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What Dostoyevsky Taught Me About a Navy Technologist’s Predictions

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By Bill Bray

A few years ago, when I was serving as a senior Navy fellow, a technologist on the team predicted that sailors soon could be wired, fitbit-style, to such an exquisite degree that everything about them, from moods to future bad choices, could be known, tracked, logged, and used. As he explained, this technology would be used for everything from emergency intervention to evaluation writing. In fact, the evaluations would practically write themselves. He was young and, to my knowledge, had never led anyone, yet presented with an almost breathless certainty.

Those of us who had spent years in the fleet could be forgiven for being skeptical, or even surprised, since we may think we know people—who they are, what makes them tick, or why they do the things they do. As much as I was surprised by the young technologist’s easy confidence, as he spoke I found myself recalling an experience I had as a young officer. With more than three years on board my first ship, I thought I knew the sailors I led and worked with very well. Know your people was a leadership mantra even back then, although it had yet to be taken as far as the young technologist’s predictions. What I could not predict was that early one morning, one of my sailors would wake up at his off-base San Diego apartment, retrieve his legally owned handgun, and shoot and kill his two roommates while they slept.

When first visited in jail, he said very little beyond that he felt he had the right to do what he did. While a bit aloof and arrogant, he was otherwise quiet and mild-mannered and had never been in trouble. A few days after the murders, I wondered to my captain how such an unassuming young sailor could do something so horrible. He said, perhaps now in contradiction to the technologist with whom I would later work, “you will never know.”

One who wrestled with a mid-19th-century version of the technologist’s optimism was the great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Naturalism was then the rage (Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1859). There was great confidence that man could be understood (entirely) through observation and experimentation (the scientific method). For example, one of Dostoyevsky’s contemporaries, Ivan Mikhailovich Sechenov, published The Reflexes of the Brain (1863) based on his research with frogs (his main claim was that all human behavior could be explained as reflexive action). Dostoyevsky had seen too much in life by then to believe it. He thought it not just nonsense, but dangerous nonsense. Its implications for political and social life were terrifying.

I first read Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky’s first novel of his major literary period, a few months after leaving my first ship. As I read it and ventured into Dostoyevsky’s world for the first time, the sailor and his fate were front of mind. With crime, the why is always more difficult to know, and more fascinating to contemplate, than the what. Military justice deals primarily with the crime itself, with the important goals of deterring criminal activity and maintaining good order and discipline. But at a grander level Dostoyevsky was not writing about crime and the criminal. Through a dramatic narrative, he demonstrates how human intentions, motivation, subjective experience, and behavior are not knowable, let alone explainable, solely through physical observation. They cannot be categorized into “data sets,” to borrow a more contemporary term. Dostoyevsky helped me be skeptical of, if not the whole human resources field, at least the faith that technology can ever make human performance and behavior predictable.

Ideas were not inconsequential for Dostoyevsky. Crime is often a phenomenon that begins with an idea. Examining how humans can be swept up by an idea and rationalize crime is a recurring theme—one could say an obsession—for Dostoyevsky throughout his major literary period beginning with Crime and Punishment (1866). He was a gifted dramatist, so much so that in Crime and Punishment, while there is no question of the student Raskolnikov’s guilt or that he will not escape earthly justice, the reader almost hangs on every paragraph, searching for answers to the why of the crime—and to eternal questions, such as can murder ever be justified, and for what? Crime and Punishment might be the greatest whydoneit ever written.

The Mystery of Man

Hemingway famously wrote in Green Hills of Africa that “Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged.” Indeed, Konstantin Mochulsky, one of the greatest Dostoyevsky biographers, writes in the introduction to Dostoyevsky: His Life and Work, “The life and work of Dostoyevsky are inseparable. . . Dostoyevsky was always drawn to confession as an artistic form. His works unfold before us as one vast confession, as the integral revelation of his universal spirit.”1

Portrait of Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881). (Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was born 30 October 1821. His father, Mikhail Andreyevich, was a doctor, and by most accounts could be stern and moody. After Dostoyevsky’s mother, Marya Fyodorovna, died in 1837 of tuberculosis, father Mikhail retired to his country estate, where his drinking and treatment of serfs worsened. In 1839, while Dostoyevsky was enrolled in the Nikolayev School of Military Engineering in St. Petersburg, the serfs allegedly beat his father to death following one particularly abusive episode (evidence uncovered in the 1970s casts some doubt on this story).2

Dostoyevsky did not care much for engineering. He passed into the School of Engineering more interested in reading writers such as Schiller, Hoffman, Balzac, and Pushkin than in studying mathematics. In The Diary of a Writer (a series of essays he wrote in the 1870s), Dostoyevsky claimed that as soon as they arrived in St. Petersburg in May 1837, he and his brother Mikhail made a visit to the spot where Pushkin died (Pushkin was killed in a duel with his brother-in-law in February of that year).3 By 1839 he knew for certain his calling. That year he wrote Mikhail:

To study the meaning of man and of life—I am making sufficient progress here. I have faith in myself. Man is a mystery. One must solve it. If you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery because I want to be a man.4

By the mid-1840s, Dostoyevsky was becoming known in St. Petersburg literary circles. He published his first book, the novella Poor Folk, in January 1846. Shortly thereafter, he requested release from military service. He then published the The Double in late January. In the next two years, he associated himself with at least two political-literary groups.

The 1840s were heady political times in Europe, and affiliating with such groups was risky in imperialist Russia. One group was founded by Mikhail Petrashevsky, long a proponent of social and civil reform in Russia. In 1848, revolution swept western Europe and the Tsar Nicholas I became more fearful of losing his grip on power. In April 1849, members of the Petrashevsky circle, including Dostoyevsky and his brothers Andrey and Mikhail, were arrested and jailed in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg (Dostoyevsky’s brothers were released within two months for a lack of evidence). A military court found Dostoyevsky guilty in November and recommended he be executed. However, the Tsar agreed to commute the sentence, but only after the writer endured a mock execution on 22 December at Semenovsky Square. The Tsar’s messenger arrived just in time to announce the commutation—“Nicholas carefully orchestrated the scenario on this occasion to produce the maximum impact on the unsuspecting victims of his regal solicitude.”5

Dostoyevsky spent four years of hard labor in a prison camp in Omsk, followed by five years of military service. One can scarcely imagine how ghastly life in a Siberian prison camp was in the 1850s. Dostoyevsky’s first letters to his brother on release in 1854 (he was unable to correspond while in prison with one exception) and his later account in Notes from the House of the Dead (1861) vividly describe a horrifying penal existence.

Yet the “unspeakable, interminable suffering” was the turning point in the writer’s spiritual development.”6 In many letters Dostoyevsky describes his time in prison as one of introspection and “regeneration.” Dostoyevsky could never reconcile his religious faith with the radical rationalism so prevalent in the mid-1800s. “The ‘magic of extremes’ which had shaken Dostoyevsky’s personal life made him follow man into the darkest corridors of his mind, where nothing remains hidden and where the only way out is the flight into God’s open arms.”7

When he returned to St. Petersburg in 1859, he found the intellectual environment brimming with this radical rationalism. The “vibrational stew” he encountered, according to James Parker, included “nihilism, egoism, materialism. . . The human is being reconceived.” Reason is pitted against faith, against the irrational. What is more truthful? What is more authentic? What is man capable of if he believes only in his capacity to reason? From where comes the moral law in a world where man is the only lawgiver? These questions plagued Dostoyevsky. As Mochulsky put it: “And thus began the struggle between faith and reason in the writer’s consciousness, thus arose the fundamental problem of his philosophy.”8

From Mystery to War

What I should have first read, before Crime and Punishment, is Notes from Underground, published in 1864 in the January and April issues of Epoch, the second magazine Dostoyevsky ran with Mikhail (the first, Vremya [Time] was closed by the censors the year prior).

At just 125 pages, Notes from Underground is the philosophical premise of the author’s great works. In it, we find a thundering cry from the wilderness, an author whose “regeneration of convictions” and long years observing man’s capacity for cruelty and depravity coalesced into a fiery conviction to save humanity from destroying itself. In today’s parlance, Dostoyevsky was a culture warrior—a reactionary who saw the state of man in the mid-nineteenth century as corrupt and sick, an outcome of his almost breathless arrogance before nature and God. Society was deep in an existential crisis. Its foundations were beginning to crumble. Few seemed to recognize the coming apocalypse.

Dostoyevsky was at war with the prevailing intellectual current of his time, one that placed humanity’s fate squarely in the hopes of a scientific positivism that held that understanding man’s character, nature, and behaviors can be derived through sensory experience (observation), experimentation, and reason. Change man’s environment for the better through science, and man’s nature will change for the better.

One of Dostoyevsky’s antagonists was the socialist Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky, who in 1863 published the utopian novel What Is to Be Done? No less than V.I. Lenin would point to Chernyshevsky’s novel as a pivotal influence. Richard Pevear, in the forward to the translation of Notes from Underground he and his wife Larissa Volokhonsky published in 1993, explains that Dostoyevsky initially planned to write a review of What Is to Be Done? in Epoch, but decided that literary critique alone would be inadequate. It required the force of an artistic response, consistent with Dostoyevsky’s conviction that only through art can the human condition be understood in a way that could expose the pretensions and falsehoods of a thinker such as Chernyshevsky. Pevear notes:

[Chernyshevsky’s hero] is the voice of the healthy rational egoist, the ingenuous man of action. Dostoyevsky takes up the challenge. Though Chernyshevsky is not mentioned by name in Notes from Underground, his theories, and in particular his novel, are the most immediate target of the underground man’s diatribes and of Dostoyevsky’s subtler, more penetrating parody.9

Rational egoism was Dostoyevsky’s bête noir. He knew where this unquestioned belief in science to answer all questions was heading, and it was not pretty. His tortured, mysterious characters can be seen as irrationality resisting science’s dogmatic adherents. His underground man mocks Chernyshevky:

Oh, tell me, who first announced, who was the first to proclaim that man does dirty only because he doesn’t know his real interests; and that were he to be enlightened, were his eyes to be opened to his real, normal interests, man would immediately stop doing dirty, would immediately become good and noble, because, being enlightened and understanding his real profit, he would see his real profit precisely in the good, and it’s common knowledge that no man can knowingly act against his own profit … Profit! What is profit? And will you take it upon yourself to define with perfect exactitude precisely what man’s profit consists in? And what if it so happens that on occasion man’s profit not only may but precisely must consist in sometimes wishing what is bad for himself, and not what is profitable? And if so, if there can be such a case, then the whole rule goes up in smoke.10

Of course, Dostoyevsky notes, man acts against his own self-interest all the time. This is natural, if incomprehensible, behavior. Man is at once rational and irrational. The observation/experimental method had no answer for this (modern neuroscience has not provided an answer either).

Crime and Punishment

Crime and Punishment is the epic, full-bodied drama that poured out of Dostoyevsky in a frenzy of creative activity following the 1864 deaths of his first wife and his brother Mikhail, and was inspired, in part, from his reading about the French murder trial of the sociopath Pierre-Francois Lacenaire. In July 1865, he was in Wiesbaden on his third trip abroad. He had gambled away what savings he had and was asking acquaintances, including the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, to loan him money. At some point that summer he abandoned work on The Drunks (the story of the Marmeladov family was ultimately incorporated into Crime and Punishment) and began work on what he had indicated to Mikhail as early as 1859 would be a “confession” novel, one he had first thought of while in prison when “lying on a bed of wooden planks, in an oppressing moment of melancholy and self-dissolution.”11

In September, Dostoyevsky wrote a letter to the prominent editor Mikhail Katkov in which he pitched the novel as a “psychological account of a crime,” going into great detail about how most of the dramatic action would not be about the crime itself, but how the protagonist navigates the aftermath of the crime morally and spiritually.12 He had finished a draft of the novel by late November when back in St. Petersburg, but was not happy with the outcome, and began rewriting it. The first part of what became a six-part novel was published in January 1866 in The Russian Messenger. Parts two and three followed in the ensuing months, and the entire novel was published by the end of the year.

Dostoyevsky’s characters are strange, outlandish, and even grotesque. In Crime and Punishment, we are not on lavish estates, in drawing rooms, or at grand balls—we are in the gutter, at the edge of civilized society, in a gloomy atmosphere of torment, sickness, and despair. Many characters are given to exaggerated emotional outbursts and behaviors. As William Hubben wrote, “All of Dostoyevsky’s stories belong to the literature of extreme situations. An ominous restlessness broods over the men and women in his novels. Frequently their reaction to seemingly small incidents is excessive, and events take a most unexpected turn.”13 

Dostoyevsky is often accused of being an overbearing writer who preached that the path to salvation was through hardship and suffering. In Russian, this outlook is known as dostoyevshchina, or as Y. Karyakin explains, “a masochistic wallowing in suffering, a pathological acceptance of the ugly in the world … a sick conscience which derives comfort from the belief that there can be no easy conscience…”14

Dostoyevsky’s protagonist Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov is perhaps an embodiment of dostoyevshchina—at once intelligent and aloof, easily irritable, with a disdain for people in general. He is tormented, suffering from some inner turmoil. He is “functionally insane,” according to Parker. But even when we learn he intends to commit cold-blooded murder, he is not wholly unlikeable. He has genuine empathy—for the Marmeladovs, for example, especially the oldest daughter, the prostitute Sonya—and a deep love for his mother and sister, one that is ostensibly the motive for the crime. He has dropped out of school and needs money to take care of his mother (Pulkheria Alexandrovna) and liberate his sister (Avdotya Romanovna, or Dunya) from marrying the corrupt businessman Pyotr Luzhin, which he believes she is only doing to help him return to school.

At the novel’s outset, Raskolnikov is already in the throes of crisis. Although his struggle is not unique, it is universal. He is Dostoyevsky’s example of the new idealists who suffer an “infirmity of notions, having come under the influence of some of those strange, ‘incomplete’ ideas which go floating about in the air…”15 The only way out of his predicament is to murder the old money lender Alonya Ivanovna, a despicable, vile woman he believes the world will be better off without. He commits a gruesome ax murder and, when walked in on by Alonya’s younger sister Lizaveta, he kills her too.

The novel’s remaining five parts deal with Raskolnikov’s anguish and looming fate. The police investigator, Porfiry Petrovich, suspects Raskolnikov not only has committed the crime, but that his conscience would eventually get the better of him and lead to a confession. What primarily holds readers’ interest is that they want to know what Petrovich wants to know—why did he do it.

An illustration to Crime and Punishment by Nikolay Karazin, showing the moment Raskolnikov is forced to kill the pawnbroker’s sister to defend himself from capture. (Wikimedia Commons)

The answer flows from Raskolnikov’s own philosophical quest. Can an evil act be justified if it produces good consequences? Are some people, by virtue of their greatness, permitted to transgress the moral law that bounds everyone else? He thought so, and the act was meant to prove it. According to Karyakin, “Dostoyevsky’s hero is a man obsessed by an idea, a man in whom Dostoyevsky looks for and finds a human being wounded by an idea, killed by an idea or resurrected by it.”16

Mochulsky claims that Crime and Punishment would have been more accurately titled Crime and Expiation: “Raskolnikov is not only the compositional, but the spiritual center of the novel … the tragedy springs up in his soul and the external action only serves to reveal his moral conflicts.”17 Raskolnikov tries to put himself above the moral law. But he cannot, just as his actions cannot be explained as reflexes in his brain.

A Lesson on Mystery and Fantastical Predictions

Why did my sailor commit a double homicide? Was he perhaps driven by something more than passion and rage at a perceived slight? Was his crime an act against his own self-interest? An illustration of man’s simultaneously rational and irrational mind in action? Much to that young, optimistic technologist’s dismay, we will likely never know. Human behavior is complex and irreducible to data and formulas, something human resources professionals and data scientists rarely want to hear. If anything, Dostoyevsky’s work and life are a testament to the inherent mystery of human behavior, the irreducible complexity of actually knowing someone well.

Recent progress in artificial intelligence has spawned, again, some fantastical predictions of data-driven talent management processes that will categorize subordinates (workers) to such a fine degree that near-total behavioral predictability will be possible. Human performance data will be continuously collected in the workplace, categorized and collated, populating digital profiles and giving future leaders a “game-changing” technological toolset to know their people. But before young leaders believe that will happen, they should read Crime and Punishment. Dostoyevsky may give them cause for skepticism. And that could be a good thing.

Bill Bray is a retired Navy captain. He is the deputy editor-in-chief of the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine.

References

1. Kostantin Mochulsky, Dostoyevsky: His Life and Work (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), xix.
2. Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850–1859 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 85–88.
3. Mochulsky, Dostoyevsky: His Life and Work,
4. Mochulsky, 17.
5. Frank, Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859, 51.
6. Mochulsky, Dostoyevsky: His Life and Work,
7. William Hubben, Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Kafka: Four Prophets of Our Destiny (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1952), 68.
 8. Mochulsky, Dostoyevsky: His Life and Work,
9. Richard Pevear, Forward to Notes from Underground (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), xiii-xiv.
10. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 20–21.
11. Mochulsky, 271.
12. Mochulsky, 272.
13. Hubben, Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Kafka, 64.
14. Karyakin, Re-reading Dostoyevsky (Moscow: Novosti Press, 1971), 7.
15. Fyodor Dostoyevsky to Mikhail Katkov, as quoted in Mochulsky, 272.
16. Karyakin, Re-reading Dostoyevsky, 124.
17. Mochulsky, 299.

Featured Image: “Illuminations in St. Petersburg,” by Fedor Aleksandrovich Vasiliev/Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow Russia,/ Bridgeman Images.

Announcements

CIMSEC Officer and Board Elections are Now Open

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By Jimmy Drennan

CIMSEC officer roles are annually elected positions, and the elections are now open for the 2021-2022 term for officers, and 2021-2023 term for board members. Read the biographic and goals statements of the nominees for the five elected officer positions, and vote using the form below. Voting closes on December 14. 

Christopher Stockdale, for President

My primary vision for the group and my aim as President of the organization is to put the ‘I’ into CIMSEC, but what does that mean? CIMSEC is an international focused organization and comprises of many chapters from across the world however I cannot help but think that in certain areas the group is still underrepresented and that much of the analysis and thinking is focused on the US and that the majority of our contributors are US based. This is great, the US is an important global actor and I want to build and expand on this whilst also getting more of our international colleagues involved. It is my aim to increase dialogue and discussion and to encourage more articles and podcasts from some of the ‘quieter’ and less represented regions. I believe that to give more the organization a greater sense of diversity and to further act as a knowledge sharing platform we need to build our relationships and expand our community and our audience. Attracting new members, new colleagues and new partners, is essential to the expansion of the group, its reach, its relevance and its presence within the forum of maritime security debate and discussion.

To expand CIMSEC also needs to improve and increase its financial base. To do this I purpose expanding on existing plans to launch a range of CIMSEC merchandise which will be designed and managed by an online company. This revenue stream will help us to raise finances for projects, meetings, sponsorship, prizes for competitions and a range of other areas that will help to expand and develop the group.

I further believe that CIMSEC needs to spend more time devoted to the establishment and management of its chapters. As a Chapter President I know how rewarding and how challenging this post can be and it is my belief that more has to be done to help our chapters grow and flourish. In 2020, I drafted a guide for Chapter Presidents illustrating how chapters can be established, what is needed, how to set-up and host meetings and who to contract with questions or difficulties. I aim to expand on this and give our Chapter Presidents greater support, advice and a specified point of contact that they can call on should they need to, I will also liaise with the Membership Director to determine the number and status of our chapters and personally connect with all our Chapter Presidents to get a full account of our global presence. I will also invite Chapter Presidents to record a brief presentation introducing themselves and giving information about their group and members as a way of reaching a wider audience and building a further connection with our core partners. I would like to establish a series of regular update meetings where Chapter Presidents present their news, details of events and/or meetings and where they can express concerns, present suggestions and feedback and exchange advice and experience in a friendly and cooperative environment.

CIMSEC is a great social, collaborative and informative platform and relies on its audience and community for its success. Since its inception it has achieved an impressive record and has reached a wide range of people, but I believe that this can be built upon and further expanded with the organization increasing its range and presence through the measures I have already outlined and more besides and I welcome the opportunity to lead the group as its next President.

Chris O’Connor, for Vice President

Chris O’Connor is a U.S. Naval Officer currently assigned to NATO. He has 16 years of experience in logistics and strategic planning, with four deployments to on a variety of platforms. He is a Graduate of the Naval Postgraduate School and the Naval Academy, and an alumnus  of the CNO Strategic Studies Group and the CNO Rapid Innovation Cell. His work has been featured by CIMSEC, Small Wars Journal, Army Futures Command, and the Atlantic Council.

My goal is to further international maritime security discussion by increasing CIMSEC outreach to other organizations and attracting talented contributors for our written content and podcasts.

Dmitry Filipoff, for Director of Online Content

I have been CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content since 2015, and a Publications Coordinator with the American Foreign Service Association since 2016.

My goals for CIMSEC include maintaining a robust and consistent schedule of publications, calls for articles, interviews and other content forms. I will also grow and strengthen our new naval society, the Warfighting Flotilla, through regular off-the-record talks and other member engagement initiatives. 

Christian Fernandez, for Director of Membership

I am a policy researcher assessing topics of public significance with the goal of providing facts and data about the scope and impact of the government’s different policies. My expertise includes conducting research, data analysis, and the development and implementation of research tools. I have a BA in Political Science from the University of North Texas at Dallas and will attend law school in the fall of 2022. Specific fields of interest include Infrastructure, Government Spending, and Public Opinion.

I am currently the Membership Coordinator and want to take on the responsibility of organizing membership events and providing members with programs and opportunities. Additionally, I want to work with the leadership team to accelerate membership growth and lead initiatives to expand our member outreach in order to maximize member engagement.

Ed Salo, for Director of Outreach

Edward Salo, PhD is an associate professor of history, and the associate director of the Heritage Studies PhD Program at Arkansas State University. I serve as the instructor for the Military History class for the university’s ROTC program. Before coming to A-State, I served as a consulting historian for cultural resources management firms for 14 years where I worked on over 250 projects across the world including an administrative history of the Corps of Engineers efforts to dispose of Iraqi munitions after the 2003 invasion, the preparation of histories of Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine installations across the globe including Japan, Cuba, and Guam, and the preparation of a document to support JPAC operations in the Hurtgen Forest to identify the location of the remains of MIA soldiers from the 28th Infantry Division.

In the field of outreach, I hope to:

  • Continue to expand CIMSEC’s social media presence
  • Build connections between our group and similar groups across the world
  • Find exciting and new guests and authors
  • Expand our connections to NROTC units
  • Find support for projects from corporate, think tanks, and other donors

Michael DiCianna, for Treasurer

For the majority of my professional career, I have worked as a federal contractor supporting DoD and USIC operations in the intelligence field. Although my tenure has moved between counterterrorism and military intelligence, I have taken many opportunities to gain experience in the field of maritime security. Prior to contracting, I was an intern with the Hudson Institute, where I assisted fellows on projects such as enhancing American naval power, littoral combat, antipiracy, and the South China Sea. During my undergraduate education, I was invited to present at the 2015 Pittsburgh Asian Consortium Undergraduate Research conference on potential conflict in the East China Sea. Regardless of where my career has taken me, I continue to have a professional and personal passion for the study of maritime affairs.
Maritime affairs runs in my family. My father worked as design engineer for NAVSEA on several projects, including the Seawolf-class attack submarine. My mother is a ballast water compliance engineer, and a leading experience in the field of environmental technology for shipping.
Safeguarding peace and prosperity on the seas has never been more important to global security. As the international order seems poised to reassemble into a “multipolar” moment, it is important that experts—both scholars and practitioners—have organizations that can place the necessary emphasis on consideration of the maritime domain and all of its aspects. The Center for International Maritime Security can and shall be a unique and profound platform for the consideration of maritime affairs now and in the future. As CIMSEC treasurer, it will be my honor to ensure the financial affairs of CIMSEC are efficiently managed to ensure that its mission is operating at top capability. As a representative of CIMSEC, I would aim to increase readership, membership, scholarly participation, and financial contributions.

 

Jimmy Drennan is President of CIMSEC. Contact him at [email protected].

Podcast

Sea Control 300 — A New Planning Model for Lower-Threshold Maritime Operations

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By Jon Frerichs

Andrew Norris joins the program to discuss his proposal for re-imagining and improving the Navy’s planning process to more effectively plan and execute lower-threshold maritime security operations — a must-listen for maritime planners and those interested in maritime operational-level planning.

Download Sea Control 300 — A New Planning Model for Lower-Threshold Maritime Operations

Links

1. “A New U.S. Planning Model for Lower-threshold Maritime Security Operations, Pt. 1,” by Andrew Norris, CIMSEC, July 27, 2021.
2. “A New U.S. Planning Model for Lower-threshold Maritime Security Operations, Pt. 2,” by Andrew Norris, CIMSEC, August 9, 2021.

Jon Frerichs is Co-Host of the Sea Control podcast. Contact the podcast team at [email protected].

This episode was edited and produced by Joshua Groover.

Force Development

In the Same Boat: Integrating Naval Intelligence 

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By Will McGee

In March 2020, the Commandant of the Marine Corps released Force Design 2030, the strategy outlining structural changes to the Marine Corps operating forces. It is intended to re-orient the Marine Corps towards its traditional role as a naval amphibious force working in tandem with the Navy to project power ashore, after two decades of expeditionary non-maritime campaigns. The major changes outlined in Force Design primarily deal with investment/divestment decisions for the Aviation and Ground Combat Elements, driven by the modern warfighting concepts articulated in the joint Navy and Marine Corps’ Littoral Operations in a Contested Environment, and the Marine Corps’ Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations.1 Force Design 2030 does not contain specific guidance for the Marine Corps Intelligence Community as it deals mostly with altering the structure of the major components of the operating forces to act as “a landward complement to Navy capabilities” through the provision of “mobile, low-signature sensors.” 

At the crux of these concepts is the development of a network of sensors to provide battlespace awareness to the fleet, and so it implies that naval integration: the ability for the Navy and Marine Corps information warfare communities to work together seamlessly, is a prerequisite for the operating concept’s success. This integration cannot be ‘surged’ once the war begins. Instead, systemic change is required of both services to ingrain habits of cooperation in peacetime garrison operations so that they can be relied upon to seamlessly work together when deployed. How can the Marine Corps intelligence community better integrate with the Navy to create a joint naval intelligence enterprise?

Operating Concepts Review

As noted in the joint 2017 Littoral Operations in a Contested Environment (LOCE), since at least 2006, successive Chiefs of Naval Operations and Commandants of the Marine Corps have called for closer cooperation and integration between the two services.2 LOCE outlines supporting concepts to facilitate this integration: Marine Air Ground Task Force (MAGTF) integration into the Composite Warfare Construct (CWC), possibly as the Expeditionary Warfare Commander or Strike Warfare Commander; creation of joint blue-green fleet/JFMCC staffs; the development of Littoral Combat Groups task-organized with additional capabilities based on an assessment of projected employment; and additional areas of exploration for future experimentation, specifically, Expeditionary Advanced Bases. Inclusion of the Marine Corps in the CWC would allow for the MAGTF to be used as another element of the maritime force, tasked by the warfare commanders like any other Navy asset. 

The Marine Corps corollary to Littoral Operations in a Contested Environment, Expeditionary Advanced Basing Operations, envisions bases that provide “land-based options for increasing the number of sensors and shooters beyond the upper limit imposed by the quantity of seagoing platforms available.” Put more generally, the idea is that groups of Marines would be emplaced on shore to support fleet operations by providing a base from which to collect information, conduct follow-on actions like refueling and rearming, or (once counter-ship systems have been acquired) control areas of key maritime terrain.3 

By distributing forces across geographically disparate locations, these concepts hope to increase the capability for the naval services to survive and project power in less-than-friendly environments. Both concepts call for close integration between the Navy and Marine Corps and both use “sensor” emplacement as one of the reasons for the new operating concept. LOCE calls for “[the creation of] a modular, scalable, and integrated naval network of sea-based and land-based sensors, shooters, and sustainers that provides the capabilities, capacities, and persistent yet mobile forward presence necessary to effectively respond to crises, address larger contingencies, and deter aggression in contested littorals.”[Emphasis added.] EABO, likewise, uses land-based sensors as an argument for the emplacement of expeditionary bases, specifically to “position naval ISR assets”[emphasis added] and “provide expeditionary surface scouting/screening platforms.”

The structural changes outlined in Force Design 2030 were driven by these operating concepts, with the stated purpose to “equip our Marines with mobile, low-signature sensors and weapons that can provide a landward complement to Navy capabilities for surface warfare, antisubmarine warfare, air and missile defense, and airborne early warning.” The Commandant of the Marine Corps specifically calls for future planning and experimentation to “focus on capabilities required to satisfy approved naval concepts of DMO, EABO, and LOCE.”4

These concepts envision the use of platforms (DMO), bases (EABO), and a combination of the two (LOCE) to emplace sensors creating a network of information-collecting devices that develop battlespace awareness and inform the estimate of the naval commander. Members of the Information Warfare community, particularly intelligence officers, might be more familiar with this idea if its authors referred to it as “collection operations” instead of “sensor emplacement” but the gist is the same. While there are kinetic operational reasons for expeditionary bases and distributed platforms, the increased ability to collect intelligence is one of the most significant arguments articulated for these joint and service concepts. Each document calls for a Navy/Marine Corps amphibious team, optimized for the future operating environments, that can create a network of collection assets to inform decision-makers of the situation. The creation of a seamless network of inter-service intelligence assets will require community-wide integration between the two services. Members of the Navy and Marine Corps must develop habits of action in peacetime garrison operations to enable frictionless employment forward. What is the state of current integration and how can the services be brought closer together?

State of Current Integration: Same Department, Different Services

A brief description of the author’s career will provide a useful example of the current state of integration between the naval intelligence enterprises. 

I attended the Ground Intelligence Officer Course at the (then-named) Navy and Marine Corps Intelligence Training Center in the fall of 2015. Even though the Marine Corps instructors were a part of a Marine Detachment in a Navy command and despite the inherently naval nature of the Marine Corps, the curriculum focused on intelligence support to the Marine Corps Planning Process in the context of primarily ground campaigns, and there was little communication with the Navy instructors or students during the course. Although all Navy and Marine Corps training occurred in the same building, the only interactions I had with Navy personnel occurred because my younger brother happened to be in the Navy’s intelligence officer’s course. 

Four years later I attended the MAGTF Intelligence Officer Course at the (tellingly) now-retitled Information Warfare Training Center. During this course—the last formal training required of a Marine Corps Intelligence Officer—the only formal interaction with Navy Intelligence personnel was a three-hour lecture by an Amphibious Ready Group Intelligence Officer. It was a great briefing, but nowhere near enough to prepare students to seamlessly operate with the Navy. At no point in the course did we discuss naval operating concepts, Navy intelligence collection assets, or any of the other topics that would prepare the student to quickly and seamlessly integrate with the fleet intelligence enterprise. 

When I arrived in the fleet at 2d Marine Division, there were three deployment opportunities: the Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), the Unit Deployment Program (UDP), and the Special Purpose Marine Air Ground Task Force-Crisis Response-AFRICOM (SPMAGTF-CR-AF). Only one of these, the MEU, involved interaction with Navy personnel or Navy Intelligence. I deployed on the SPMAGTF-CR-AF, a rotation with tasked mission sets of crisis response and theater security cooperation. This deployment did not require substantive interaction with the Navy or Navy Intelligence personnel. The expectation was that Intelligence Officers in 2d Marine Division deploy once during a three-year tour. This means that roughly only one in three Marine Corps intelligence officers had any experience working in an operational setting with the Navy. 

This experience gap was the norm during garrison training also. I participated in four major exercises at the Marine Expeditionary Force, Division, and Regimental levels: MEF Exercise 2016, Bold Alligator 2016 and 2017, and 2d Marine Division’s Large Scale Exercise 2017. Two of these exercises did not include the Navy whatsoever. While Bold Alligator was intended to be an amphibious exercise, during neither iteration did I ever interact with the Navy’s intelligence personnel. At the completion of my tour, I rotated to the supporting establishment. 

So, to summarize: none of my Marine Corps training or education has substantively addressed naval intelligence subjects and I have no specific operational experience in maritime operations. I will return to the operating forces next summer and if I am not sent to a billet slated to deploy on the MEU, it is likely that I will be a field grade officer who has spent (exponentially) more time underway as a Midshipman than as a Marine, and worked far more extensively with the Royal Marines than the United States Navy. 

My experience is anecdotal, and as such limited to the time and place in which it occurred: II Marine Expeditionary Force from 2015-2018. I am sure I have peers with significantly more naval operating experience than I. The fact, however, that this experience is derived from specific operational employment is indicative of the broader problem: neither of the standard training or career pipelines is deliberately structured to provide joint experience with the other naval service, and as a result, this experience is the exception rather than the norm. Greater integration is required. 

Integrating the Naval Intelligence Enterprise

If the stated intent is that the future Marine Corps and Navy operating forces operate seamlessly with one another, the intelligence warfighting function is no different from the rest of the force. Systemic changes are required to further integrate the naval intelligence enterprises. Following are suggestions for ways to more closely align the Navy and Marine Corps efforts. 

Service Intelligence Centers

The Commandant’s Planning Guidance describes the separation of the Navy and Marine Corps into two services with distinctly different priorities by stating that “The 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, however, removed the preponderance of the [Fleet Marine Force] from fleet operational control and disrupted the long-standing Navy-Marine Corps relationship by creating separate Navy and Marine Corps components within joint forces. Furthermore, Navy and Marine Corps officers developed a tendency to view their operational responsibilities as separate and distinct, rather than intertwined.”5

Nowhere is this more evident than at the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity (MCIA). MCIA was created in 1987 and intended to bridge the gap between the (newly separated from fleet control) Fleet Marine Force and the national Intelligence Community.6 Located in Quantico, Virginia, it currently operates three lines of effort: production of intelligence estimates as required by the supporting establishment, support to the operating forces and intelligence community, and facilitating/coordinating efforts of the Marine Corps Intelligence Enterprise.7 None of these responsibilities seem to be dissimilar from those of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI); except that the institutional separation between the two likely limits coordination. Structure drives function. Establish MCIA as a tenant command under ONI and integrate the service level intelligence centers. Space is available—is the old ONI building being used? 

Doing so would benefit both organizations. ONI would gain subject matter expertise on intelligence support to ground operations and amphibious operations. MCIA’s production responsibilities involve inherently naval concepts and would likely be better served by close coordination with the nation’s premier maritime intelligence authority. Moving MCIA onto the ONI campus and into its structure would allow for routine interaction by reducing the 90-mile round trip required for in-person collaboration. It would also ease interaction with other members of the intelligence community and the other services’ intelligence centers, most of which are located inside the Washington, DC, beltway. 

Since the operating services call for an integrated network of sensors, and the Marine Corps plans to double the number of unmanned aerial vehicles it operates, the cell responsible for processing, exploitation, and dissemination (PED) of intelligence gathered by these vehicles should operate in this proposed structure.8 In the LOCE and EABO constructs, information collected by sensors informs decision-makers of both services and so locating the PED for new Marine Corps ISR at a joint command would represent each service’s equities equally. 

Marine Corps and Navy intelligence officers assigned to the proposed MCIA/ONI combination would operate in an integrated naval intelligence structure and return to the operating forces with an understanding of the other service’s threat concerns and enterprise structure, creating a subset of officers with joint naval expertise as a part of their shore tours. Integrating the service level intelligence centers would shift the bifurcated efforts to a mutual comprehensive focus on the maritime domain beginning with the littorals and stretching to the bluewater ocean. Navy and Marine Corps interests are intertwined; why not their intelligence centers?

Personnel Exchange in Equivalent Billets

Since Marine Aviators attend Navy schools, use Navy-funded aircraft, and are held to Navy maintenance and readiness standards, why not standardize the training and employment of Marine Corps Air Intelligence Officers and Navy Aviation Intelligence Officers assigned to squadrons? Once standardized, these personnel could be exchanged for tours with the other service. Marines could deploy as part of a carrier strike group and learn the Navy Intelligence structure; Navy intelligence officers could integrate into the Marine Air Ground Task Force. Precedents exist, as every Marine unit already deploys with Navy medical and religious personnel. 

This would only work in Aviation Combat Element billets as these are the most similar between the two services. Marine Corps ground intelligence officers, for example, qualify as infantry officers as part of their training pipeline and so have very different expertise than that expected of Navy intelligence officers. However , since the Marine Corps uses Navy standards and funding for its aviation, formally integrating intelligence support systems should not be difficult, thereby creating a permanent reserve of junior officers who have operational experience in the other naval service.

Analysis Exchange

Formalizing a structure for analytic exchange would integrate the two services by allowing analysts to access products across the integrated enterprises. The Marine Corps already uses the Marine Corps Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance Enterprise Knowledge Gateway (MKG). The MKG is an internet portal that resides on secure networks on which analysts upload their products. It allows, for example, an intelligence analyst at III MEF in Okinawa to read the work of analysts at 6th Marine Regiment in Camp Lejeune. Either the Marine Corps could add Navy operational units to the MKG or together the two services could develop a joint architecture for sharing tactical intelligence, enabling seamless integration in garrison and while deployed. Threats are service agnostic. Systems architecture should be as well. 

According to the services’ operating concepts, the Navy and Marine Corps intend to operate together seamlessly in a future naval campaign. Since one of the main arguments for these concepts is the creation of a network of sensors to inform decision-makers, the services’ intelligence and information warfare communities are vital to this effort—these communities can lead through deliberate structural change to involve the other service in its enterprise. The Navy and Marine Corps may be two separate services but when the next war kicks off they will be in the same boat. 

Will McGee is a student at Yale Law School and currently serving as a Captain in the Marine Corps Reserves.  A 2013 graduate of the US Naval Academy, Will earned a Masters of Philosophy in Modern European History at Cambridge University, UK, as a Nolan Scholar, and served eight years as an active-duty Ground Intelligence Officer. 

Endnotes

1 United States Marine Corps, Force Design 2030. https://www.hqmc.marines.mil/Portals/142/Docs/CMC38%20Force%20Design%202030%20Report%20Phase%20I%20and%20II.pdf?ver=2020-03-26-121328-460. 

2 United States Navy and United States Marine Corps, Littoral Operations in a Contested Environment. https://www.candp.marines.mil/Portals/216/documents/Concepts/LOCE%20full%20size%20edition_0.pdf?ver=2018-05-01-133728-797, page 6.

3 United States Marine Corps, Expeditionary Advanced Basing Operations, https://www.candp.marines.mil/Concepts/Subordinate-Operating-Concepts/Expeditionary-Advanced-Base-Operations/.

4 Force Design, 12.

5 United States Marine Corps, Commandant’s Planning Guidance, https://www.hqmc.marines.mil/Portals/142/Docs/%2038th%20Commandant%27s%20Planning%20Guidance_2019.pdf?ver=2019-07-16-200152-700, page 2.

6 John Brown, Christina Clark, Jorge Miranda, Neri Terry, “Marine Corps Intelligence Activity Military and Civilian Interaction” (unpublished manuscript, June 2011), https://www.hqmc.marines.mil/Portals/133/Docs/MCIA%20Marine%20and%20Civilian%20Interaction.pdf.

7 “Marine Corps Intelligence Activity” https://www.candp.marines.mil/Organization/Supporting-Establishment/Marine-Corps-Intelligence-Activity/.

8 Force Design, 7.

Featured Image: U.S. Army Soldiers with 1st Special Forces Group, 1st Special Forces Command, conduct an extraction during an Expeditionary Advance Base Operation exercise at the Northern Training Area, Okinawa, Japan. (U.S. Marine Corps photo)