The Marine Corps Needs Company Intelligence Officers

The Marine Corps’ basic tactical unit, the infantry battalion, is undergoing major structural revision. Force Design 2030 experimentation known as Infantry Battalion 2030 (IBX30) represents a critical interwar opportunity to build Marine battalions with unrivaled lethality derived from information advantage at the tactical edge. Unfortunately, Marines who participated in initial live-force experiments still struggled to achieve this advantage despite new sensors and highly technical personnel.

There appeared to be two intertwined problems limiting the new design’s performance. First, there is a marked imbalance between collections and analysis at the company level. If future companies will have collection capability and capacity on par with today’s battalions, their commanders need c intelligence officers. Second, holdovers from the legacy task-organization continue to delay the intelligence-fires integration needed for time-sensitive targeting. To maximize lethality, future infantry companies need tactical intelligence officers who can work seamlessly within company fire-support teams (FiST) to task assets from multiple collection disciplines, process their raw information, and communicate actionable intelligence in real time.

A key role of legacy intelligence teams was to reduce uncertainty for commanders during the planning process and help them make decisions despite the uncertainty of combat. That decision-support role remains important at higher echelons, but fighting units need tangible targeting information more than theoretical planning products. The Marine Forces Special Operations Command (MarSOC) direct support team (DST) construct is a great example of how intelligence can be more than a staff function—it should directly enable lethality. For conventional echelons smaller than battalions, tactical intelligence should enable beyond-line-of-sight targeting and standoff engagements.

To that end, the Force Design 2030 company is set to gain an impressive array of multidomain sensors and precision weaponry.¹ Among these are more capable Group 2 unmanned aerial systems (UASs), unprecedented signals intelligence and electromagnetic warfare (SI/EW) capabilities, information environment monitoring tools, and loitering precision munitions. These new capabilities should extend the company kill chain; intelligence and fires Marines should be more capable than ever of finding and surgically destroying the enemy by fire.

Unfortunately, testing with SI/EW teams and enhanced UAS at IBX30 events demonstrated that beyond-line-of-sight kill chains remain difficult to close. Yet, as the battalion task-organization shrinks to accommodate more technical Marines and their expensive equipment, standoff strike options are increasingly important for survivability. The IBX30 company may be more fragile in a direct-fire gunfight than its legacy equivalent because it will operate in a distributed manner with fewer Marines. Several IBX30 experiments to date have shown that additional sensors alone did not give company commanders effective early warning or standoff strike options. Worse, excessive amounts of raw data often created issues with “information overload” that diluted the commander’s perception of the situation and hindered decision-making.²

The intelligence cycle might explain this result. Marine Corps Warfighting Publication 2-1: Intelligence Operations breaks the intelligence cycle into a six-step process. While SI/EW teams and Group 2 UASs represent a substantial boost to collections, the follow-on analytical steps have not received appropriate resources. Experiments are showing that the IBX30 design skips more than half the cycle, jumping from raw collection directly to utilization by the company commander. One of the intelligence community’s most trusted authors, Mark Lowenthal, teaches that a lopsided investment in collection platforms at the expense of analysis results in a mountain of unused data.³ According to the proposed IBX30 task organization, Marine Corps military occupational specialty 0231 intelligence specialists will be responsible for all analytical steps in the intelligence cycle even though their training standards do not prepare them for such a demanding role.

Intelligence collection requires a nuanced understanding of the technical, physical, or administrative indicators accompanying an activity or object. The current IBX30 design assigns 0231 sergeants and corporals (E-4/E-5) to orchestrate the company tasking, collection, processing, exploitation, and dissemination (TCPED) effort.⁴ Unfortunately, conventional intelligence specialists below the rank of staff sergeant (E-6) are ill-prepared for this role in an infantry company. E-1 through E-5 individual-level training and readiness tasks do not require those 0231s to perform collection requirements management or collection operations management. The Intelligence and Ground Sensors Training and Readiness (T&R) Manual does not assign 0231s below E-6 any significant collection responsibilities.⁵ Moreover, 0231s are not taught infantry tactics at the platoon or company level, so their analysis and communication lacks reference experience and doctrinal lexicon.⁶ 0231 corporals and sergeants in conventional forces are simply not trained to manage the entire TCPED cycle. The service needs to either reevaluate 0231 training and readiness standards or employ these Marines according to their capabilities. The latter is significantly less costly and disruptive than the former, which would take years to realize.

Unless the Marine Corps recognizes these Marines’ limitations and augments the IBX30 design accordingly, tactical intelligence failures will plague future infantry companies despite advanced collection tools. During initial IBX30 experimentation, company-level intelligence cell (CLIC) Marines repeatedly failed to task, collect, process, exploit and disseminate intelligence from multiple UASs, ground reconnaissance, and SI/EW teams. During experiment debrief interviews, 0231s could not describe the physical and technical indicators that could have provided early warning of enemy actions and should have been the focus of their collection plan.⁷ These Marines were capable of tasks for which they were trained, but the service never prepared them to drive the entire intelligence cycle.

Despite their enthusiasm and creativity during experiment events, CLIC Marines did not know the fundamentals of multidiscipline collection operations: mixing, tipping, queuing, and redundancy.⁸ During one realistic urban training exercise, isolated sensors worked independently and fed raw data to directly the commander, indicating a dysfunctional collection plan.⁹ Following those events, commanders expressed frustration with conflicting, superfluous, and erroneous reporting. In one instance, a company commander felt compelled to divert his attention from maneuver elements to watch a Stalker UAS video feed while simultaneously trying to correlate possible enemy positions on his map with lines of bearing provided by a SI/EW team over voice radio. He was effectively suppressed by the deluge of information. Ultimately, the company failed to detect and preempt a mounted enemy counterattack despite readily available indications and warnings.¹⁰

Improper manning is responsible for an imbalance between collections and analysis, but remnants of the legacy task organization are responsible for delays in the intelligence and fires coordination needed to prosecute time-sensitive targets. Since lethality is the defining quality of an infantry company, intelligence should empower the fires support team (FiST). However, a recent draft of the proposed IBX30 task organization shows that the CLIC, UAS operators, SI/EW team, and organic precision fires (OPF) cell are all separate entities reporting individually to the company commander.¹¹ These teams rely on radio communications to coordinate their efforts and share information, but the company’s finite radio nets quickly become saturated with raw reporting. Unless they are all physically colocated with the FiST (in which case the FiST will be harder to move, conceal, and protect), the intelligence Marines are likely to work in isolation rather than fight in an integrated manner. The proposed task organization will result in the physical and cognitive separation of all these capabilities and will invite friction, inefficiency, and agonizing delays.

Solutions

Given those problems, two solutions emerge. First, the service should consider the MarSOC DST model and assign a tactical intelligence officer to infantry companies. Second, that intelligence officer should be a member of the FiST. Their combination of collections and analysis training with grunt-like experience from The Basic School will enable a company intelligence officer to find, fix, track, and target the enemy before direct-fire contact is made.

In an April 2022 Proceedings article, Captain Nathaniel Lambert, the intelligence officer at 1st Battalion, 1st Marines during IBX30 experimentation, recognized these same issues and recommended that ground intelligence officers be added to the company structure. However, since Captain Lambert published his argument, legacy ground intelligence officers’ participation in the infantry officer course—a crucial reference experience—has become uncertain. Since ground intelligence officers may soon be extinct, Tactical Intelligence Officer Course (TIOC) graduates are the most appropriate choice to fill company intelligence officer billets. The intelligence officer pipeline remains the only entry-level training pipeline that can consistently prepare Marines to serve as infantry company intelligence officers.

TIOC graduates are all trained platoon commanders from TBS, so they enter the operating forces with substantially more infantry experience than enlisted intelligence specialists. Following TBS, intelligence officers learn structured analytic techniques and all-source collection management at the 45-day TIOC.¹² The combination of intelligence training and TBS experience facilitates snap intelligence assessments thanks to a phenomenon known as recognition-primed decision making. All this training builds on a foundation of critical thinking laid during four years of college. Until the service radically alters and extends the 0231 enlisted training pipeline, tactical intelligence officers will be far better prepared to plan, analyze, contextualize, and communicate actionable intelligence at the company level.

The second solution involves nesting that intelligence officer within the FiST. Colocation of the intelligence officer with FiST personnel will do three things. First, it will reduce the latency between target acquisition and engagement; second, it will reduce risk to force by increasing standoff strike options; and third, it will enhance lethality by increasing the likelihood of first-round effects. The intelligence officer would harmonize collections to facilitate the use of fire support and precision munitions while reducing uncertainty for the commander. He or she would dynamically task, collect, process, exploit, and disseminate intelligence to colocated fires personnel in a drastically more efficient and effective manner than the current design.

0231 intelligence specialists are still critical and could accompany their intelligence officers in the FiST or remain with the company command post. 0231s are still needed to build, maintain, and disseminate formal intelligence products, coordinate briefs and debriefs with platoons, conduct sensitive site exploitation, ingest reporting from higher, draft intelligence summaries, and manage a common intelligence picture. In addition to hard-copy maps, CLIC Marines will need to acquire, manage, and disseminate huge volumes of foundational geospatial information (maps) that today’s commanders can easily take for granted when they only train on familiar military installations.

Commandant David H. Berger directed significant changes to force structure, not just procurement of new technology. Powerful geospatial sensors, signals intelligence, and precision munitions are great, but they do not make infantry companies more lethal unless qualified Marines can effectively employ them. There is no doubt that manpower structure change at this scale would require tough compromises within the intelligence occupational field, especially during the initial transition.  The Marine Corps must act now despite that friction. Company intelligence officers are the most direct and reliable way to ensure that new collection equipment enhances lethality.