Playing Football Instead of Soccer: The Marine Corps Culture of Centralized Command and Control

Abstract

The enemy of the future will intentionally exploit US forces' dependence on information technology. Because of this, information on the future battlefield will be inherently limited, thus requiring a change from the current paradigm of continuous information transfer and centralized, top-down direction of tactical forces to an intent based, decentralized command model. Although the Marine Corps espouses the idea of decentralized command (mission tactics, mission command, maneuver warfare, etc), the service culture actually reflects a tendency towards centralized, rigid command and control. In order to prepare the force for a future battlefield of limited information and concomitant uncertainty, the Marine Corps must make major changes to both organizational structure and training methodology.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 02, 2016
Accession Number
AD1178764

Entities

People

  • Thaddeus V. Drake

Organizations

  • Marine Corps University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Autonomy
  • Biomedical
  • C4I
  • Electronic Warfare
  • Human Systems
  • Space
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Command And Control
  • Doctrine
  • Electronic Warfare
  • Information Operations
  • Information Systems
  • Information Warfare
  • Marine Corps Operations
  • Military History
  • Military Organizations
  • Military Science
  • Organizational Structure
  • Second World War
  • Students
  • Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
  • War Colleges
  • War Games
  • Warfare

Readers

  • Joint Military Operations and Doctrine.
  • Maritime Combat Support and Expeditionary Logistics.

Technology Areas

  • Fully Networked C3
  • Fully Networked C3 - Command and Control