Farewell thoughts from Major General James A. Marks.

Major General James A. Marks was commissioned 4 June 1975 into Military Intelligence upon graduation from the United States Military Academy. During his 29 years of commissioned service, MG Marks has held command and staff intelligence assignments including: Company Commander, 1st Battalion, 503d Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Fort Campbell, Kentucky; Aide de Camp, Commander in Chief. US Pacific Command, Camp Smith, Hawaii; S3, 319th Military Intelligence Battalion (Airborne), 525th Military Intelligence Brigade, XVIII (Airborne) Corps, Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Executive Officer, 313th Military Intelligence Battalion (Airborne), 82d Airborne Division, Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Commander, 107th Military Intelligence Battalion, 7th Infantry Division (Light), Fort Ord, California; G2, 6th Infantry Division (Light), Fort Wainwright, Alaska; Special Assistant to the Chief of Staff of the Army; Commander, 504th Military Intelligence Brigade III Corps, Fort Hood, Texas; Deputy Chief of Staff, Intelligence, Headquarters, US Army, Europe and Seventh Army, Heidelberg, Germany; Executive Officer to the Commanding General, Stabilization Force, Sarajevo, Bosnia; Assistant Chief of Staff, J2 (Intelligence), United States Forces, Korea, and Deputy Chief of Staff, C2, Combined Forces Command; Commander, United States Army Intelligence Center and Fort Huachuca (USAIC&FH); deployed as C2, Coalition Forces Land Component Command during Operation IRAQI FREEDOM; and resumed Command of USAIC&FH. He is an Honor Graduate of the US Army Ranger School, a Master Parachutist, Air Assault qualified, and authorized to wear the Canadian and Republic of Korea Airborne wings.

MG Marks holds a Master of Arts degree in International Relations from the University of Virginia and a Master of Science degree in Theater Operations from the School of Advanced Military Studies. He is a graduate of the Military Intelligence Officers' Advance Course, the United States Army Command and General Staff College, the School of Advanced Military Studies, and the Army War College.

His awards and decorations include: the Distinguished Service Medal, Defense Superior Service Medal, Legion of Merit with one Oak Leaf Cluster, Bronze Star, Defense Meritorious Service Medal, Meritorious Service Medal with four Oak Leaf Clusters, Army Commendation Medal, Army Achievement Medal with one Oak Leaf Cluster, Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal, Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary and Service Medals, Korean Defense Service Medal, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Medal.

MG Marks graciously provided his comments on highlights of his three-year command here at Fort Huachuca, as well as his thoughts and advice on a number of issues of importance to him and the school during his official exit interview for the USAIC History Program on 5 May 2004. He was interviewed by Ms. Katharine W. Schmidli.

Q: To begin this interview, would you please describe your personal philosophy of leadership and command?

Focusing most directly on the leadership aspects: I'd like to think that I am a leader with a personal touch. I am very interested in the soldier as an individual. I am extremely interested in his and her personal as well as professional growth. You can't have one without the other. There must be a balance of both. Balance is open-ended; there is no template. It is a personal and professional definition that each individual leader needs to make sure he or she can achieve, can live, can demonstrate, and then can demand from his or her subordinates and those around him or her.

Q: Sir, you hit the ground running on September 11th 2001 when you took command. What modifications did your initial vision for the Intelligence Center and School undergo after this event?

My assignments were primarily as a tactical soldier in multiple divisions, both as an infantryman and an intelligence professional. In addition to the tactical assignments, I had the opportunity to serve at the joint level and on the Department of the Army's staff. My experiences were broad enough, but more deep in terms of my tactical experiences and perspectives in the application of intelligence. So I crafted my vision for the Intelligence Center and School to make sure that we could reinforce those soldier intelligence skills at the very lowest levels of engagement; but making sure we educated all of our soldiers as to what was available throughout the "Mud-to-Space" construct of leveraging all intelligence capabilities at the tactical through strategic levels.

But when you take command on 9/11, you tear that vision up when you suddenly realize that we are now a nation at war. Soldiers are going to be deployed. My vision shifted as we realized there would be an inevitable increase in the number of intelligence soldiers coming through the school. We have seen that. We have gone from 11,000 students trained during the course era year to around 15,000. We are on a steady incline in terms of the demands our nation has put and will continue to put upon us as intelligence professionals.

Maintaining relevance with the field became even more critical. The only way we could do that was to send soldiers to the field, send mobile training teams to the field and stay connected to the field in multiple and redundant ways so I would know what the field commanders and intelligence professionals needed from us.

Q: You deployed to Camp Doha, Kuwait, in September 2002 where you joined the CFLCC and remained with the team during the race to Baghdad, returning to the School in June 2003. Could you tell us about your role in Operation IRAQI FREEDOM and any observations based upon your experiences during your deployment?

I was the C2, the senior intelligence officer for the CFLCC which was formed out of the Third US Army. The intelligence professionals that I was blessed to work with demonstrated professionalism and the moral and physical courage that you would expect from the young Americans we are raising.

We made some modifications when I came back here to USAIC in terms of how we train these professionals. Primarily we stressed the concept of "fighting Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance." "Fighting ISR" goes beyond collection management and those traditional collection management terms and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). It is an approach toward taking those intelligence capabilities that are a part of our formations and those that are external to our organic formations, demanding the most of those capabilities and leveraging every aspect of them at all times. It's a mind set; it's TTPs that must be imbued in our intelligence professionals from noncommissioned officers all the way through our very senior intelligence officers.

At the end of the day, warfighting is all about execution superiority. That is based upon decision superiority, and decision superiority is based upon information and knowledge superiority. The commander must be comfortable, within the bounds of comfort and assumption of risk, that he has the best intelligence available so that he can make good solid decisions.

Once those decisions are made, we move into execution superiority, You have got to execute a program across the entire spectrum. That goes from building a church or a school to providing security to dropping kinetic weapons systems and trying to kill as many bad guys as you can very precisely and aggressively. Information superiority leads to knowledge superiority which leads to decision superiority which leads to execution Superiority. We always knew that. But it has been revalidated and reconfirms how we train here; we have made some tweaks. When you look at each of the Military Occupational Specialties (MOS), you can see some TTPs that have been modified based on our common experiences. I won't go into detail, but suffice it to say we are taking that experience from the field and bringing it back to the school.

Let me tell you that interagency cooperation has never been finer. Those are all the agencies that contribute to the fight when we talk about the high end of "Mud to Space"--the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. All of those agencies contribute immediately to what is going on, on the ground. They help create that environment where a commander can make good solid decisions. But none of this happens in a vacuum. It happens because intelligence professionals fuse information in a very timely manner.

Q: There are changes coming to Military Intelligence (MI) as a result of the Chief of Staff of the Army's decision to move quickly towards a future force structure. What do you see as some of the challenges facing the MI Corps as the Task Force Modularity decisions begin to be implemented?

Let me re-phrase your question. I don't see them as "MI challenges," I see "MI opportunities." There are increasing demands on our intelligence professionals at all levels. They aren't challenges but opportunities to do what is demanded of us. We are so blessed to be alive today, during this time, so that we can make these contributions. To be in uniform, to be United States Army intelligence professionals, is a magnificent opportunity.

Having said that, there are some very specific things that the Army is going to ask us to do in the joint construct. We don't fight as an army; we fight as a joint team. We have got to leverage the Air Force, the Marines, the Navy, the Coast Guard, and the National agencies. Everyone contributes. Our job is to fuse it and make sure it gets to the right commander at the right time, in a very timely manner. If there is a latency in anything we do, we are asleep at the switch.

We have to be aggressive in leveraging all of these contributors. How we fight demands it. This includes the soldier on the ground. That young soldier has intelligence that we have got to go get if we are painting a picture of the enemy, his intentions, his actions, and where we think he is going to be, so we can be predictive, so we can get ahead of him. We don't want to react, we want the enemy to react, we want to shape.

The opportunities are immense. We are going to have intelligence professionals in brigade-like Units of Action which will have some division capabilities. We are going to have intelligence professionals at the division level with corps-like capabilities embedded in them. We are taking some of the greatest capabilities we have in our Army and we are shoving them down, for lack of a better verb, to the lowest levels of engagement on the ground where we can really make a difference. The leveraging capabilities of what is out there in terms of intelligence have got to be present all the way down to brigade level. We are doing that today.

With the advent of these units, the number of intelligence professionals will increase. Those command opportunities are essential because our Army has a culture of command. But the toughest job an intelligence professional has ever had is that of staff "2", being the senior intelligence officer at any of these levels. That's a staff job. But if you take the point I made about "fighting ISR" and you pull that into a staff position, what you will see are staff officers who are going to have command-like responsibilities--not authorities, but responsibilities to leverage across the intelligence community throughout the entire spectrum, "Mud-to-Space," and enabling that tactical formation, or any formation with those capabilities. It is much more important to focus on what is core to our business, and that is being an intelligence professional at all levels. We have to know what is available at the agency levels. But we also have to understand that the essence of our business is at the tactical level of engagement. We have never forgotten that and we have never abandoned that. We have got to continue to hammer that into our young intelligence professionals. So it is more than just increased command opportunities, it is about being the senior intelligence officer at all levels.

Q: Of the opportunities that remain, which do you see as systemic to how the Army operates as a whole and what are your ideas to address these challenges?

First and foremost, I will tell you that the intelligence team will be embedded at the very lowest levels of engagement. That's point one, And that intelligence professional is a part of the team just like the infantryman or the artilleryman. The senior intelligence officer, at any level, must be part of the team. The tactical commander on the ground needs to make sure he uses the intelligence professional team to train the aggregate that makes up his formation. For instance, the intelligence team can be of particular value during stability operations. Soldiers must be the sensors on the ground; they must have some tactical questioning skills. They must have a sense of their environment; using the information acquired in one location to gain a sense of what type of application of force may be required in another part of the environment.

The intelligence training plan that takes place at the lowest levels of engagement must include the fingerprint of the commander. Gone are the days when the commander looks at the intelligence officer and says, "You know, you are as screwed up as anything I have ever seen. Get your act together!" It's not being an apologist anymore. It's not looking at the commander and saying, "Sir, I'm sorry, I screwed that up. I'll get my act together. I'm just the intel guy and I'll work as hard as I can."

It's saying, "Time out, Sir. I am a member of YOUR team. Let me help shape a training plan that has YOUR endorsement. You are the coach. How do you want me to work as part of the aggregate, to make you more enabled, more aggressive, more knowledgeable, more precise, more deadly? Whatever the demands are that you have operationally, I will enable as the intelligence guy. But I need your fingerprints on the training, because if I try to do it myself, there are a thousand reasons why guys won't participate, the primary reason being I can't task them. I lead an absolutely critical element of your team. Sir, put your fingerprints on this. I will shape it. We will get it done and there will not be any alibis."

Q: What advice would you give your successor?

This is a nation at war. We are not going to move away from being a nation at war anytime soon. In fact, what defined my generation of soldiers--we were defined culturally and doctrinally as an Army based on the Cold War. How we fought, how we equipped, how we trained, was based on that inevitable conflict we thought would occur on the plains of central Europe and potentially on the peninsula of Korea. We have gone through a redefinition of that over the course of the last 10 to 12 years since the wall came down in November of 1989 and Operation DESERT STORM. Over the last decade of the nineties, a lot of "brush fires" have occurred around the world.

This is a defining war that we are part of now; it is a cultural shift. It is not a brush fire, but a full-fledged engagement that is going to take every aspect of our leadership and our development and our intellectual might to make sure we stay ahead of.

My successor is coming in from Iraq. That is a defining experience in her life. Major General Fast will walk in here and will bring those great experiences, the currency with the field, an understanding of what are the true demands, and she will impart that knowledge across the training we conduct here. She will sustain and increase the connection with the field. I would just tell her very briefly, "Strap yourself in and be prepared for a very wild ride, because it's going to be more of what we've experienced during the course of the last three years."