These War Games Will Determine the Future of the Marine Corps

'This week, top brass from around the Corps are meeting in an executive off-site meeting near Washington, D.C., to discuss a plan that will use war games to shape the future force. It's part of an initiative called Force 2025, said Lt. Gen. Robert Walsh, the deputy commandant of Marine Corps Combat Development Command, who described the plan to Military.com during a recent lecture at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
In July, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Robert Neller plans to choose one of two separately developed plans to shape the future force, Walsh said. On course of action favors an "evolutionary" approach, making changes in a more gradual fashion and building on existing methods and practices. The other, he said, is a "revolutionary" approach that emphasizes more "out of the box" ideas and disruptive thinking.
Neller has spoken often about the Marine Corps' need to develop its capabilities, particularly in the information warfare and cyber realm. In an order published in January, he set a 2017 deadline to expand information operations, cyber, and electronic warfare.
"We will engage in deliberate, holistic, total force planning to shape the Marine Corps of 2020-2025 and beyond based on our future operating concepts and capabilities," he wrote. "We will look at advances in technology that create opportunities to adjust table of organization structure spaces that more appropriately meet current and future force operational requirements."
Neller has also touted the importance of experimentation and adopting new technology. Earlier this year, he announced that an operational battalion, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, out of Camp Pendleton, California, would serve as the Corps' "experimental unit" during a deployment to the Pacific this year for the purpose of testing out new operational concepts.
The two approaches to change were developed by two teams of officers representing a spectrum of ranks and military occupational specialties who broke the Marine Corps down into its separate elements -- ground, air, logistics, and command -- to discuss ways that each element needed to change to confront current-day challenges.
Planning began with more than 200 officers. That number was ultimately cut down to two teams of 12 as the courses of action were refined. The most senior officers, Walsh said, worked on slower, evolutionary approaches to change, while the more junior ones, including captains, majors and lieutenant colonels, focused on revolutionary and disruptive proposals.
"Really what I had to do was pressurize them to put away their MOS equities," he said. "I didn't want them thinking as a Harrier pilot or an artillery officer. I wanted them thinking [Marine air-ground task force]."