There’s an energetic debate within the U.S. Marine Corps concerning the worth of operations within the data surroundings as a central side of maneuver warfare. Some critics have known as new power construction just like the Marine expeditionary power data group a failed experiment. Individually, some leaders could also be questioning whether or not marines ought to alter how they set up for fight. For instance, ought to the Marine air-ground job power embody an data fight ingredient?
If battle is violent, what can we imply by operations within the data surroundings? Sticks and stones break your bones, however what about phrases? They will trick enemies and set them up for a mighty fall. These operations use cyber instruments, digital warfare, deception, operational safety, and focused messaging to disclaim an adversary the flexibility to orient and coordinate on the battlefield. Joint doctrine treats these capabilities as central. If the Marine Corps is to be “first to struggle,” it should be first to blind, mislead, and deny the enemy the means to reply. And that requires models designed to struggle within the data surroundings.
But, whereas many commanders and workers sections perceive the necessity to destroy, displace, disintegrate, and isolate an enemy bodily, some battle to see how data capabilities help these efforts as a core ingredient of recent mixed arms. Every bodily impact — whether or not isolation or destruction — will depend on shaping how the enemy sees the battlespace. Know the way the enemy sees and decides, blind them, and each strike can break their cohesion. Warfare rewards asymmetry.
We goal to shut that hole by analyzing operations within the data surroundings alongside established navy idea and by reviewing latest II Marine Expeditionary Power Data Group experiments with new ideas and job organizations.
We’re not impartial. One in all us instructions the knowledge group mentioned. The opposite has been his longtime collaborator in interested by find out how to struggle and win by leveraging results within the data surroundings. By this collaboration now we have realized that on a clear battlefield, essentially the most dependable path to benefit is to disorient the enemy: deny their sensors and indicators, feed them false indicators, then strike decisively whereas they seek for ghosts or exhaust themselves chasing phantoms. Our expertise additionally exhibits that some vital facets of fight are arduous to recreate on a coaching vary or in a schoolhouse. It requires broader dialogue and dialogue in boards like Conflict on the Rocks.
What’s a Marine Data Group?
The II Marine Expeditionary Power Data Group is a brigade-sized formation that mixes intelligence, cyber, house, data actions, communications, and digital warfare capabilities to help international contingencies starting from reinforcing embassies and counter terrorism to amphibious operations and large-scale fight. At the moment, the Marine Corps fields three of those formations.
The doctrinal foundation is Marine Corps Warfighting Publication 8-10, Data in Marine Corps Operations. That publication treats the conversion of uncooked knowledge into usable information as a core ingredient of fight energy. The flexibility to generate, protect, defend, and deny data — whereas disrupting an adversary’s potential to make data into fight energy — creates a brand new type of benefit: techniques overmatch. This time period describes the technical benefit that accrues to the power higher capable of harness data to direct fires, maneuver fight formations, defend traces of provide, and make selections. Successful requires seeing what the opponent can not and exploiting that edge.
The central thought is that there’s a single underlying struggle for data in fashionable battle. It hyperlinks reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance to social media campaigns that form morale and to cyber operations towards enemy command and management techniques. Like traditional cavalry doctrine, victory will depend on retaining freedom of motion, hiding what issues from the enemy, growing the state of affairs to make clear intent, and focusing on enemy vulnerabilities shortly. In fashionable navy operations envisioned in joint doctrine, this battle reaches into our on-line world and house — and right into a contest of narratives that determines how an adversary perceives and processes data.
The Idea of Victory: Disorientation
This central thought hyperlinks to the OODA loop — observe, orient, resolve, and act. The orient step is an important section of synthesizing noticed knowledge by making use of new data and psychological fashions — usually linked to previous experiences and even cultural traditions — to create an understanding of the state of affairs. It includes assessing your place, capabilities, and the surroundings, figuring out gaps or errors in pondering, and forming a speculation of find out how to achieve a bonus in time and house.
Operations within the data surroundings disrupt what an adversary observes by digital warfare, deception, and operational safety measures designed to restrict what the enemy can see. Jam their communications. Trick their sensors. Cover your signatures. Extra essential, these operations can reshape orientation by injecting true and false data and by exploiting psychological operations so the enemy acts based mostly on a basic misunderstanding of the battlespace. Framed this manner, disorienting an opponent is a type of maneuver: create shock and confusion, then exploit the ensuing gaps in enemy motion.
The Marines aren’t alone in seeing a brand new function for broad-based data operations that mix cyber, house, intelligence, digital warfare, deception, and messaging. Joint doctrine names data as one among seven joint capabilities. In 2024, Adm. Samuel J. Paparo Jr., the commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, instructed the Senate that this functionality was his primary precedence. Particularly, he stated “the joint power requires capabilities to blind … see … and kill.” Blinding and seeing are the guts of what doctrine calls data warfare and our imaginative and prescient of disorientation as new idea of victory.
The U.S. Military has likewise launched ideas for “counter-command and management” warfare and created theater data benefit detachments to offer persistent sensing, focusing on, and informational results. And the Military is shopping for new tools. Its Terrestrial Layer System household of techniques converges cyber operations, digital warfare, and indicators intelligence to provide brigade and division commanders natural instruments to degrade enemy networks.
This isn’t new in idea. Wayne Hughes mentioned anti-scouting and command and management countermeasures in Fleet Techniques a long time in the past, and Chilly Conflict maritime planners lengthy debated find out how to defeat reconnaissance-strike networks that threaten capital ships. NATO even makes use of the phrase “cognitive warfare” to explain actions that degrade adversary rationality and create systemic fragility. After Desert Storm, analysts known as that marketing campaign the “first data battle,” and the U.S. navy codified command and management warfare within the mid-Nineties: assault adversary command and management to blind and disorient their sequencing and response. Alongside the identical traces, the Military built-in indicators intelligence-driven focusing on and digital warfare central to Airland Battle with rising ideas about pc community operations and inform and affect actions.
That historical past clarifies why the Marine Corps wants models organized to win the struggle for data. Prior efforts usually struggled since they relegated data operations, broadly outlined, to a workers synchronization train at larger headquarters. Colonels caught in infinite conferences and faraway from the battlefield battle to reply in a well timed method. The forms takes its toll. Successful a struggle for data requires extra. It requires seeing data as a maneuver house, not as bureaucratic debate between competing workers sections. It requires devoted formations that generate choices for gaining operational benefits within the data surroundings to help offensive and defensive operations. And it wants unity of command beneath a commander liable for data operations — not simply coordination by a workers part.
This attitude is why II Marine Expeditionary Power Data Group has experimented with reorganizing into extra versatile job teams, forces, and parts that may be built-in with expeditionary forces. Every is led by a commander. Every is charged to generate choices within the data surroundings that disorient the enemy. For instance, a job unit assigned to help a Marine expeditionary unit would possibly pull indicators intelligence Marines from 2nd Radio Battalion, all-source analysts from 2nd Intelligence Battalion, a fires liaison from 2nd Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Firm, expeditionary communications and defensive cyber operators from eighth Communications Battalion, and affect and civil reconnaissance groups from an data maneuver firm. This data job unit — led by a significant — can present well timed choices for the expeditionary commander to assault and defend data in ways in which disorient the enemy whereas conducting amphibious operations.
This design additionally permits deeper joint and naval integration. The Navy’s data warfare commanders have proved invaluable in latest campaigns towards the Houthis, the place they helped generate battlespace consciousness (i.e., observe), deny the enemy straightforward assault vectors (i.e., disorient), defend command and management (i.e., resolve) and synchronize mixed kinetic and non-kinetic fires (i.e., act). Embedding related capabilities with Marine expeditionary models and joint job forces expands choices for ahead deployed formations. You possibly can struggle outnumbered whenever you struggle a blind man by placing a premium on disorientation as a key line of effort.
This imaginative and prescient set the stage for a collection of experiments designed to check find out how to construct and combine specialised models into Marine formations that deal with data as a maneuver house. First, in summer time 2024, the knowledge group embedded a job ingredient with 2nd Marine Infantry Division to check integrating composite data capabilities — cyber, digital warfare, psychological operations, and deception — with conventional mixed arms. In early 2025, the main target shifted from the division to a regiment to check the flexibility of smaller detachments to help tactical models in large-scale workouts. In spring 2025, the experiments went worldwide and examined supporting U.S. European Command as a part of train Joint Viking, with the knowledge group integrating with 10,000 servicemembers from 9 completely different nations to sign NATO’s potential to discourage Russia within the excessive north. The experiments culminated in August 2025 when a job unit from the II Marine Expeditionary Power Data Group accomplished exterior certification, signaling wider recognition of its potential to function.
Why That is Wanted to Wage Trendy Warfare
Though Marine expeditionary power data teams have been activated in 2017, the Marine Corps has an extended lineage of experimenting with data results. That lineage reaches again to Gen. Al Grey’s intelligence-driven experiments in Vietnam and to surveillance and reconnaissance teams that operated from 1988 to 1999. The sample is acquainted and expensive: Wars educate the Marine Corps the worth of the struggle for data, and peacetime usually redirects consideration and assets away from it.
The service mustn’t repeat that mistake. Locking within the potential to function within the data surroundings requires deliberate organizational and resourcing modifications. On the middle of the controversy is whether or not so as to add an data fight ingredient to the Marine air-ground job power. This could occur. You possibly can’t struggle on the trendy battlefield with out the flexibility to disorient the enemy. It’s that straightforward.
This reform requires additionally adopting the coordination facilities pioneered on the II Marine Expeditionary Power Data Group. These entities function the nervous system and mind for operations within the data surroundings. They monitor developments throughout the electromagnetic spectrum, knowledge networks, and social media platforms, and ship common updates that hyperlink deployed models with larger headquarters. These updates assist commanders see the knowledge panorama and take motion to affect it and set circumstances for follow-on operations.
Utilizing instruments just like the Maven Good System and established Marine Corps processes for managing data duties, coordination facilities can each observe day-to-day competitors within the data surroundings and supply reach-back help to deployed forces. Crucially, the facilities give commanders a single place to synchronize results, analyze choices, and create unity of motion.
When competitors turns to disaster, these facilities use subordinate data help parts that join theater commanders’ must Marine forces making ready to deploy. These parts are aligned to particular threats and geography and carry out a contemporary type of advance power operations within the data surroundings: securing vital knowledge terrain, complicated an adversary, and shaping circumstances whereas pleasant forces shut. This mannequin operationalizes longstanding calls to align authorities for data operations throughout providers.
These coordination parts additionally facilitate joint integration. When an data help ingredient aligns with Military theater data benefit detachments, they’ll quickly mix cyber operations, digital warfare, and indicators intelligence alongside deception and strategic communication to disorient the enemy. When marines arrive already built-in with these capabilities and throughout providers, the joint power positive aspects a number of methods to disrupt an adversary’s decision-making and create the systemic shock and dislocation the joint power must deploy and assault. Each providers want deep sensing and counter-reconnaissance capabilities within the data surroundings if they’re to comprehend Paparo’s purpose of disorienting opposing battle networks like these fielded by China.
Attacking an adversary’s potential to orient has change into a idea of victory: it’s how marines win the struggle for data. Marine expeditionary power data teams needn’t be a boutique experiment. They exhibit find out how to apply maneuver warfare within the twenty first century. To grab the initiative in an period of proliferated sensors, AI-enabled networks, and swarming techniques, the Corps ought to task-organize data teams as tailor-made, multi-domain models of motion tied to data coordination facilities and help parts. These capabilities let commanders blind, mislead, and fracture enemy choice cycles whereas defending pleasant data benefit — enabling multi-domain fires, safeguarding logistics, and opening seams for maneuver.
Benjamin Jensen is the Frank E. Petersen chair on the College of Superior Warfighting, Marine Corps College and the director of the Futures Lab on the Middle for Strategic and Worldwide Research.
Ian Fletcher is a Marine officer presently commanding the II Marine Expeditionary Power Data Group. The article consists of feedback and strategies by the marines in his formation.
The views on this article are these of the authors and never these of Marine Corps College, the Protection Division, or any a part of the U.S. authorities.
**Please word, as a matter of home model Conflict on the Rocks won’t use a distinct identify for the U.S. Division of Protection till and except the identify is modified by statute by the U.S. Congress.
Picture: Lance Cpl. Alexander Hires by way of U.S. Marine Corps
