaign plan was progressing and identify what challenges remain. A few observations are outlined here, focusing on staff functions and command integration at the component level. The three areas addressed are the role of a Deputy Joint Force Maritime Component Commander (D-JFMCC), staff integration through officer exchanges, and combined planning cells for each warfighting function.
Deputy JFMCC
During LSE-21, Marine Corps Forces Northern Command experimented with assigning a Marine general officer to U.S. Naval Forces Northern Command to serve as the D-JFMCC. Prior to execution, their staffs conducted research to determine what the billet would entail and how it could best serve the Naval Forces North commander. Naval Forces North’s responsibilities for maritime homeland security and maritime homeland defense do not directly correlate to the expeditionary nature of a Marine expeditionary force, nor do the capabilities required for those missions match the direction of Force Design 2030. This made it difficult to define the role a Marine Corps D-JFMCC would serve, and at the start of the exercise, it was clear the initial vision for the billet was not sufficient and would require post-execution analysis. The D-JFMCC’s designated role was not optimal in driving staff actions or commander decision-making, as many of the identified functions of the deputy became redundant with the functions of Naval Forces North’s deputy commander and the director of maritime operations.
Despite these challenges, the process provided valuable insights into the future construct of a fully integrated maritime component command relationship. For starters, the unique nature of the Atlantic Basin—its coastal waters make defining homeland defense responsibilities more complex, and maritime homeland security and maritime homeland defense frequently overlap—requires the integration of a third sea service, the U.S. Coast Guard. With simultaneous roles as both a military force (Title 10) and a maritime law enforcement agency (Title 14), the Coast Guard can integrate interagency responses and support military operations through unique command relationships and maritime homeland defense structures. For example, for maritime homeland defense, Coast Guard area commanders serve dual roles as Coast Guard operational commanders and Defense Forces East/West commanders under the JFMCC. This integration is always in effect and can be operationalized rapidly to ensure a complementary, unified, all-domain response. This arrangement offers a path toward JFMCC integration while affording operational flexibility to prosecute missions under both Title 14 and Title 10 authorities. To fully realize the advantages of this arrangement, however, Coast Guard and Department of Defense planners need to regularly exercise these command-and-control nodes to establish working relationships before competition crosses into conflict.
The Marine D-JFMCC could focus on oversight of naval force generation with respect to timing, training, and certification against specific future mission requirements. A single predeployment training construct across the three services would enable the maritime team to prepare for priority missions, directed by a gaining combatant commander, in time- and resource-constrained environments. The JFMCC still could oversee the preparation of gaining or reconstituting forces for future operational requirements in support of other geographic and functional combatant commands. This commander also could pair naval forces, assigned to a single mission, to train and prepare together, building a team prior to deployment.
By leveraging the roles of subordinate commanders, the JFMCC would be able to execute a single battle concept across warfighting functions and the conflict continuum while supporting interagency coordination, a key component to success in any theater.
Staff Integration
The services often talk of staff integration as the exchange of liaison officers (LNOs) or the augmentation of planners to facilitate information flow and mutual understanding. However, LNOs are often spread thin, participating in multiple meetings, passing information provided to them, and seeking information for their parent commands. They are important to external commands, but they do not compare to what a fully aligned and integrated staff can achieve through unity of effort. Physical and formal integration is required beyond the LNO. Senior staff leaders must advocate for permanent billets across key cross-functional teams and along all three planning horizons (current operations, future operations, and future plans), within a single staff.
During LSE-21, Marine Corps Forces Command/Marine Corps Forces Northern Command used one LNO and multiple planners across warfighting functions to support integration with Naval Forces Northern Command. The construct was successful in concept and reduced stovepiped planning efforts, but it was ad hoc across functions and horizons and requires further exercise and experimentation. A lack of understanding of a JFMCC’s authorities and processes left some capabilities underused and planners still learning the nuances of the larger maritime fight within the Northern Command area of responsibility. To build an integrated staff with capacity and operational competence requires regular exercise and formalized alignment of planners, deputies, and watch personnel.
By establishing integrated billets and defining roles, responsibilities, and relationships, planning teams will be able to incorporate trust, capacity, and capabilities unique to the Sea Services in solving operational problems across planning horizons. Action officers will be confident in service capabilities and less concerned with maintaining service-centric optics, thereby realizing the full potential of a unified and integrated naval service.
Combined Warfighting Function Planning Cells
LSE-21 also provided an opportunity to test the services’ ability to fight a multitheater conflict using distributed maritime operations—from planning to all-domain globally integrated fires, C5I, and logistics. The integrated planning cell concept showed promise but still requires further testing and refinement. To better align service cultures, capabilities, capacities, and strengths, the component and tactical commands must fully integrate planners along each warfighting function.
At the component level, this means a joint maritime operations center, theater logistics center, and theater fires, protection, information, and intelligence center need to be established with the appropriate authorities to resource and plan the global maritime fight. These centers must have representation from all three services to address the various maritime challenges.
In addition, these centers should be supported by interagency representation, allowing the command to execute joint and interagency warfighting concepts across domains and beyond traditional boundaries. Integrated command and control would be a natural result of a single integrated staff.
This construct would facilitate faster decision-making and ensure unity of effort across the maritime domain. With a single, integrated maritime staff rather than separate service cells, the JFMCC could create a maritime body operating with one pulse and able to provide the best military advice to the Joint Force Commander. Moreover, it would ensure unity of effort across the Sea Services and support alignment across theaters. The second- and third-order effects of a fully integrated staff require further analysis; however, an integrated naval force, designed to respond globally, could provide the United States with a dynamic and resilient force.
Ramifications
To integrate the Sea Services, the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard will need to evolve their parochial systems, platforms, and mind-sets. They must integrate at every level of command and will require service-level programs and concepts to augment strategic-, operational-, and tactical-level employment. Service purchasing decisions and investments must be complementary and enable integrated capabilities. Finally, education and training must inculcate not just a Navy, Marine Corps, or Coast Guard mind-set, but a clear vision of naval service.
For Echelon I commands (service level), a change in education, training, doctrine, and mission-essential task alignment will be necessary. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard education, from Officer Candidate School to general officer education, would need to emphasize the complementary nature of each service’s culture, capabilities, and operating concepts. Officers from each service should complete familiarization tours with their sister services to encourage integration and professional development. “Naval billets” and even a “naval certification” should be prized for promotion and command selection. Joint training events, exercises, and certification events would be required for forces moving into a maritime theater together. This would ensure that tactical units could exercise and deploy together, providing an opportunity to build relationships and common operating procedures. Finally, for doctrine and task alignment, the services would need to ensure that doctrinal concepts have mutual support and that doctrinal terms invoke similar mental constructs.
One Force
Naval integration is a mental and cultural shift that will enable the Sea Services to act and think as one force, and it resides in the organizational constructs of the units tasked with maritime operations. It must go beyond programs, games, and exercises to professional mind-set and organizational constructs. Commanders must be willing to accept the short-term risk of exchanging staff members to achieve long-term success in building a blue/green organization. The services and their operational-level staffs must educate, train, and inculcate the force with a truly naval outlook. Regardless of the theater, mission, or threat, naval integration requires each service to establish formal lines of authority with well-defined roles and responsibilities and create flexible organizations, where service members are comfortable with operating in unfamiliar but critical and dynamic staff structures.
Service-Level Efforts
Throughout their history, the Navy and Marine Corps have maintained a special relationship, practicing integrated naval operations, amphibious landings, and forward power projection from the sea. The amphibious ready group and Marine expeditionary unit provided the primary integrated forward power projection force. The counterinsurgency fight shifted attention toward land, but with the end of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and U.S. acknowledgment of strategic competitors able to challenge U.S. naval supremacy, the Navy and Marine Corps are refocusing on leveraging the inherent characteristics and strengths of a forward-deployed naval force.
The services’ efforts toward integration started in earnest in 2016 with the introduction of littoral operations in contested environments and expeditionary advanced base operations in the Marine Corps Operating Concept and the appearance of naval integration in the Navy’s A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority.1 These documents laid the groundwork for today’s concept development, war gaming, and programing decisions and shaped the services’ ideas about what naval integration looks like. Current strategies and concepts expand on this early framework and direct each service to increase integration, enabling them to better compete and fight within the modern operating environment. As with any new construct, the services’ collective understanding will evolve with time and operational experience, and naval integration will manifest itself in different ways, depending on the mission and adversarial conditions.
1. Office of the Commandant of the Marine Corps, Marine Corps Operating Concept (Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, September 2016), 12–13; Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, A Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority (Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, December 2018), 14.
1. Office of the Secretary of the Navy, Advantage at Sea Prevailing with Integrated All-Domain Naval Power (Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, December 2020); Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, CNO NavPlan (Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, January 2021); and Office of the Commandant of the Marine Corps, 38th Commandant’s Planning Guidance (Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, 17 July 2019).
2. U.S. Navy Office of Information, “Large Scale Exercise,” 18 August 2021.
