'Expeditionary Warrior' probes Marine-SOCOM relationships.

A tabletop war game at Quantico Marine Base for the first time examined the details of how Marines and special operations units could fight as a combined force.

The drill, in late November, was called Expeditionary Warrior, and was part of a wide-ranging war game called Title 10, designed to showcase a military service's capabilities to carry out its statutory responsibilities. The Army, Navy and Air Force each conducts its own yearly Title 10 war games.

In the U.S. code, Title 10 stipulates the responsibilities of the military services to organize, train and equip their forces.

Expeditionary Warrior is the first Title 10 war game that the Marines have conducted since the mid-1990s, when the program was abandoned.

The first iteration of the war game--dubbed Expeditionary Warrior 03-1 -- looked at how a Navy-Marine Expeditionary Strike Group, along with U.S. Special Operations Command forces, would conduct preemptive maneuvers against terrorist cells.

In broad terms, Expeditionary Warrior differs considerably from other Title 10 programs, officials said. This war game consists of an annual series of small, focused combat experiments and related events that can either be connected by a common theme or address discrete issues. The game completed in November was the first in the Expeditionary Warrior series, expected to last through fiscal year 2003.

In charge of organizing the games is the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory. The Expeditionary Warrior event was "different from other programs," said Frank Jordan, director of war gaming at MCWL.

The November event was only one among a series of short war games that make up Expeditionary Warrior, he explained. The idea is to break up the project into smaller pieces, so planners can focus on specific issues. "We need a program that is flexible, fast moving, involves a series of several events, instead of one gigantic event every year," Jordan said. "We are going to have several related events throughout the year, under the general title of Expeditionary Warrior."

Unlike previous war games that did not necessarily lead to changes in Marine Corps concepts of operations and doctrine, Expeditionary Warrior is expected to yield guidance for the future, said Jordan. "We hope to get more focused results that we can get specific action on.

The scenarios in Expeditionary Warrior largely are shaped by events surrounding the U.S. war on terrorism. Most notably, said Jordan, is the emphasis on how the Marine Corps and the Special Operations Command can "develop a closer relationship."

Jordan declined to discuss how the Marines and the special operators fared in the war game as a joint force. He said the results of the war game could not be disclosed yet. At press rime, Warfighting Lab officials were scheduled to brief Lt. Gen. Edward Hanlon Jr., who heads the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, on the war game after-action report. Hanlon serves as the executive agent for Marine Corps Title 10 war games.

Marine Maj. Joel Sauer, an operations officer at the Warfighting Lab, said that a war game such as Expeditionary Warrior is the first step in the process of figuring out what changes may be needed in the force makeup and organization. "It's an efficient way to discover the deficiencies in a particular unit," Sauer told National Defense. "You don't have to put forces in the field, spend millions of dollars to figure out that you need to reorganize a unit or that you need a certain new tool."

In tabletop-type games, the action takes place in a "sandbox" where the players--divided up into blue (friendly) and red (enemy) cells--execute their battle plans. In Expeditionary Warrior, said Sauer, most of the players were active-duty Marines and special operations troops, and only a minority were retired officers or outside experts.

How to best combine Marine units and special operations forces was one of the objectives in Expeditionary Warrior, even though war game events don't necessarily translate into real-world changes in deployment tactics, Jordan explained.

It has been widely reported that the Marines and the special operators increasingly will be fighting as a joint force. (See related story, p.42)

Late last year, then Commandant Gen. James Jones signed a memorandum of agreement with the Special Operations Command that commits both organizations to "move forces closer together, establish the framework for building bridges between the two organizations," Jones told reporters during a roundtable in Washington, D.C.

Jones also assigned Marine Brig. Gen. Dennis Hejlik to work under SOCOM's chief, Air Force Gen. Charles Holland, A Marine Corps SOCOM detachment of 85 members will begin training with special operators and is expected to be ready for action within a year or two.

"We are going to provide 85 Marines who have the type, capability and skills that the special operations command can use in their own deployments," said Jones. "We are looking for ways to use Marine forces to go into what was previously SOF missions that we can do and were trained to do, to free up the SOF to go do the higher-tier stuff."

But Jones recognized that combining forces from different organizations takes more that just a written memorandum. "There are some cultural things to overcome," he said. "There are some institutional ties and confidence building measures that we have to build."

War games such as Expeditionary Warrior will help probe some of the cultural issues and come up with new ways to bridge the institutional gaps, Jordan suggested.

During Expeditionary Warrior, he said, "We were interested in several different things in terms in how the Marines and special operations forces work together. ... What capabilities and qualities each would bring that would complement and assist the other."

Over time, the plan is to establish "an interface between the Joint Special Operations Command and deploying Marine Expeditionary Unit staffs," said a war-game fact sheet. Officials also are seeking to "synchronize SOCOM and USMC war-fighting developments, as well as materiel research and procurement initiatives.

Ultimately, said Jordan, "By putting them together, the results would be greater than the sum of the parts." The goal, he said, is to "give the task force commander a lot more capability. ... We were looking at command relationships--how those would be set up. That is a very important piece."

The war game also was designed to demonstrate the Marine Corps "distinctive capabilities," such as forward presence and forcible entry, said Jordan, and "how those things could integrate with special operations forces and carry out preemptive operations.

The scenarios in Expeditionary Warrior were stretched across different regions of the world.

"No single war game will be definitive and give you all the answers," Jordan said. Most often, "it generates more issues than answers. There has to be follow-on efforts" to take advantage of the after-action recommendations. War game results can be used to fine-tune what the military services call DOTMLPF (doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership, personnel, facilities).

In the future, the Warfighting Lab expects to be working more closely with the Joint Forces Command, which has been tasked to establish a Defense Department-wide wargaming program.

JFCOM experimentation projects and associated gaming are becoming more connected to traditional service-centered Title 10 gaming, Jordan noted. JFCOM is planning a Title 10-like war game, called Joint Global 2004.

Title 10 war games generally address future concepts and force-makeup in the context of core Title 10 responsibilities of organizing, training, and equipping forces to execute each service's roles and functions. But Jordan noted that Title 10 war games also are joint, with other services participating, and are expected to have "major implications for the future direction and capabilities of the sponsoring service."

Existing Title 10 war-gaming programs sponsored by other services include the Navy's Global Series, the Army Transformation war game series and the Air Force Global Engagement and Aerospace Futures series.

These are large annual events, each with a planning cycle of eight to 10 months.

RELATED ARTICLE: Urban warfare simulation helps train company commanders.

A new high-tech simulation is now available to U.S. Army captains who are preparing to lead infantry units in urban warfare scenarios.

The computer game, called Full Spectrum Command, is the first of its kind, because it was specifically designed to make trainees "think through" the challenges associated with urban combat said Col. Paul E. Melody, the Army's director of combined arms and tactics directorate at the Infantry School, in Fort Benning. Ga.

The Infantry School plans to take advantage of the advanced features in Full Spectrum Command to help captains hone their company-commander skills, Melody said at a Pentagon news conference. The simulation, he explained, is a useful tool for a captain seeking to leam how to "build a plan to fight the enemy" The trainee "enters his plan in the computer," said Melody. The computer, assisted by the instructor, plays the role of "an asymmetric threat" such as a terrorist organization.

What makes the training valuable, he said, is that "the captain only sees what he would see if he were in combat, as he moves into a building. It lets him experience the command-and-control challenges of fighting in this kind of terrain."

Full Spectrum Command was designed and developed at the Institute for Creative Technologies, in California. The Army chartered the ICT four years ago to create a liaison between the service and the entertainment industry, for the purpose of enhancing simulation-based training.

The ICT had an $8 million budget to develop both Full Spectrum Command and a companion urban-warfare computer game, called Full Spectrum Warrior. The latter is a cognitive training aid for squad training, for small unit tactics and unconventional warfare.

In Full Spectrum Command, the captain leads a force of three rifle companies-with about 140 troops each.

Rob Sears, an CT producer, said that engineers were instructed to create a game that would "get into the thought process" of crafting war tactics. 'We were modeling command and control as a process," Sears told an industry conference last month, in Orlando, Fla.