The Marine Corps’ Force Design reorients the service toward maritime reconnaissance and counterreconnaissance. Marine Corps intelligence should similarly reorient. The Marine Corps currently categorizes intelligence officers along both functional and domain-specific lines. It has human and signals intelligence functional experts, as well as ground and air intelligence domain experts. This construct has served the Marine Corps well since it was instituted in Intelligence Plan 1994 (the Van Riper Plan) but should evolve to fill emerging gaps owing to Force Design modernization and the changing character of war.
Modern warfare and the service’s new focus on the maritime domain blur the distinction between Navy and Marine Corps intelligence. The Navy traditionally focused on sea-based threats and the Marine Corps on land-based threats. This distinction is nearly obsolete. Navy intelligence now closely tracks antiship missiles and bomber aircraft based far inland. Marine Corps intelligence is deeply interested in tracking maritime threats.
There also are gaps between the services. Navy intelligence is not responsible for monitoring sea-based land-attack threats to Marines ashore and Marines do not train or equip intelligence personnel to sense or analyze these maritime threats.
Asymmetric threats such as those from maritime militia fishing boats and scientific research vessels are not generally a priority for either service. Separately, the war in Ukraine has demonstrated the potency of long-range missiles; small unmanned aerial systems (sUASs); and loitering munitions, all of which now pose significant threats to Marines. Sufficient initial training on these threats is not provided to Marine Corps intelligence professionals. Marine Corps intelligence can fill emerging gaps and keep pace with Force Design imperatives by creating a new littoral intelligence officer specialty, expanding air intelligence to focus on cruise and ballistic missiles and their kill chains, and enhancing ground intelligence with sUAS and loitering-munitions expertise. Marines are starting to build this knowledge via ad hoc initiatives in the operating forces, but this expertise should be institutionalized with the formal creation of new specialties, schoolhouse instruction, and training standards.
Gaps in the Van Riper Plan
In 1991, then–Brigadier General Paul Van Riper published a blistering critique of the performance of Marine Corps intelligence during the First Gulf War. He diagnosed the root cause, saying, “I had the sense many of the problems are endemic and stem from the way we select, train, and educate our intelligence personnel.”1 In particular, he criticized the service’s reliance on lateral moves from other specialties to create intelligence officers, implying that officers transitioned to intelligence because they were not competitive in their original specialties. In 1994, the Van Riper Plan established four new entry-level intelligence officer tracks: human, signals, ground, and air.2 These four tracks remain, but officers now also attend the Tactical Intelligence Officer Course (TIOC) in Dam Neck, Virginia, prior to entering their track. The air and ground intelligence officer tracks align with the service’s primary warfighting domains and support associated elements of the Marine air-ground task force. However, the service currently lacks a maritime intelligence track to accompany its new focus on maritime warfighting.
As the Marine Corps shifts focus to providing maritime reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance for the joint force, its intelligence personnel will be conducting the Navy equivalent of scouting and screening to gather relevant information about the adversary while preventing the adversary from doing the same to friendly forces. According to Commandant of the Marine Corps General Eric Smith, “We are the eyes and ears for the joint force, ideally positioned within the WEZ [weapons engagement zone] to conduct both reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance, to act as a joint fires integrator for the combined force, and to strike the enemy from land and air to sea with organic sensors and precision fires, when necessary.”3 Marine Corps intelligence should play a central role in collecting and making sense of maritime information that enables joint targeting, but it does not currently train and equip Marines in maritime intelligence.
The war in Ukraine has clarified two trends in the character of war especially relevant to Marine Corps intelligence—the missile age has reached maturity, and uncrewed and autonomous sensors and weapons are critical, ubiquitous capabilities on the modern battlefield. In conflict, cruise and ballistic missiles launched from aircraft, land-based launchers, and ships and submarines are the primary threats facing Marine Corps stand-in forces, as well as the vessels needed for their maneuver and sustainment. Marine Corps intelligence personnel are not sufficiently trained on cruise and ballistic missile threats or the kill chains that enable them. Formal tactical intelligence training also has not kept pace with the rapid development of sUAS and loitering-munition threats, which are prominent in Ukraine.
The Van Riper Plan has served the Marine Corps well for nearly 30 years, but the service’s intelligence community must adapt to support maritime-centric operations and enable commanders to understand and defeat pressing threats on the battlefield.
Littoral Intelligence Officers
The most-needed update to the Van Riper Plan is a new littoral intelligence officer specialty to focus on amphibious operations and maritime collection, analysis, and targeting. This would add a third domain-specific primary specialty to the air and ground intelligence specialties. Littoral intelligence officers would be trained to support Marine expeditionary units (MEUs) and maritime reconnaissance and counterreconnaissance units, including Marine littoral regiments, reconnaissance and light armored reconnaissance (LAR) battalions, and intelligence battalions, along with other staffs and units.
Relevant ground intelligence officer billets would be recoded to littoral intelligence, and the schoolhouse would decrease ground intelligence officer throughput equivalent to the number of littoral intelligence officers generated. The training pipeline would consist of TIOC followed by the Naval Intelligence Officer Basic Course in Dam Neck until the Marine Corps creates its own course. In addition, or as a partial solution if a new primary specialty is infeasible, the service could create a maritime-centric advanced intelligence course. This would mirror the aviation weapons and tactics instructor intelligence course and ground-centric intelligence tactics instructor course at Marine Corps Tactics and Operations Group in Twentynine Palms, California. To avoid repeating the mistakes of the First Gulf War, the Marine Corps should progress from ad hoc solutions to deliberately selecting and training littoral intelligence officers.
Maritime sensing initiatives in the operating forces are currently conducted by personnel lacking formal maritime intelligence training. From 2022 through 2023, 13th MEU operated a maritime sensing node in key maritime terrain during its deployment to the western Pacific.4 A signals intelligence officer was in charge of the node, and ground-sensor Marines operated the maritime sensors. These Marines built their maritime-sensing skills from scratch with unfamiliar equipment during workups and deployment. The 3d Marine Littoral Regiment, MEUs, and reconnaissance and LAR battalions, among other units, use similar ad hoc teams to advance maritime sensing initiatives.5 Forward-leaning commanders and individual Marines displaying tenacious effort and ingenuity are making these initiatives bear fruit, but ad hoc arrangements are neither sustainable nor sufficient against advanced rivals.
Littoral intelligence officers would specialize in amphibious operations, maritime sensing, and asymmetric maritime threats. These officers would complement rather than duplicate the expertise of Navy intelligence officers, who focus on analyzing threats to ships and embarked sailors and Marines. Their training would primarily focus on maritime sensing, including integrating shore-based maritime radar, sUASs, and crewed and uncrewed small boats to collect information on adversary maritime threats and enable maritime targeting. Their collection focus could range from high-end warships to threats such as maritime militia fishing vessels and scientific research ships. Collected maritime data could be processed and fused at the Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group and feed the fleet’s maritime intelligence operations center.
These officers also would be knowledgeable about hydrography and identifying potential beach landing sites for surface connectors, such as the medium landing ships and autonomous low-profile vessels that will be used for maneuver and sustainment of stand-in forces when fielded. Littoral intelligence officers could be paired with new enlisted maritime collection specialists formally trained on maritime sensors and potentially sourced from the surveillance sensor operator community (the 8621 specialty). These new specialties would help the service institutionalize maritime intelligence expertise.
Air-and-Missile Intelligence Officers
The main threats to Marines ashore and afloat are cruise and ballistic missiles launched from diverse platforms. Marine Corps intelligence can help stand-in forces survive within the WEZ by providing air intelligence officers with robust training in cruise- and ballistic-missile threats and redesignating them as air-and-missile intelligence officers. Air intelligence is the specialty most familiar with missile technology, but its focus is limited to air-to-air and surface-to-air missile threats to Marine Corps aircraft. In broadening their expertise to cruise and ballistic missiles, including hypersonic types, air-and-missile intelligence officers could increase the survivability of all stand-in forces. This also would improve the survivability of Marine Corps aircraft, since the primary threat to aircraft in the Pacific is long-range missile strikes against aircraft on the ground at airfields.
Air-and-missile intelligence officers would inform commanders about how their units are being monitored, adversary missiles within range, the likely construct and sequencing of missile attacks, and how their units can actively or passively defeat or minimize damage from these attacks. Many Marine Corps intelligence officers are beginning to provide this information to commanders on an ad hoc basis, but they lack formal training on missile threats. Air-and-missile intelligence officers should be familiar with missile speeds, flight trajectories, terminal-attack profiles, seeker phenomenology, guidance and accuracy, warhead types, and onboard countermeasures, among other technical specifications. They also should monitor the order of battle and disposition of relevant missile threats and know how to access data providing indications of missile launches and warning of incoming missiles.
Finally, these officers should understand the larger kill chains associated with these missiles, including the C4ISR infrastructure that provides missiles with targeting data. Marines with this expertise could help commanders complicate adversary monitoring of their units and inhibit adversaries from achieving targeting solutions.
Ground Intelligence with sUAS and Loitering-Munitions Expertise
Marine Corps ground intelligence officers with formal training in threat sUASs and loitering-munition tactics and capabilities would improve support to ground operations. As demonstrated in Ukraine and the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, these capabilities are changing the character of ground combat and will pose significant threats to Marines in future conflicts. In 2024, lethal Russian drones reportedly caused approximately 90 percent of Ukrainian casualties in fighting surrounding a key town in a six-month period.6 By gaining expertise in these capabilities, ground intelligence officers could help commanders develop schemes of maneuver that minimize casualties. Every Marine should be a drone killer, just as every Marine was trained to counter improvised explosive devices during the war on terror.7 Formally trained ground intelligence officers should equip Marines with the necessary understanding of sUASs to make them effective drone killers.
Initial training should familiarize ground intelligence officers with the breadth of sUAS capabilities, tactics, and kill chains used by potential adversaries and the technical concepts common to all sUASs that make them both function and vulnerable. Training material could be drawn from sUAS and loitering-munitions employment in recent conflicts, especially in Ukraine. This includes how sUAS and loitering-munition teams are cued, their search patterns for discovering targets, sensor phenomenology, common weapons pairing for targets these systems identify, and how they support battle-damage assessment and target reengagement. These officers also should be knowledgeable about how sUAS and loitering-munition teams function and integrate into an adversary’s broader tactical military system.
This training would help ground intelligence officers develop more effective collection plans for friendly sUASs and improve the value of intelligence gained from their employment. One of the primary threats to friendly sUASs are adversary sUASs. In Ukraine, smaller sUASs deliberately crash into larger ones or dangle chains in their rotors.8 Electronic jamming and various other active and passive defeat mechanisms also threaten friendly sUASs and loitering munitions. Officers with this knowledge would help commanders drive lethal ground operations while protecting Marines.
The Van Riper Plan was an effective solution to intelligence shortfalls in the 1990s, but the character of war and focus of the service has since changed. Marine Corps intelligence is behind in evolving to this reality. A new littoral intelligence officer specialty, expanding air intelligence to focus on cruise and ballistic missiles and kill chains, and infusing ground intelligence officers with sUAS and loitering-munition expertise are important steps to rectifying this shortfall. Enlisted intelligence specialties and training should similarly evolve.
Institutionalizing service-level change is a difficult, painstaking process that often lags informal adoption. Marine Corps senior intelligence leaders have been forward-leaning in supporting ad hoc initiatives that have paved the way for institutionalization. The changes recommended for Marine Corps intelligence may require tough trade-offs, including dropping some legacy training content and extending the duration of initial training. The benefit will be worth the cost, however. Potential adversaries are adapting, and the Marine Corps is modernizing to meet the challenge. Marine Corps intelligence must keep pace.
1. BGen Paul K. Van Riper, USMC, “Observations During Operation Desert Storm,” Marine Corps Gazette 75, no. 6 (June 1991): 55–61.
2. Christopher Paul et al., Alert and Ready: An Organizational Design Assessment of Marine Corps Intelligence (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2011).
3. Gen Eric M. Smith, USMC, “FRAGO 01-2024,” April 2024.
4. Capt Kevin Buss, USMC, “13th MEU Conducts Sensing Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations,” Marines.mil, 26 April 2023.
5. LtCol Scott Cuomo, USMC, “On-the-Ground Truth and Force Design 2030 Reconciliation: A Way Forward,” War on the Rocks, 12 July 2022.
6. Rebecca Rommen, “Russian Attack Drones Account for 90 Percent of Ukrainian Casualties around a Key Town in the Last Six Months, Medic Says,” Business Insider, 8 June 2024.
7. Capt Karl Flynn, USMC, “Make Every Marine a Drone Killer,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 149, no. 11 (November 2023).
8. Ian Lovett and Nikita Nikolaienko, “Inside a Ukrainian Vampire Drone Squad’s Mission to the Front Lines,” The Wall Street Journal, 10 May 2024.
