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A New Way of War
Distributed Operations, a new concept, empowers small tactical teams that would fight independently, miles apart in the battlespace.
* Teams would have the ability to regroup and fight as traditional Marine Corps units.
* Decision-making would be pushed down the chain of command.
* But the "tendency of people to reach down in the network" remains a worry. Will small teams be empowered or micro-managed?
Commanders are beginning to see vast potential for interagency cooperation and intelligence sharing in Distributed Operations (DO), the Marine Corps' new operational concept. The plan is a major change in how the Corps deploys in response to unconventional warfare threats.
Driven by cutting-edge communications technology, DO is now in its second month of an estimated 18-month experimentation cycle prior to implementation. But that technology may pose a management risk to the very forces it seeks to empower.
Gen. Robert E. Schmidle, director of the Expeditionary Force Development Command at Marine Base Quantico, Va., said the Corps developed DO in response to the rising global threat of terrorist and insurgent armies.
"That kind of enemy is not going to come at us in conventional formation," Schmidle said. "He's going to come at us in small, distributed, dispersed, decentralized kind of teams. Marine forces must be able to operate in that same kind of decentralized manner.
"We are the forces that are capable of operating in both the traditional and the nontraditional realm. ... What we are talking about is training Marines to standards that will allow them to have more specialized skill sets, but not at the expense of being able...