Infantry Battalions as Sensor Webs for the Fleet

As the Marine Corps prepares to fight and win a Pacific war as part of the fleet, the infantry battalion is as critical as ever. Though the infantry must retain the ability to close with and destroy the enemy, expeditionary advanced base operations (EABO) are a new challenge to Marine infantry. The infantry battalion in EABO and as part of the stand-in forces can simultaneously serve the maritime team as a sensor network through scouting and patrolling. Within the littoral combat team (LCT), the infantry battalion is not only a sensor web, but it also can be a laboratory for warfighting innovation to solve maritime scouting problems and other modern combat challenges. The Marine Corps should train and equip infantry battalions to scout as part of the maritime force.

Scouting and Patrolling

Infantry Marines are trained from their early days at the School of Infantry to conduct reconnaissance patrols. In the LCT, a reconnaissance patrol could be tasked with locating enemy ships. An infantry battalion with three rifle companies can maintain an impressive rate of squad-sized patrols (9 squads per company and 27 squads per battalion, counting only rifle squads). The patrol rate increases significantly if the Marines are competent and confident enough to patrol as fireteams (a four-to-six Marine maneuver element with two to three fireteams per squad).

Scouting and patrolling skills are typically trained at the small-unit level (company and below). Patrol training does not require live ammunition, and Marines can practice patrol planning, movement techniques, and even responding to chance contact without drawing weapons from the armory. However, training scouting and patrolling skills often takes a back seat within a battalion’s busy training schedule.

Patrolling is arduous and often excruciatingly mind-numbing. Units cover miles of terrain on foot while carrying hundreds of pounds of gear. Good habits and alert posture can give way to poor decisions and boredom as minutes become hours. A downpour can rapidly make any group of hardened Marines lose focus on their objective. Most patrols will never make contact with the enemy, and the reward for a successful foray is usually another patrol within a few hours. Compared with live-fire training for offensive operations or urban close-quarters combat, patrol training is not sexy. Furthermore, live-fire events—typically platoon and company attacks—tend to get most of the attention during a battalion’s training cycle. Infantry battalions, particularly the battalions now within LCTs, need to train in scouting and patrolling, however, to make their units capable sensor webs.

Better Sensor-Web Training

Blank-fire, force-on-force patrolling exercises (PEXs) need to be evaluated as seriously as any exercise with live ammunition. Battalion leaders should identify PEXs months in advance as milestone training events for their company commanders. The standards for evaluation should be drawn from Marine Corps doctrine, specifically from Marine Corps Tactical Publication 3-01A: Scouting and Patrolling, and the unit’s mission-essential task list. Each company’s culminating PEX should involve sustained field operations against a live opposition force and must be integrated with a cadre of evaluators. For units that will conduct EABO, the exercise should include sensing objectives an LCT would be tasked to achieve. On completion, the company should receive feedback and a plan of action for remediation, if necessary. The battalion should then be certified by its higher headquarters during the unit’s predeployment Marine Corps Combat Readiness Evaluation (MCCRE).

Most MCCREs do not have evaluated patrolling events. LCTs and battalions that will likely conduct EABO during deployments should consider including an EAB-specific evaluation in their MCCREs. This “EAB-EX” should include a PEX during which companies patrol from simulated EABs and conduct reconnaissance to feed a higher headquarter’s targeting cycle. This would allow evaluators to provide specific scouting, patrolling, and reconnaissance feedback.

If adding a battalion PEX to an already packed MCCRE is not feasible, a patrolling evaluation should at least be part of every event during the readiness exercise. For example, with creativity and safety backstops, a battalion live-fire defense (a frequent MCCRE event) could incorporate blank or non-fire patrolling prior to the live-fire training. If the MCCRE includes company live-fire attacks, the attacks could culminate in a hasty defense with reconnaissance or combat patrols. Even more routine training could include patrolling “reps.” Instead of just living in an administrative bivouac during a three-day marksmanship range, Marines could establish a patrol base to practice observation, reporting, and scouting and patrolling tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) during the time between courses of fire.

Sensing Ships

Even with excellent training, there are still challenges in getting infantry Marines to sense ships. A patrol could work its way right up to the beach and would still need to contend with the fact that it can see only about three miles out to sea before the horizon intervenes. Fortunately, Marines are experimenting with commercially available maritime radars to push the detection range of an average “coastwatcher” beyond the horizon. In 2022, small teams of Marines used Simrad radars with organic optics and communication equipment to track surface vessels during a deployment to Estonia with Task Group 61/2.4.¹

More recently, Marine Rotational Force Southeast Asia (MRF-SEA) integrated the same type of small maritime radar with its RQ-20B Puma small unmanned aerial system (sUAS), identifying surface contacts with the radar and then cueing the sUAS to confirm the nature of the contact.² In both cases, small teams of Marines with the right training and gear improved maritime domain awareness, which could prove critical in a future fight. An infantry battalion trained in scouting and patrolling and armed with similar equipment down to the squad or team level would saturate a battlespace with redundant, survivable sensors.

This entire effort could be happening with multiple teams, squads, platoons, and companies across hundreds of miles. Furthermore, each node of such a sensor web would include infantry Marines ready for a gunfight. Should trouble arise, they could mass with their adjacent units at prearranged rally points and engage the threat with the combat power of a platoon, company, or even a battalion.

Constant Innovation

To stay ahead of the curve in the sensing fight, battalion leaders should be harnessing the creativity of their Marines to pioneer innovative sensing solutions. An infantry battalion training cycle is the perfect petri dish for testing new scouting tactics and techniques. Junior Marines are tech savvy and hungry to do something meaningful with their service.³ With the right resources and supervision, they could generate the cutting-edge innovations required to win in the Pacific.

One idea is to provide Marine Corps units in their predeployment training cycle with the sensing technology MRF-SEA is currently testing and other experimental equipment, such as swarms of the cheap drones being purchased as part of the Department of Defense’s Replicator Initiative.⁴ Units would employ the equipment as they see fit to accomplish their reconnaissance tasking and results would be analyzed for trends and worthwhile new TTPs. The feedback from these events then would drive the cycle of innovation forward. This is the same type of innovation playing out daily on battlefields in Ukraine, where the use of sUAS to sense, attack, and enable command and control has been driven by soldier-level ingenuity.

The Marine Corps Warfighting Lab (MCWL) is already enabling similar initiatives, particularly with the experimental infantry battalions. MCWL experts provide the right supervision, technology, and experimental methodology to capture lessons. MCWL cadres with emerging technology should be assigned to as many battalions as possible. When there are not enough MCWL teams to go around, there should be a certification process for battalions to stand up their own organic innovation cells to receive emerging technology and experiment within MCWL’s overarching scientific framework and guidance. Some battalions will be more suited to test different types of gear. For instance, a 7th Marine Regiment battalion stationed in the high desert of Twentynine Palms, California, likely could not experiment with emerging unmanned underwater vehicles, but could experiment with UAS swarms or artificial intelligence–enabled decision-support software.

By combining challenging infantry training with methods to empower Marines to creatively solve problems, the infantry could enhance its ability to support a naval fight in the Pacific. This approach could yield tactics that would have otherwise gone undiscovered. Furthermore, scouting and patrolling are not relevant only in the Pacific. Mastery of these critical warfare skills will ensure infantry Marines are ready to fight in any clime or place.