Out within the Indian Ocean, the maritime militia’s unmanned craft approached the Marine-led worldwide process pressure, and a younger sergeant deployed his personal small submersibles to satisfy the risk. Whereas the Marines’ new methods used synthetic intelligence to synchronize a response to enemy drone swarms, their operator nonetheless confronted the timeless problem of the ocean. He struggled to manage his drones as they unfold out beneath the crashing ocean waves. This cat-and-mouse sport of reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance nonetheless relied on ideas honed since WWII: a mixture of technical and human-centric skillsets that will allow a cross-functional workforce of Marines, Marine Raiders, and allied companions to prevail.
This vignette, though primarily based within the technological developments of in the present day, is ready within the late 2030s. It’s a part of our effort at Marine Forces Particular Operations Command to make use of fiction to see into the longer term.
Fictional intelligence, or FICINT, tales, as outlined by Ghost Fleet and Burn-In authors Peter Singer and August Cole, signify a technique to envision future eventualities with operationally-informed fiction writing. Our command labored with each authors—recognized for galvanizing discussions about change inside the Protection Division—to mentor present Marine Raiders in publishing three FICINT tales which have already helped drive dialogue on the evolution of MARSOC into 2040.
On this present decade, we’ve been working to implement the imaginative and prescient and technique specified by 2018’s “MARSOF 2030” and its supporting working idea of 2021, planning for our future capabilities and employment with our colleagues throughout Particular Operations, the Marine Corps, and the Joint Drive. These paperwork laid out the challenges: our nation’s adversaries and their proxies are unceasing of their use of cyber assaults, disinformation campaigns, geopolitical incursions, disruption of economic maritime commerce, and financing of malicious actors to realize strategic benefit. Marine Particular Operations Command acknowledged the necessity to illuminate, contextualize and counter these efforts whereas creating effects-based dilemmas at a tempo adversaries can’t match. In addition they outlined the capabilities our forces must prevail, described the environments through which they are going to function, and sought to align MARSOC as a connecting file between U.S. SOCOM’s modernization efforts and the Marine Corps’ future working ideas.
Our conceptual framework is quickly turning into a actuality. Deployed Marine Particular Operations Forces acquire persistent placement and entry to politically delicate environments and develop enduring relationships with our allies’ and companions’ army leaders. As Marines, we’re particularly suited to function in littoral areas—the place nearly all of the world’s inhabitants facilities are situated, and the preponderance of financial exercise happens. We’re offering our Marine Raiders with the superior coaching, ways, and applied sciences that underpin our working idea. Raiders are strengthening and enabling allies and companions, illuminating, and deterring malign actions, and enabling the velocity and precision of a Joint Drive response if we should escalate from competitors to disaster and battle.
However at the same time as we offer options for in the present day’s challenges, our Marine Raiders proceed to evolve from the strategic imaginative and prescient specified by MARSOF 2030 in direction of the ever-increasing strategic and operational challenges anticipated within the following decade. It is because of this that we turned to FICINT writing. We constructed upon the operational ideas that globally distributed Marine Raiders execute every day, whereas difficult ourselves to internalize a future working atmosphere with the varieties of multi-functional challenges highlighted by U.S. SOCOM’s 2040 conceptual framework.
Our brief tales focus on sensible purposes and deadly and non-lethal results in strategic competitors and disaster, and assist us envision the varieties of folks, capabilities, dependencies, and interactions that can be required of future Raider formations. To that finish we integrated a number of themes that transcended anyone vignette: utilizing new digital capabilities to attain larger results with our companions and allies; quickly adapting to modifications in environmental circumstances and adversary strategic targets; and eventually, staying true to our Marine Corps heritage and the inspiration it offers to allow us to attain decisive results for our nation.
Raider 40: “Imbedded.” The overarching function is to focus on interagency-enabled actions like counter-threat finance operations that maintain growing relevance not just for enduring counter-terrorism missions but additionally in strategic competitors. This story emphasizes the significance of tracing state-sponsored actions to non-state malign affect, underscoring the importance of a sturdy liaison community and the need for a dependable redundant assist system. Because the digital panorama continues to increase, the narrative contrasts non-lethal and deadly actions.
Raider 40: “Arctic Urgency.” The story focuses on the appliance of data and non-lethal results in strategic competitors. Arctic Urgency delves into the intricacies of partnered operations, human-machine teaming, spectrum administration, and communication inside denied environments. It underscores that human adaptation will stay a pivotal factor in competitors and battle.
Raider 40: “Uncharted.” Conceptualizing the convergence of MARSOF parts and future Marine Air-Floor Job Forces (MAGTFs), “Uncharted” examines how MARSOC’s operational strategy integrates with the Marine Corps Drive Design ideas. Because the story develops, the employment of uncrewed autonomous methods and use of human cultural nuances with accomplice forces turns into a focus.
MARSOF 2030 began our transformation from a needs-based counterterrorism-focused pressure to at least one composed of pressure parts and command-and-control nodes that may sense, fuse, and manipulate information at unprecedented scope, velocity, and understanding to realize decisional benefit and supply operational commanders effects-based choices contained in the adversary’s determination cycle. Our MARSOF 2040 imaginative and prescient will make us stronger by difficult the present pressure to iteratively analyze, anticipate, and predict what can be wanted. FICINT is one useful gizmo to border the dialog. As we try to maintain MARSOC’s high-performing contribution as a part of the joint pressure in 2040, we want our formation to assume critically, adapt successfully, and execute boldly to attain that end result.
Inspired by the creativity of our authors, I’ve printed their tales on our web site. A wider dialogue will happen in Could 2024 at World SOF Week Convention in Tampa, Florida. I stay up for the discussions stemming from our efforts to ascertain and embrace the longer term working atmosphere through which our Marine Raiders will thrive.
Maj. Gen. Matthew Trollinger is the commander of Marine Forces Particular Operations Command. The views expressed are these of the writer and don’t essentially signify the views of the Division of Protection or Particular Operations Command.