MILITARY : Marines Gear Up for Wars of Future

And now, a pop quiz for everyone who is interested in military affairs:

Q. Where can you find the think-tank with the hottest new agenda for developing concepts in the art of warfare?

a. The Air Force

b. The Naval War College

c. The Brookings Institution

d. The Marines

A. If you thought the Quantico dateline was put there just to trick you, guess again. The Marines really are becoming an intellectual force in the U.S. military, and here, for those who may be skeptical, are some of the things they are doing:

* A new Marine war-fighting lab here is experimenting with ideas ranging from a global response team to deal with attacks from chemical and biological weapons to a streamlined command structure that scraps much of the battlefield bureaucracy in use since Napoleon’s day.

* A revamped Marine combat development center is taking the ideas dreamed up and tested by the war-fighting laboratory and rewriting current tactics and doctrine to incorporate them, speeding them out to the fleet as soon as they are workable.

* The corps is setting up a “university without walls” to provide advanced training for officers. Instead of bringing students to Quantico, it will offer courses and seminars by television that can reach Marines at bases and aboard ship.

* The Marines are promoting a cadre of some of the best and brightest officers in the military, and freeing them to speak their minds and develop ideas. Many are now colonels and generals, and they are beginning to stir things up intellectually.

Although some of these trends have been underway for some time, the effort received a boost from Gen. Charles C. Krulak, the Marines’ new commandant, who has launched a program of “experimentation” designed to reshape the corps for the battlefield of the future.

The result has been a powerful push for innovation that onlookers in other services and in outside think-tanks view as worth watching closely.

“The things that the Marine Corps is getting into have the potential to redefine how we go to war,” gushes a top Army futurist who, for bureaucratic reasons, asked that he not be identified. “They’re cutting-edge stuff--just what the military ought to be probing.”

Admittedly, the notion of the Marines as any kind of intellectual force may seem to defy some firmly held American stereotypes.

While Americans historically have prized the Marines as the kind of outfit you’d want to have around if someone ordered you to take some hill, few seem to have cried, “Send in the Marines!” to attack an intellectual problem. The corps’ image has been of brawn, not brains.

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Then too, the Marines are not the only branch of the service that is exploring new war-fighting concepts. The Army, for instance, maintains battle labs around the country. And each of the services has its doctrine-writing centers and war and staff colleges.

But defense experts say that while the other services have done well at shepherding improvements in military technology, they have done little to alter the fundamental way U.S. forces fight. Most of what they are doing assumes a Desert Storm-like battlefield.

In contrast, rather than just testing new technology, the Marines have started from the premise that both the size of the military and the very art of warfare are going to change, and they have begun looking for ways that the new technology can help them get there.

“The Marine Corps is doing the best job because they’re taking a very holistic approach to improving current war-fighting,” says John F. Hillen III, a former Army officer now at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research organization.

The Marines also have been willing to take some risks, from dropping a long-cherished concept that may have outlived its military usefulness to experimenting with ideas such as the “nonlethal” weapon that sprayed sticky foam from a special gun to immobilize rioters in Somalia.

As a result, while the experiments the corps is conducting are eclectic and wide-ranging, they all fall under a single conceptual framework: How to use U.S. forces more efficiently in the kinds of small-scale conflicts that experts say America is likely to face.

The list includes:

* Setting up what may be the first military rescue team designed to deal with terrorist attacks that involve chemical or biological warfare. An emergency computer network links the unit to a panel of 11 civilian scientists equipped to provide expert advice from back home.

* Experimenting with a 21st-century command structure that does away with the top-heavy military bureaucracy that has existed for the last 250 years and substitutes a three-officer management group linked by computer to companies and squads.

* Developing a system of transponders that enables U.S. forces to monitor intersections, buildings and even individual rooms in urban areas electronically. The Marines hope the devices will cut the number of people required for peacekeeping missions.

* Testing a ship-launched battlefield communication satellite--actually a large balloon--that can handle computer and radio signals for all U.S. fighting units in a region without forcing them to rely on earth-orbiting satellites, which are expensive and overloaded.

* Developing new ways to deliver supplies and ammunition, such as using pilotless helicopters that move at night along electronic flight paths to get materiel to widely dispersed platoons. The system could eliminate the need for huge stockpiles near the battlefront.

Earlier this month, the Marines conducted the second segment of an exchange program with a group of Wall Street traders in hopes of learning more about how to use digitized information, in the form of numbers flashed on a computer screen, in making decisions on a battlefield.

Following a session last spring in which the Marines spent time on the trading floor, the Wall Streeters were flown to Quantico to don fatigues and spend a weekend in a simulated command post in the northern Virginia forest.

Col. Tony Wood, the lab’s director, says the exchange with the traders has not produced any breakthroughs, but it has given the Marines better insight into how they will have to cope with computerized information in the high-tech battlefield.

To be sure, not all the war-fighting lab’s experiments are successful. Wood eventually had to throw in the towel on an attempt to dehydrate diesel fuel to ease its transport and storage and then rehydrate it before use. And a field trial to test a device that sprays pepper at adversaries proved to be a dud.

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But Wood is undaunted. “We accept this as a process of experimentation,” he says. “Some will fail.”

The next step for the lab will be to broaden its testing by conducting larger field exercises at bases ranging from Camp Pendleton and Twentynine Palms, Calif., to Camp Lejeune, N.C.

Lt. Gen. Paul K. Van Riper, commander of the combat development complex, says relative peace is providing a rare opportunity for innovation. “The system . . . must be redesigned.”