Strategy

The U.S. Military In Competition: Supporting Effort One

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By Ryan Ratcliffe

“Ultimate excellence lies…in defeating the enemy without ever fighting.” —Sun Tzu

“America is back,” proclaimed President Joe Biden in his first address to the Department of State. “Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy,” he continued, declaring that the United States would repair its alliances and reengage the world to confront global challenges. Speaking to the department that had recently published its comprehensive assessment of relations with China and called for a revival of U.S. foreign policy, the President’s words were likely well received. 

Designed to serve as a modern-day “long telegram,” The Elements of the China Challenge reveals the Chinese Communist Party’s aim to revise world order, highlighting many of the Party’s malign and coercive activities designed to achieve its subversive ambitions. The authors of this seminal work, the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff, conclude by calling for the United States to refashion its foreign policy around the principles of freedom and to reserve the use of military force for when all other measures have failed. 

Diplomacy will certainly be fundamental in addressing the China challenge, but returning it to the forefront of U.S. foreign policy will not occur overnight. Decades of systemic decline have reduced U.S. diplomatic capacity and left the military as the more prolific instrument of national power. Therefore, until the Department of State completes the transformation it requires and returns to primacy, the Department of Defense will need to shoulder some of the burden in answering the China challenge. One such element that the Department of Defense should assist with is countering actions in the gray zone. 

The gray zone is the “contested arena somewhere between routine statecraft and open warfare,” and it includes actions taken to achieve relative geopolitical gains without triggering escalation. So, despite the U.S. military’s preeminence as a joint fighting force (or, more likely, as a testament to it), state actors like the Chinese Communist Party are pursuing and achieving success in the gray zone. These revisionist actors purposefully avoid armed conflict in an effort to evade the lethal arm of U.S. foreign policy, challenging traditional assumptions of strategic deterrence. Left unchecked, these gray zone victories will gradually amass into a direct threat to U.S. national security; this makes it well within the military’s purview to orient on the gray zone. 

To help counter the gray zone strategy the Chinese Communist Party regularly uses, the U.S. military should consider non-traditional approaches to competition. Such creative military support would buy U.S. diplomacy time to rebuild its capacity for securing freedom, while still avoiding armed conflict. This article offers a framework for achieving this non-traditional support from the U.S. military: First, the United States should leverage its military manpower to legally support non-military competition activities. Second, the U.S. military should establish a forward-deployed headquarters to command and control the military’s involvement in competition. Finally, the senior military officer in this competition-focused headquarters should be charged with synchronizing operations in the information environment.

Providing Military Support to Competition

Although there are many definitions, competition is generally viewed as fundamental to international relations. To effectively compete, though, one must develop a thorough understanding of the competition. Therefore, it is important to recognize that the pinnacle of Sun Tzu’s “win without fighting” maxim is not determining the fate of a battle before it is fought; the true measure of excellence is to never even do battle because one’s aims were wholly achieved without conflict.

Recognizing that its competitors seek to achieve their revisionist aims below the threshold of armed conflict, the U.S. military must adapt its deterrence strategies to counter illegal gray zone operations. Deterrence by denial, defined as elevating the probability of operational failure, likely has a greater chance of succeeding in the gray zone than deterrence by punishment, such as taking retaliatory action. To effect deterrence by denial in the gray zone, the U.S. military should enable its interagency and international partners to counter the illicit activity that often underpins gray zone strategies.

Countering malign behavior has many faces: U.S. allies upholding their own sovereignty, partner nations protecting their economic livelihood, and the U.S. government imposing economic sanctions are all examples of ways to achieve competition’s strategic ends. In spite of their critical role in opposing illicit gray zone activities, though, the agencies that confront malign behavior often lack the manpower to reach the point of taking action. Manning shortfalls, exacerbated by the expansive size of the Indo-Pacific, leave the U.S. military’s interagency and international partners unable to muster adequate back-end support for their efforts, such as maintaining robust intelligence pictures or gathering actionable evidence of malign activity.

The U.S. Department of Defense, on the other hand, is more adequately manned for the task of competing in the Indo-Pacific. For example, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command alone has approximately 375,000 military and civilian personnel assigned to its area of responsibility. In contrast, the U.S. Department of State employs only 70,000 individuals throughout the world, and the New Zealand Defence Force is just over 15,000 strong. So, while the U.S. military’s interagency and international partners lack the manpower to identify and track gray zone activity, nearly two decades of asymmetric conflict has left the U.S. military manned, trained, and equipped to provide precisely the type of back-end intelligence and logistical support its partners require. Any manpower that the U.S. military contributes to these partners is likely to have outsized impacts on their ability to compete and counter gray zone actions.

It should be clarified that supporting competition cannot detract from the U.S. military’s lethality, a unique capability it alone provides. Therefore, like any effective strategy, efforts to counter gray zone operations should be focused on the most important and attainable objectives. Careful consideration should be given to preserving the “means” of the U.S. military to protect national security: its combat power. However, supporting competition and retaining combat power are not mutually exclusive. For example, many of the skills required to perform maritime governance, such as fusing multi-source intelligence data or finding and fixing maritime vessels, directly translate to combat operations. Activities supporting competition can and should be used to build operator proficiency, while simultaneously contributing to deterrence by demonstrating credible military power in the region.

A Competition-Focused Command

To synchronize the U.S. military’s support to competition and maintain awareness of the collective risk acceptance, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command should consider establishing a competition-focused headquarters west of the International Date Line. This headquarters would provide the unity of command required to develop the foreign, joint, and diplomatic partnerships needed to compete with a state actor seeking to undermine regional stability. 

Some will view a headquarters west of the International Date Line as incurring too much risk of escalation, but the opposite is more likely true. The U.S. military will be unable to deter illicit gray zone activities without accepting some risk, as a willingness to accept risk demonstrates commitment to one’s adversary. Accepting greater risk does not mean the United States should condone or take wanton action, though, as disparate or conflicting actions could elevate the risk of unintentional or inadvertent escalation. Instead, risk acceptance should be carefully considered for the confluence of the U.S. military’s efforts to support competition. Establishing a forward headquarters, then, directly addresses the issue of risk: it would demonstrate commitment to the United States’ competitors while maintaining a complete picture of the military’s support to competition, thereby decreasing the risk of escalation.

The ideal structure for this organization would be a Combined Joint Interagency Task Force (CJIATF) led by a senior civilian, with a 3-star general or flag officer serving as deputy, and possessing a cabinet of experienced foreign policy advisors and liaison officers. To ensure a “forward mindset”, the CJIATF should be positioned in Guam, Australia, or Palau, and staffed by a mix of deployed and permanent personnel. Such a construct will provide responsive command and control for regional competition, increasing the U.S. military’s ability to support competition while freeing other units to maintain their focus on conventional mission sets and traditional strategic deterrence.

There are many factors that make a CJIATF the ideal choice to serve as the nexus of military support to competition. First, joint task forces provide a “single mission focus” with the ability to “integrate forces…in a dynamic and challenging political environment.” They also foster “de facto interdependence” through an environment of mutual reliance on their members’ contributions. The “combined” and “interagency” modifiers emphasize the need to include a wide variety of partners within this joint task force—partners that should range from U.S. government agencies to a host of international liaison officers.

To effectively navigate the complex requirements of providing military support to external entities, the CJIATF should employ a blend of traditional and novel concepts. For example, the “by, with, and through” approach translates well to competition. Although more commonly associated with armed conflict, this approach offers an outline for orchestrating interagency and international cooperation: The CJIATF strives for actions performed by its partners, with the support of U.S. forces, and through a legal and diplomatic framework. Such an approach would allow the U.S. military to support a wide range of partner actions, while still abiding by international law and applicable U.S. Code. 

Competition demands exactly the kind of interagency and international cooperation that a joint task force promotes. As the stakes of competition continue to rise with tensions following suit, detailed integration between the military, government agencies, and partner nations remains the best hope for diminishing the risk of conflict. Avoiding conflict while preserving the rules-based international order should be considered success in today’s competition, and a CJIATF is uniquely capable of supporting this objective.

Information-Related Synchronization

In addition to enabling partner actions, the CJIATF will need to grapple with the fact that all competition efforts are inexorably tied to the information environment. Instant communication and weaponized social media offer ample opportunity for competitive exploitation, and they present considerable risk of inadvertent escalation. Additionally, misinformation and deep fakes now offer low-cost means to wreak societal havoc with ambiguous attribution. 

Despite some documented success, the United States has struggled to develop a unified understanding of information operations. Difficulty preventing exploitation, such as Russian interference in U.S. elections or Chinese industrial espionage, creates a perception of information vulnerability—a setback the United States must rectify. To fix this, consideration of information operations needs to move from garrison staff, academia, and think tanks to the operational realm. The role of every warfighter has changed: You are no longer simply “doing land operations, you’re doing an information operation in the land domain.” 

The connection between competition and information makes the CJIATF’s responsibilities inherently information-centric. Therefore, in addition to enabling its partners to compete, the CJIATF must also synchronize information operations in support of competition. This focus on gaining advantage in the battle for information dominance makes the CJIATF’s senior military officer a logical choice to serve as the first Joint Force Information Component Commander (JFICC).

The JFICC is a novel approach to the battle-tested functional component commander construct. Commanders designate a subordinate functional component commander to establish unity of command and unity of effort for operations in a specific domain (i.e., there are normally separate component commanders for operations on land, at sea, in the air, etc.). This type of domain-specific synchronization is precisely what the United States needs to overcome its previous setbacks in the information environment. Additionally, operations can have significant effects in the information environment regardless of the domain they are executed in, and the inverse is also true: Actions in the information environment can have real-world impacts in physical domains. 

To manage this cross-domain interaction, the JFICC needs to synchronize the projected effects of all efforts in the region. This robust requirement, combined with the move towards all-domain operations, means the JFICC must be able to deploy their information-related capabilities as a demonstrable force, in line with the forces operating in the other domains. They will then need the authority and capacity to mass this force in support of decisive action. Designating the CJIATF commander as the JFICC directly addresses this requirement by placing “the responsibility and authority for execution of the decisive [information] tasks under a commander vice under a staff officer.”

Although it is non-doctrinal for a joint force commander to serve as a functional component commander, there is some precedent for this: A Special Operations Joint Task Force commander may also serve as the Joint Force Special Operations Component Commander. Comparing special operations forces with information-related capabilities turns out to be rather effective, as neither “own” physical battlespace, neither historically have a dedicated service component, and both often operate below the level of armed conflict.

Any future JFICC will likely be faced with an extraordinarily complex all-domain problem, and will be able to directly impact national strategic objectives. Experience is the best teacher, and the U.S. military should capitalize on the opportunity to advance its ability to operate in the information environment by employing the first JFICC below the threshold of armed conflict. Doing so will provide valuable insight into the dyad of operating in the physical domain and information environment simultaneously—a fundamental challenge of all-domain operations. 

Competition is Not a Nine-to-Five Job

To realize its strategic aims, the United States must make a concerted effort to align its means and ways to achieve its ends, building upon its strengths while improving its deficiencies. Supporting interagency and international partners where command and control resides with a new headquarters commanded by a novel functional component commander presents formidable challenges, but it is precisely the economy-of-force option the United States needs to better compete now. This structure aligns with strategic guidance from the highest levels of the U.S. Government, and it could eventually serve as an example for other theaters to emulate, such as U.S. Africa Command.

Finally, a subtle but crucial aspect of implementing this construct is that it acknowledges the gray zone operating environment for what it is: a contest of wills without violence. Left unchecked, these gray zone strategies could lead to a Tzu-esque defeat of the rules-based international order before Clausewitzian force is ever used. With this recognition, the U.S. military must shift its approach to competition from a “nine-to-five” business model and begin applying effort commensurate with traditional military operations.

Utilizing the U.S. military to support competition will likely be difficult and often uncomfortable. Additionally, establishing another forward-deployed headquarters will require both personal sacrifice and significant monetary commitment, and appointing a new functional component commander will challenge traditional military thought. There is, however, something much worse than these changes: failure to levy the existing force against today’s challenges with the hope that tomorrow’s force will be more capable of achieving success. Hope is not a viable course of action when national security is at stake.

As put forth in The Elements of the China Challenge, the United States needs to mobilize the global forces who ascribe to the existing world order and are willing to defend it, keeping one aim in mind: securing freedom. The forward-mindset and combined, interagency nature of this supporting approach will do exactly that: ensure the United States’ efforts align with and support the strategic interests of its partners in the Indo-Pacific. This paradigm shift could be the rallying cry that unites a constellation of allies and partners to form the whole-of-society approach this contest will require. The time for action is now; the world order we know depends on it.

 Major Ryan “Bevo” Ratcliffe is an EA-6B Electronic Countermeasures Officer and a Forward Air Controller in the United States Marine Corps, currently assigned to I MEF Information Group. He will begin pursuing a Master of International Public Policy from The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in August 2021.  

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Marine Corps, Department of the Navy, or Department of Defense.

Featured image: A JH-7 fighter bomber attached to a naval aviation brigade under the PLA Northern Theater Command taxies on the runway with drogue parachute during a flight training exercise in early January, 2021. (eng.chinamil.com.cn/Photo by Duan Yanbing)

Podcast

Sea Control 251 – Undersea, Out of Mind with Dr. Christian Bueger and Dr. Tobias Liebetrau

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By Jared Samuelson

Dr. Christian Bueger and Dr. Tobias Liebetrau join the program to discuss real and imagined threats to undersea cables, infrastructure, and the complexities of regulating and protecting an international network. 

Download Sea Control 251 – Undersea, Out of Mind with Dr. Christian Bueger and Dr. Tobias Liebetrau

Links

1. “Protecting hidden infrastructure: The security politics of the global submarine data cable network,” by Dr. Christian Bueger and Dr. Tobias Liebetrau, Contemporary Security Policy, March 29, 2021.
2. SafeSeas Network Website

Jared Samuelson is Executive Producer and Co-Host of the Sea Control podcast. Contact him at [email protected].

Future Tech

Software-Defined Tactics and Great Power Competition

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By LT Sean Lavelle, USN

There are two components to military competency: understanding and proficiency. To execute a task, like driving a ship, one must first understand the fundamentals and theory—the rules of navigation, how the weather impacts performance, how a ship’s various controls impact its movement. Understanding is stable and military personnel forget the fundamentals slowly. Learning those fundamentals, though, does not eliminate the need to practice. Failing to practice tasks like maneuvering the ship in congested waters or evaluating potential contacts of interest will quickly degrade operational proficiency.

In the coming decades, human understanding of warfighting concepts will still be paramount to battlefield success. Realistic initial training and high-end force-on-force exercises will be critical to building that understanding. However, warfighters cross-trained as software developers will make it far easier to retain proficiency without as much rote, expensive practice. Their parent units will train them to make basic applications, and they will use these skills to translate their hard-won combat understanding into a permanent proficiency available to anyone with the most recent software update.

These applications, called software-defined tactics, will alert tacticians to risk and opportunity on the battlefield, ensuring they can consistently hit the enemy’s weak points while minimizing their own vulnerabilities. They will speed force-wide learning by orders of magnitude, create uniformly high-performing units, and increase scalability of conventional forces.

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Imagine an F-35 section leader commanding two F-35 fighters tasked to patrol near enemy airspace and kill any enemy aircraft who approach. As the F-35s establish a combat air patrol in the assigned area, the jet’s sensors indicate there are two flights of adversary aircraft approaching the formation, one from off the nose to the north and the other off the right wing, from the east. Each of these flights consists of four bandits that are individually overmatched by the advanced F-35s. Safety is to the south.

These F-35s have enough missiles within the section to reliably kill four enemies, but are facing eight. Since the northern group of bandits are a bit closer, the section leader decides to move north and kill them. The section’s volley of missiles all achieve solid hits, and there are now four fewer enemy aircraft to threaten the larger campaign.

Now out of missiles, the section turns south to head back home. That’s when the section leader realizes the mistake. As the F-35s flowed northward, they traveled farther away from safety while the eastern group of bandits continued to close on the F-35s, cutting off their path home. 

The only options at this point are to try to travel around the bandits or go through them. A path around them would run the fighters out of fuel, so the flight leader goes straight for the four enemy aircraft, hoping that the bandits will have seen their friends shot down and run away in fear.

The gambit fails, however, and the remaining enemy aircraft close with the F-35s and shoot them down. What should have been an easy victory ended in a tactical stalemate, and in a war where the enemy can build their simple aircraft faster than America can build complex F-35s, the 2:1 exchange ratio is in their favor strategically.

This could have gone differently.

Persistent and Available Tactical Lessons 

Somebody in the F-35 fleet had likely made a mistake similar to this example during a training evolution long before the fateful dogfight. They might have even taken a few days out of their schedule to write a thoughtful lessons-learned paper about it. This writing is critically important. It communicates to other pilots the fundamental knowledge required to succeed in combat. However, success in combat demands not just understanding, but proficiency as well. An infantryman who has not fired a rifle in a few years likely still understands how to shoot, but their lack of practice means they will struggle at first.

Under a software-defined tactics regime, in addition to writing a paper, the pilot could have written software that would have alerted future pilots about the impending danger. While those pilots would still need to understand the risk, ever-watching software would alert them to risks in real-time so that a lack of recent practice would not be fatal. A quick software update to the F-35 fleet would have dramatically and permanently reduced the odds of anyone ever making that mistake again.

The program would not have had to be complex. It could have run securely, receiving data from the underlying mission system without transmitting data back to the aircraft’s mission computers. This one-way data pipe would have eliminated the potential for ad-hoc software to accidentally hamper the safety of the aircraft.

The F-35’s mission computer in our example already had eight hostile tracks displayed. The F-35’s computer also knew how many missiles it had loaded in its weapons bay. If that data were pushed to a software-defined tactics application, the coder-pilot could have written a program that executed the following steps:

  1. Determine how many targets can be attacked, given the missiles onboard.
  2. If there are enough missiles to attack them all, recommend attacking them all. If there are more hostile tracks than missiles (or a predefined missile-to-target ratio), run the following logic to determine which targets to prioritize.
  3. Determine all the possible ordered combinations of targets. There are 1,680 combinations in the original example—a small number for a computer.
  4. For each combination, simulate the engagement and determine if an untargeted aircraft could cut off the escape towards home. Store the margin of safety distance.
  5. If a cutoff is effective in a given iteration, reject that combination of targets and test the next one.
  6. Recommend the combination of targets to the flight commander with the widest clear path home. Alert the flight commander if there is no course of action with a clear path home.

This small program would have instantly told the pilot to engage the eastern targets, and that engaging the targets to the north would have allowed the eastern targets to cut off the F-35s’ route to safety. Following this recommendation would have allowed the F-35s to maintain a 4:0 kill ratio and live to fight another day.

A simple version of this program could have been written by two people in a single day—16 man-hours—if they had the right tools. Completing tactical testing in a simulator and ensuring the software’s reliability would take another 40-80 man-hours. 

Alternatively, writing a compelling paper about the situation would take a bit less time: around 20-40 hours. However, a force of 1,000 pilots spending 30 minutes each to read the paper would require 500 man-hours. Totaling these numbers, results in 96 man-hours on the high-end for software-defined tactics versus 520 man-hours on the low-end for writing and reading. While both are necessary, writing software is much more efficient than writing papers.

To truly train the force not to make this mistake without software-defined tactics, every pilot would need to spend around five hours—a typical brief, simulator, and debrief length—in training events that stressed the scenario. That yields an additional 10,000 man-hours, given one student and one instructor for each training event. At that point, all of the training effort might reduce instances of the mistake by about 75%.

To maintain that level of performance, aircrew would need to practice this scenario once every six months in simulators. That is 10,000 hours every six months. Over five years, you’d need to spend more than 100,000 man-hours to maintain proficiency in this skill across the force.

Software-defined tactics applications do not need ongoing practice to maintain currency. They do need to be updated periodically to account for tactical changes and to improve them, though. Budgeting 100 man-hours per year is reasonable for an application of this size. That is 500 man-hours over five years.

Pen-and paper updates require 100,000 man-hours for a 75% reduction in a mistake. Software-driven updates require 596 man-hours for a nearly 100% reduction. It is not close. 

When a software developer accidentally creates a bug, they code a test that will alert them if anyone else ever makes that same mistake in the future. In this way, a whole development team learns and gets more reliable with every mistake they make. Software-defined tactics offer that same power to military units.

Software Defined Tactics in Action

While the F-35 example is hypothetical, software-defined tactics are not. The Navy’s P-8 community has been leveraging a software-defined tactics platform for the last four years to great effect. The P-8 is a naval aircraft primarily designed to hunt enemy submarines. Localization—the process by which a submarine-hunting asset goes from initial detection to accurate estimate of the target’s position, course, and speed—is among the most challenging parts of prosecuting adversary submarines.

On the P-8, the tactical coordinator decides on and implements the tactics the P-8 will use to localize a submarine. It takes about 18 months of time in their first squadron to qualify as a tactical coordinator and demonstrate reliable proficiency in this task. These months include thousands of hours of study, hundreds of hours in the aircraft and simulator, and dozens of hours defending their knowledge in front of more experienced tacticians.

When examining the data the P-8 community collects, there is a clear and massive disparity in performance between inexperienced and experienced personnel. There is another massive disparity between those experienced tacticians who have been selected to be instructors because of demonstrated talent and those who have not. In other words, there are both experience and innate talent factors with large impacts on performance in submarine localization.

The community’s software-defined tactics platform has made it so that a junior tactician (inexperienced and possibly untalented) with 6-months of time in platform performs exactly as well as an instructor (experienced and talented) with 18-months in platform. It does this largely by reducing tactician mistakes—alerting them to the opportunities the tactical situation presents and dissuading them from enacting poor tactical responses.

This makes the P-8 force extremely scalable in wartime. In World War II, America beat Japan because it was able to quickly and continually train high-quality personnel. It took nine months to train a basic fighter pilot in 1942. It takes two or three years to go from initial flight training until arriving at a fleet squadron in 2021. Reducing time to train with software-defined tactics will restore that rapid scalability to America’s modern forces.

The P-8 community has had similar results for many tactical scenarios. It does this, today, with very little integration into the P-8s mission system. Soon, its user-built applications will be integrated with a one-way data pipe from the aircraft’s mission system that will enable the full software-defined tactics paradigm. A team called the Software Support Activity at the Naval Air Systems Command will manage the security of this system and provide infrastructure support. Another team consisting of P-8 operators at the Maritime Patrol and Reconnaissance Weapons School will develop applications based on warfighter needs. 

Technical Implementation

Implementing this paradigm across the US military will yield a highly capable force that can learn at speeds orders of magnitude faster than its adversaries. Making the required technical changes will be inexpensive.

On the P-8, implementing a secure computing environment with one-way data flow was always part of the acquisition plan. That should be the case for all future platform acquisitions. All it requires is an open operating system and a small amount of computing resources reserved for software-defined tactics applications.

Converting legacy platforms will be slightly more difficult. If a platform has no containerized computing environment, it is possible to add one, though. The Air Force recently deployed Kubernetes—a framework that allows for securely containerized applications to be inserted in computing environments—on a U-2. Feeding mission-system data to this environment and allowing operators to build applications with it will enable software-defined tactics.

If it is possible to securely implement this on the U-2, which was built in 1955, any platform in the U.S. arsenal can be modified to accept software-defined tactics applications.

Human Implementation

From a technical standpoint, implementing this paradigm is trivial. From the human perspective, it is a bit harder. However, investing in operational forces’ technical capabilities without the corresponding human capabilities will result in a force that operates in the way industry believes it should, rather than the way warfighters know it should. A tight feedback loop between the battlefield reality and the algorithms that help dominate that battlefield is essential. Multi-year development cycles will not keep up.

As a first step, communities should work to identify the personnel they already have in their ranks with some ability to develop software. About a quarter of Naval Academy graduates enter the service each year with majors that require programming competency. These officers are a largely untapped resource.

The next step is to provide these individuals with training and tools to make software. An 80-hour, two-week course customized to the individual’s talent level is generally enough to get a new contributor to a productive level on the P-8’s team. A single application pays for this investment many times over. Tools available on the military’s unclassified and secret networks like DI2E and the Navy’s Black Pearl enable good practices for small-scale software development.

Finally, this cadre of tactician-programmers should be detailed to warfare development centers and weapons schools during their non-operational tours. Writing code and staying current with bleeding-edge tactical issues should be their primary job once there. Given the significant contribution this group will make to readiness, this duty should be rewarded at promotion boards to maintain technical competence in senior ranks.

A shortcut to doing this could be to rely on contractors to develop software-defined tactics. To maximize the odds of success, organizations should ensure that these contractors 1) are co-located with experienced operators, 2) are led by a tactician with software-development experience, 3) can deploy software quickly, 4) have at least a few tactically-current, uniformed team members, and 5) are funded operationally vice project-based so they can switch projects quickly as warfighters identify new problems. 

The Stakes

Great power competition is here. China’s economy is now larger than America’s on a purchasing parity basis. America no longer has the manufacturing capacity advantage that led to victory in World War II, nor the ability to train highly-specialized warfighters rapidly. To maintain America’s military dominance in the 21st century, it must leverage the incredible talent already resident in its armed forces.

When somebody in an autocratic society makes a mistake, they hide that mistake since punishment can be severe. The natural openness that comes from living in a democratic society means that American military personnel are able to talk about mistakes they have made, reason about how to stop them from happening again, and then implement solutions. The U.S. military must give its people the tools required to implement better, faster, and more permanent solutions. 

Software-defined tactics will yield a lasting advantage for American military forces by leveraging the comparative advantages of western societies: openness and a focus on investing in human capital. There is no time to waste.

LT Sean Lavelle is an active-duty naval flight officer who instructs tactics in the MQ-4C and P-8A. He leads the iLoc Software Development Team at the Maritime Patrol and Reconnaissance Weapons School and holds degrees from the U.S. Naval Academy and Johns Hopkins University. The views stated here are his own and are not reflective of the official position of the U.S. Navy or Department of Defense.

Featured image: A P-8A Poseidon conducts flyovers above the Enterprise Carrier Strike Group during exercise Bold Alligator 2012. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Daniel J. Meshel/Released)

Force Development

Learning for Warfighters: A Conversation with Major General William F. Mullen III (ret.)

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By Mie Augier, Major Sean F. X. Barrett, and Major Kevin Druffel-Rodriguez

Major General William F. Mullen III, USMC, retired as Commanding General (CG), Training and Education Command (TECOM) on October 1, 2020, completing a career that featured an unusually vast amount of experience across Marine Corps training and education commands. Major General Mullen commanded Marine Corps Tactics and Operations Group at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center (MCAGCC) Twentynine Palms, CA, and he also served as President, Marine Corps University (MCU), concurrently serving as CG, Education Command, as well as CG, MCAGCC.

While CG, TECOM, Major General Mullen spearheaded the effort to publish Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication (MCDP) 7 Learning, the Marine Corps’ first new doctrinal publication issued since 2001, to explain why learning is critically important to the profession of arms. In the conversation that follows, we discussed some of the themes in MCDP 7, learning to become learners, and the importance of building learning cultures in warfighting organizations.

What inspired your own interest and curiosity in learning, and how did you first experience the benefits of being a lifelong learner?

I have always been interested in learning and reading and what it can do for you. But I had never heard it articulated how much it can actually do for you until I was a company commander at 2nd Battalion, 6th Marines. The battalion commander was LtCol John R. Allen (later General Allen), and he exemplified everything that was possible with reading, the 5,000-year-old mind, for example, and using that for knowledge and experience.

As an example, we had a short notice deployment to deal with Haitian and Cuban migrants. Before we deployed, he gave us a couple chapters of problems the U.S. Army had had with POWs (prisoners of war) in Korea as a read-ahead for the things we would likely face (e.g., dealing with large, angry crowds). Reinforcing this, LtCol Joseph F. Dunford (later Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Dunford) took over as battalion commander after Allen, and he also exemplified this ideal of being a lifelong learner. They showed us what was possible from learning. They were so far past their peers in their ability to think and execute, and it kept getting better as they became more senior.

August 11, 2013, at sea on USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD-6): Lance Cpl. Justin L. Morrow, a fire direction controlman with Echo Battery, Battalion Landing Team 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, and a native of St. Augustine, Fla., reads a book from the Commandant of the Marine Corps’ reading list. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Paul Robbins)

You argue the mind is a muscle and therefore atrophies when not exercised. This metaphor conveys not only the importance of learning, but also introduces an element of “pain.”1 What is the origin of your understanding of this metaphor?

We all know that Marines like to exercise, so when I was talking to them for my “PME on PME” lecture,2 one of the things I was trying to get across is that your brain needs to be exercised as well. I would ask them what happens if you don’t PT, you don’t exercise. Your muscles atrophy. Your physical abilities atrophy. The brain is the same way.3

In the past, I have read studies about Alzheimer’s patients and how to stave off the effects of memory loss. I noticed that people who stayed more mentally engaged, learned new languages, read a lot, and played challenging games were able to exercise their mental synapses, which allowed them to continue to think and be engaged instead of atrophying. Regarding the whole pain aspect, I would ask them, “How many times have you read a really hard book, and you are trying to work your way through it, and your brain is just tired?” This is just like a strenuous exercise, but for the mind. For me, philosophy is that way. I try and read it and work through it, but I have to take it in small doses because it is tough.

One way to train the mind-muscle is by reading. How did you become someone who reads broadly?4

Part of it is that I read fairly quickly, and that was developed when I finished being a company commander. I went to Inspector-Instructor (I&I) duty in Milwaukee and got back into my alma mater to get a Master’s in Political Science. So, I was working on my Master’s, working I&I duty, which if you do it right is more than a full-time job, and I was also doing my Command and Staff (non-resident course) box of books all at the same time. I had to figure out ways to read quickly. I wrote an article called “Advanced Reading Skills” that came out in the Gazette that talks about the process and how I did all that.5

I always knew I wanted to cast my net widely, but I couldn’t really articulate it until I saw LtGen Paul K. Van Riper articulate it. He said we are trying to understand human beings because we lead human beings. We try to get them to do things that they naturally would not do. How do you understand human beings? How do you understand all the things that impact our ability to get our job done if you aren’t reading widely? Some people say, “I never read fiction,” but some of the most creative things I have ever come across, with regards to ideas, are in fiction. Some of the things you read about, you ask, “Why can’t we do that?” It gives you ideas. When it comes to understanding the human condition and what makes people tick, human beings really haven’t changed that much. The character of war has changed, but the nature of war hasn’t. It is still human beings going against each other—opposing wills. So how do you understand people and what makes them tick?

What books have you found useful for inspiring others to pursue a lifetime of learning?

I wrote an article, “A Warriors Mind,”5 in which I talk about the different categories if you want to know more about this and all the books I listed. There are only five in each category. One of those categories is, “How do you hook their interest?” How do you get them reading more? That came from watching the phenomenon of the Harry Potter books. Kids who really wouldn’t read anything were reading books that are 700-800 pages long and just eating it up. That hooked their interest, and then they expanded onto other things because they realized that reading is not a chore. It is actually enjoyable.

So how do you get them interested? Where are they at intellectually? Where is their vocabulary? What is their comprehension level? Those are the important things because if you hand someone a dense book, and they haven’t been reading much, that’s a dead end. But if you hand them some other things that you can use to build up to something high-end, that’s a better approach. So, I would ask them, “Where are they at now, what have they read?” The biggest thing that has hooked people’s interest is historical fiction, especially well-written historical fiction. That really gets them enthusiastic and wanting to learn more, and they start expanding their interests from there.

MCDP 7 Learning has been out for a year now. How did it come together? And with the benefit of hindsight, is there anything you would have done differently? For example, are there any additional topics you would have included or ideas you would have framed differently?

To clarify, I didn’t write it. I had a writing team who did the writing, but it was my idea to initiate the writing of it, and I was heavily involved in the editorial process and reviewing it. I would go back to them and ask questions, ask them to factor in things, and try to get it “MCDP 1-like.”

The inspiration for doing it was frustration. MCDP 1 is our foundational document. It is our maneuver warfare philosophy. It is supposed to be the basis for everything we do, but a majority of the folks in the Marine Corps don’t understand it, mainly because they have not read it. For those who have read it, they have not read enough around it to understand what it means, how you operationalize it, because we aren’t studying our profession.

There are a lot of folks who just can’t be bothered. “Reading is a chore,” or “I joined the Marine Corps so I didn’t have to go to school anymore.” Officer, SNCO, enlisted, it doesn’t matter—everybody needs to understand it. So learning is about how you go about learning your profession. Continuous learning is a lifelong pursuit, and it is the only thing that enables you to understand what MCDP 1 says and how you then operationalize it and live by it in your units. Education prepares you for the unknown. What happens when plans have to change? And that always happens. Education is far more important than training.

What would I do differently? Right now, I can’t say that I would do anything that much differently because the main emphasis was to get it out in recognizable form. I sent it out to a couple of people, a number of people who I highly respect. Some of them came back and said, “We don’t need it,” and I was a little frustrated by that response, until I realized: Well, they lived it. Of course, they understand it, it is intuitive to them.

No, they didn’t need it, but it is not for them. It is for all of those folks who do not understand and don’t understand the why—why learning is so important. So I can’t say that I’d do it any differently. But I can say that it does need to be reviewed in about five or ten years or so. Take a look at it and see what needs to change to keep it current with education technology and the theories going on. But it was also to prod, to help change the Marine Corps from industrial age learning to information age learning, which is a very different approach, and we are not built that way. And we needed some serious dynamite under our foundation to break out of our bureaucratic processes.

You wrote the TECOM guidance that led to MCDP 7 and also had some interesting thoughts about how to take PME beyond the industrial age. What motivated you to issue that guidance?

The big piece was the why—why learning was so important. I have been talking about it for years, doing the “PME on PME” lecture as well, and advocating for it well before that—because of what I was seeing: the lack of people studying their profession and understanding the requirement to learn.

And then, thinking about what it would take to start to try and change the culture of the Marine Corps to become more of a learning culture. We were explaining the why and trying to get the culture to change through a doctrinal publication. I didn’t expect it to have the importance of MCDP 1, but I remember the Commandant, General Robert B. Neller, asking the question, “How do we re-invigorate maneuver warfare?” The reason he asked that question was that most people have not read it, they have not studied it, they haven’t studied the requirements.7 And all of this came together, and I talked with General David H. Berger when he was in his Deputy Commandant, Combat Development and Integration (DC CD&I) job, my immediate boss my first year at TECOM, and he thought the idea had merit. And then when he became Commandant, we sent it up to him after a brief review process, and he signed it.

So you had a little bit of inspiration from FMFM 1?

Yes, absolutely, because you have to understand how to take intelligent initiative. You have to understand what intent is and then be able to have the mental agility to adjust as things change around you. All of that requires continuous learning. If you decide that you don’t need to learn anymore and that you left all of that behind when you left school, you end up with people who might take the initiative—but there’s a good chance it is the wrong initiative.

MCDP 7 refers to learning organizations and learning cultures. How do these organizational elements interact with individual-level learning, and how can we cultivate them more effectively?

We have to set the foundation for the expectation that when you join the profession, continuous learning and continuing professional development during the career—ideally, through life—is absolutely required. And if that is too much work for you, then you need to find employment elsewhere. Because the way I look at it is, if we are not studying our profession, if we don’t keep up with it, it is like a doctor or a lawyer who stops studying. Who wants to go to them?

We are in the most intellectually and physically demanding profession on the face of the earth, and the price of getting it wrong is that the people we are in command of end up dying.

We shouldn’t have to figure it out by filling body bags. But we do, too often. I saw it in Iraq, I saw it in Afghanistan. And that is not right.

There should be the understanding that learning is something you need to get after as a professional. But if you don’t because you are young, and you just haven’t figured that part out yet—whoever is in charge of you should tell you, “You better get after it! Here are some ways to do it, and let me help you with it. Here are some things to read, we are going to talk about them. I will help coach you and move you along.” That is the kind of thing that has to happen in a good profession and in a good unit.

How do active learning approaches benefit leadership development?

Part of it is taking responsibility instead of needing others to push you through things. One of the active learning experiments we did was out at the Marine Corps Communications-Electronics School (MCCES) out at Twentynine Palms. One of the questions I asked when I first took over was, instead of Marines having to wait around to join a course, can’t we hand them a syllabus as soon as they show up, preferably on some electronic device? They start to read through the syllabus at their own pace. If there is a lab requirement, it is hands on, it is available to them 24/7. The instructors are there to coach, teach, mentor, and help them through the process, and they work through it with their peers—but they work at their own pace. And when they have demonstrated the necessary level of competence, they move on, cutting down on time waiting around.

In the experiments we did, the Marines loved it. We experimented at Marine Corps Intelligence Schools, and the Marines loved it. There were a couple of other places where we experimented. We need to be able to take advantage of the fact that the young Marines are smart, great with technology, and can learn at their own pace. It also is then about building trust by giving Marines control over their learning. Let them show initiative as well.

In both MCDP 7 and your “PME on PME” lecture, you talk about the importance of critical thinking, judgment, and decision-making. What other important post-industrial age skills and attitudes do you find important, and how can we improve at cultivating them in our PME institutions?

The understanding that comes from continuous learning—being better educated, being more openminded, being more mentally agile—makes Marines more capable. Some people have advocated that the kinds of skills that special operations forces (SOF) have are needed—the maturity, the knowledge, the skills. I’m not advocating that we need to be SOF, but we certainly need to be more SOF-like. We have to get our Marines more mature, better focused. In today’s operating environment, people have to be able to think, take the initiative, have good judgment, and understand what is going on around them.

Thinking about the differences between rote memorization and critical thinking, what shifts have to occur to transition from teaching warfighters what to do and what to think to how to think critically and independently?8

Part of it is getting out of the bureaucratic process we have established and that has been ground into everybody, probably since the mid-1960s. TECOM is part of the problem because we inspect that process, the industrial age process, which tells people what to think, which encourages them to sit down and wait to be told what to do.

So, shifting out of that—one part of that was sending a letter to the commanders of all the schools in TECOM saying, “Now you have the authority to experiment. Tell me what you want to do. And that is what we will hold you to, and no longer the part of the inspection process that does not apply.” But we need to figure out how to do that in the most effective manner—not necessarily in the most efficient manner. Efficiency is good, but it is less important than effectiveness in my mind.

Maj. Gen. William F. Mullen III, off-going commanding general, Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, gives a speech during the installation’s change of command ceremony, Twentynine Palms, Calif., June 8, 2018. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Rachel K. Porter)

How do you shift, and how will it look after? I don’t have the answer right now, but we need to at least start moving, and that is what we are doing. We have started, but we need to expand. Every Marine knows he or she may get called to go into combat or to support it. They need to be able to show initiative and figure out what to do, not wait around to be told.

You mention the importance of experimentation, active learning, and critical thinking. What are some of the critical barriers to cultivating and implementing them in our organizations?

For sure, bureaucracy and the inspection process—the formal school’s inspection process, which holds people in a straitjacket. And what I experienced was, some colonels, as soon as you gave them an inch, and the ability to experiment, they took it and ran like you would expect a good colonel to do. Others were very hesitant, didn’t know what to do, and said, “No, we are just going to continue doing what we are doing.” And that was tremendously frustrating. You have been given guidance. Here is the intent. You have top cover—get after it. You have the ability to take some risk, especially in a training environment where the risk you are taking is being more effective and making sure Marines understand.

One of the buzzwords I had was we have to get away from focusing on process, and we have to focus on product. What do the Marines understand and retain once they move out to the operating forces? That is what is most important. Everything we do should focus more on that: helping them understand more, retain better, think better—not the process of just moving things through and making sure you have all the “i’s” dotted and all the “t’s” crossed. That, to me, is our biggest obstacle: our own processes and bureaucracies and being so focused on process.

Major General Mullen was commissioned in 1986 and served 34 years as an infantry officer, serving in the operating forces with 1/3, 2/6, and RCT 8. He participated in Operation SEA SIGNAL dealing with Haitian and Cuban migrants, Contingency Operations in the former Yugoslavia, several counter-narcotics operations, as well as three combat tours in Iraq. Supporting establishment tours included the FAST Company, Pacific; Inspector-Instructor, F Company 2/24; Marine Aide to the President; the Joint Staff; and, CO, MCTOG. As a general officer he served as President, Marine Corps University; Director, Capability Development Directorate; Target Engagement Authority for Operation INHERENT RESOLVE; CG, MCAGCC; and ended his service as CG, Marine Corps Training and Education Command (TECOM). Major General Mullen retired on Oct 1, 2020 and is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Colorado. He also recently started as Professor of Practice at the Naval Postgraduate School (Graduate School of Defense Management). He co-authored the book Fallujah Redux which was published in 2014.

Dr. Mie Augier is Professor in the Graduate School of Defense Management, and Defense Analysis Department, at NPS. She is a founding member of NWSI and is interested in strategy, organizations, leadership, innovation, and how to educate strategic thinkers and learning leaders.

Major Sean F. X. Barrett, PhD is an intelligence officer currently serving at Headquarters Marine Corps Intelligence Division. He has previously deployed in support of Operations IRAQI FREEDOM, ENDURING FREEDOM, ENDURING FREEDOM-PHILIPPINES, and INHERENT RESOLVE.

Major Kevin C. Druffel-Rodriguez is an active duty Marine Corps combat engineer officer. He is currently the operations officer for the Headquarters Marine Corps Directorate of Analytics & Performance Optimization.

References

[1] Mortimer J. Adler, “Invitation to the Pain of Learning,” Journal of Educational Sociology 14, no. 6 (Feb. 1941): 358-363.

[2] “MajGen Mullen’s PME on PME,” October 17, 2019, Marine Corps Association, video, 1:41:49, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcPSB5Edbx4.

[3] One of the more interesting receptions of MCDP 7 is Jocko Willink, Echo Charles, and Dave Berke’s detailed reading of it on Jocko Podcast. They discuss important themes in MCDP 7, such as continuous learning and needing to exercise your mind. Jocko Willink, Echo Charles, and Dave Berke, “227: Learning for Ultimate Winning. With Dave Berke. New Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication. MCDP 7 Learning,” April 29, 2020, Jocko Podcast, podcast, 2:21:27, https://jockopodcast.com/2020/04/29/227-learning-for-ultimate-winning-with-dave-berke-new-marine-corps-doctrinal-publication-mcdp-7-learning/ and Jocko Willink, Echo Charles, and Dave Berke, “228: Put Pressure on Your Mind, Be Your Own General and Be Your Own Soldiers. MCDP 7, Pt. 2 With Dave Berke,” May 6, 2020, Jocko Podcast, podcast, 3:08:13, https://jockopodcast.com/2020/05/06/228-put-pressure-on-your-mind-be-your-own-general-and-be-your-own-soldiers-mcdp-7-pt-2-with-dave-berke/.

[4] Epstein notes the importance of intellectual range and agility in David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World (New York: Riverhead Books, 2019).

[5] William F. Mullen, III, “Advanced Reading Skills: Techniques to Getting Started,” Marine Corps Gazette Blog (Apr. 2019): B1-B5.

[6] William F. Mullen III, “A Warrior’s Mind: How to Better Understand the ‘Art’ of War,” Marine Corps Gazette 103, no. 6 (June 2019): 6-7.

[7] For a more detailed discussion, see William F. Mullen, III, “Reinvigorating Maneuver Warfare: Our Priorities for Manning, Training, Equipping, and Educating Should Be on Our Close Combat Units,” Marine Corps Gazette 104, no. 7 (July 2020): 62-66.

[8] For an overview of some changes already underway in the Marine Corps, see Gidget Fuentes, “Marine Infantry Training Shifts From ‘Automaton’ to Thinkers, As School Adds Chess to the Curriculum,” USNI News, December 15, 2020, https://news.usni.org/2020/12/15/marine-infantry-training-shifts-from-automaton-to-thinkers-as-school-adds-chess-to-the-curriculum.

Featured Image: PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii (Jan. 10, 2020) – Marines and Sailors with the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit’s Maritime Raid Force secure a simulated casualty during Visit, Board, Search and Seizure training. (Official U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Isaac Cantrell)

Fostering the Discussion on Securing the Seas.