Sea Control - Sea Control 580: Building Resilient Kill Chains

Episode Date: June 27, 2025

Building Resilient Kill Chains for the Stand in Force

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. We're shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. I'm your co-host, Brian Kerg, and our guests today are Major Aaron Barlow, Captain Patrick Riley, and Major Sean Harper, all of the United States Marine Corps. We'll be discussing the recent article, Building Resilient Kill Chains for the Stand and Force, which was published with CIMSEC on 14 October. As a reminder, all views expressed are personal and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Defense or any other organization with which we are affiliated. Gentlemen, welcome aboard Seat Control. Can you tell us a little bit about yourselves and

your professional backgrounds? Aaron, let's go ahead and start with you. Hey, sir. Well, first of all, thank you for having us. It's awesome to be able to get to talk to you anytime. I know you're a busy guy with all you've got going on. So getting a minute of your time is definitely a pleasure. Name's Aaron Barlow. I currently work at Operations Analysis Directorate in CD&I. That's Combat Development and Integration at Headquarters Marine Corps as an Operations Research Analyst. I have the opportunity to work there with the other two guests today. It's a pleasure to work there with them. And before that, I was a combat engineer, and I guess I still am a combat engineer, but have not done that in a

while. I get to think about problems like this up at Headquarters Marine Corps. So hi, I'm Captain Pat Riley. As Aaron said, we're kind of all working at Operations Analysis Directorate in DCCD&I. Before I came there, obviously a graduate of Stable Postgraduate School in the Operations Research Curriculum. And before all that, I was a communications officer working at Communications Battalion on the West Coast. Hi, I'm Major Sean Harper. I'm an infantry officer by trade. I did some time at 7th Marines in 29 Palms, which is where I cut my teeth. I had a great time there. Got selected to go to the Naval Postgraduate School and complete a master's in OR as well with these gentlemen, and currently at CDNI as an operations research analyst,

hanging out in the server stacks, and glad they let us out for this. i'm glad they uh let you out as well i appreciate you all the time uh and you all definitely sound uniquely qualified to speak on the problem set that you described in your article so let's go ahead and turn our attention to that can you walk us through the big blue arrows on your article's core thesis like what's the elevator pitch yeah so kind of how we got here is we observed um you know force design being a part of the service and then at the service headquarters for a while, a lot of the debate still kind of, or conversations still stuck in the debate phase, and we didn't want to go there.

We want to move past that, knowing that if you buy into that this is the right thing for the service to do, that if the directions that General Berger kind of headed us in, that's the right thing to do for the service. We wanted to make sure that the service and evaluate, is the service doing the right things to get to that goal? um so in that we kind of re-examined uh some of the big the big arguments within force design uh what we call like maybe the the crown jewel which is the stand-in force that's what what things are focused on and then examine the value proposition what the stand-in force

the ring core stand-in force brings to the joint force in a certain context and then sort of um is the things the service is doing making the stand in force better, getting it to where it needs to be. And then you can kind of compare that to some current events, open source news that's out there. For instance, when we're thinking about closing kill chains against maritime targets, there's a lot of activity going on in the Red Sea, has been for the last year, um both in the terms of sea denial and also countering uh some of the joint force joint forces uh like intervention there uh focused in a little bit in the article down towards the bottom on the on the mq-9 right now this article is not about mq-9s but sort of

uh if you can tee up our argument a little bit you know if houthis can shoot down mq-9s and they're a less capable adversary, I would say, than we expect the PLA might be. And if the MQ-9 is a big part of the sensing C5 ISRT suite that the Marine Corps is going to rely on in the first island chain, maybe we ought to take a look. If Houthis can shoot them down, maybe the PLA can do the same. And maybe we want to look to diversify and see where we're going.

So that's sort of, I mean, there's a lot more to unpack and hopefully we'll get there but that's sort of uh the genesis of how we started this yeah that's really good stuff and uh as somebody else who's been studying force design for a while uh and looked at some of the debates and arguments about it i think you can make the case pretty quickly and simply that the houthis are validating the stand-in force concept in a way that the houthis using some very minimal land-based power are in fact affecting the maritime space very effectively which i think is the beauty of your article is you flip that on its head and you and you offer as you just did hey if they can do that to us what could the pla do to the stand in force in

the indo-pacific and how so that demonstrates hey there's some some juice to the value proposition but there's also a gap and how can we get after that gap which i think is is the core scope of of resilience so turning it back to you guys your article begins with a strategic context for building resilient kill chains. You talk about the national defense strategies from 2018 to 2022, Marine Corps force design efforts, the 39th Commandant's planning guidance,

a potential war with China and the value proposition of the stand-in force. So can you go ahead and build that out, build out that strategic context? Yeah, absolutely we can. So I think what I would start with saying is that those who maybe were bored and said nothing ever happens,

have been maybe surprised the past couple of years with everything going on in geopolitics. And I think that the paradigms out there that we operate under are shifting very, very quickly. So I think for me, at least, I think about what the Marine Corps needs to do is transform under pressure. And what that pressure is, is we have conflicts going on in Ukraine right now. We have conflicts going on and a showdown happening between Israel and Iran, and simultaneously, we're trying to transform the force, right? So as the train is rolling down the tracks, how do you swap out the wheels and make the train better so when it arrives at the destination, it's ready to go? I think that's very, very challenging. so as we know the Marine Corps is very much a crisis response force and that's something that

we take a lot of pride in sending out marine expeditionary units to different hot spots in the globe and that's something that we've really prided ourselves in and really been the crown jewel but now the question is is that if we go into a major combat operation if crisis goes into conflict? Will we be ready? And how do we prepare for that? So I think that's really the challenge, especially in the Indo-Pacific when there's so much going on elsewhere that takes up bandwidth every single day. And I think that's really the context for a lot of our discussions that go on between us as a team and C.D. and I in general. And I know something that the Commandant, his most recent guidance, talks about being able to do both things. Can we do

crisis response at the same time that we can be part of the standard force doing major combat operations in the first island chain. There's a lot of historical parallels, Sean. I appreciate your points there between the pre-World War II Marine Corps in terms of continuing to prosecute various small wars and continuing to develop that proficiency or maintain that particular field of excellence while also going through its own campaign of learning for amphibious warfare doctrine. That's not the subject of this episode, but I implore leaders to look at that or readers to look at that as well. And I think they'll see a lot of remarkably similar parallels. So to wrap up the strategic context, your article, it also notes the risk of isolation

of the stand-in force, and it raises certain associated questions, which really feeds the rest of your core argument. Can you talk about that risk and its implications? Sure. So going back to kind of the genesis of the stand in force concept and kind of the realities of modern warfare, I think the concept itself is definitely informed by this idea of needing to compete with an adversary that has a precision fires regime, which is fundamentally different than how the Marine Corps had to fight for the last 20 years. How do we need to change our thinking when the enemy has cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and the ability to employ them accurately, which is, again, not something we've faced. So this idea of the SIF concept is, you know, it's fundamentally built on this idea that, you know, the force that's employing it, in this case, the Marine Corps, might have some level of isolation from the joint force. We need to persist forward and we need to be able to be resilient in the face of these robust adversary sensing and fires capabilities. And the Marine Corps has kind of evolved in its thinking about what it kind of wants the SIF to do and what the goals of force design sort of are. And, you know, coming from a position where we were at Naval Postgraduate School when force design started, we've kind of been able to center our sort of whole education and then our service on, you know, in a supporting establishment of seeing how these concepts progressed.

If you look at some of the really early foundational literature around force design, specifically we call out the phase one and two reports, the initial idea of what the Marine Corps and the stand-in force is going to contribute in like a first island chain environment or somewhere where they're under an adversary's precision strike regimes or these small networked formations that essentially they possess a complete kill chain. They can go from sensing a target to attacking it completely organically without needing to rely on any additional capabilities from the joint force. But then as you kind of progress through the force design literature, by the time you get to the 2022 annual update, there's sort of a shift in focus that's articulated from, you know, a Marine Corps that's going to be able to generate all this organic lethal capability as a standing force to something a little bit different where we're envisioning what they refer to as a balanced approach. And it places a lot more emphasis on sensing and counter and reconnaissance and counter reconnaissance and integration and joint kill webs. But then there's still this lingering

idea that the Marine Corps needs to possess the capability to do this organically, even as we're increasingly focusing on layering in and being interoperable with the joint force in this world. So I think a lot of what we're trying to analyze with this article is where the Marine Corps is with respect to that balance. So much of the newer component of the value proposition is joint interoperability. You have to be able to network and integrate with joint capabilities. And I mean, this is a really tough problem. So the idea that we're trying to attack here is that, You know, the service still needs to be in a position where it's fielding capabilities that that match the stand in force concept. They're small, they're risk worthy, they're high quantity versus exquisite and, you know, extremely expeditionary such that you could persist without a lot of external support.

And then that you could have these capabilities, but still scale them to add value to the joint force, you know, as a sensing and fires layer when you're able to successfully integrate. And the idea is that you might be robust to whatever kinetic or non-kinetic threat conditions that the service is facing to both persist and be resilient. Thanks for that, Pat. That's really great stuff. And I think it's important that you highlighted the differences from the very beginning of Force Design 2030 and then the progression, the nuance and the changes of emphasis as it's gone from annual update to annual update, It just reveals the importance of a campaign of learning that demonstrates, hey, we didn't get it perfect out the chute right away, and there were still a lot of things we had to learn on the go. And I think you highlighted some. Another I would highlight when we're talking about integration is something as simple as authorities in terms of, hey, if you have a Marine Corps formation that's putting something that can potentially fire missiles at another thing, but that missile is targeting something in the air and maritime space, at what level or what

echelon of command or where in a joint force construct would that missile be controlled? And so if you start drawing out the doctrinal lines, let's say, let's start with the anti-air battalion within a Marine Latoya regiment. Well, that air defense missile or air defense asset that that lab might be firing very rapidly is going to go through up to a SADC and then a RADC rather a sector air defense commander, regional air defense commander, the area air defense commander, who is also typically the joint force air component commander, the JFAC, who's typically going to be somebody wearing an Air Force uniform, not a Marine Corps uniform, and perhaps the RADC as well. And you very rapidly see, wait a minute, is the Marine Corps actually going to be controlling

that missile? I'm not going to say yes or no right here. What I am saying is you now run into a very compelling doctrinal question when it comes to joint integration, which I think the Marine Corps perhaps maybe didn't appreciate a few years ago, but now appreciates much more deeply. So I'll stop there. Let me turn it back to the article. So as you developed your case, you mentioned CJADC2, or it's spelled out C-J-A-D-C, the number two, CJADC2, and how the 39th Commandant's planning guidance describes Marines as acting as the, quote, JTAC of the joint force, end quote. So for your purposes, how would you describe CJADC2? And can you explain the metaphor of the JTAC of the... So again, thanks for kind of discussing the authorities

piece and just the imminent complexity of what we're trying to accomplish here and just how challenging of a doctrinal problem this is to sort of unpack. I think some of what you mentioned is sort of tied into CJAD-C2, which stands for Combined Joint All-Domain C2. It is a DoD initiative. The idea is to sort of shape the future joint C2 capabilities of the future force, essentially. How does the joint force sense and make sense and act really across all levels and phases of war, just calling on the definition here, right, and across all domains of warfare. So what this comprises is, you know, you need to be able to share information rapidly across the whole joint force enterprise um you need to do that you need kind of a common standards and

framework you need security to make sure that those networks are robust and resilient to adversary threats um and everything needs to work in a denied and degraded environment so obviously an incredibly uh challenging problem for the dod to tackle and the marine corps has kind of placed a lot of its value proposition, you know, per this progression of the force design concept on making sure that this CJAD-C2 concept works and that it works for the Marine Corps and that we can successfully leverage it. Kind of, I think, on a related token, sort of central to the idea of combined joint all-domain C2 is this idea of any sensor, any shooter.

The idea that you could take any sensing node in the joint force and it can network its way towards a decision center and then a firing platform elsewhere in the joint force, whether that's within the same service that the sensing originated in or whether that's external in a completely different service or even with our allies and partners. And this ties into, I think, what the Commandant is trying to articulate with the Marine Corps as the JTAC of the Joint Force. He's referring to the Joint Terminal Air Controller. It's kind of a qualified service member. They're going to direct military aircraft during offensive air operations, close air support. And I think what's envisioned here is that the Marine Corps, they're operating forward as a stand-in force. They're under this fires regime, but they're persisting, they're resilient, and they're sensing and providing C2 capabilities that reach back to the joint force and enable the joint force to gain situational awareness or even prosecute targets based on that sensing capability. So really being this forward positioned enabler of all of the decision and fires capabilities that the joint force could bring into a fight. And then I just want to hop in here real quick and just add on something about the C portion of this CJAD C2, and that's the combined nature of it with our allies and partners.

I think that's something whenever you read the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times and they talk about strategic competition, that we often underplace just how important your allies and partners are to not only having access, facing an overflight in some of these areas that you need to operate, but just how much combat power they're bringing to the fight. That's something when you talk about the Japanese Self-Defense Force, JSDF, having spent some time over there. I mean, we were side by side with those units that were out there, working with them in all of the COCs, day on, stay on. And that's absolutely critical that not only can you talk amongst the joint force, but you can talk to them as well, sending them any sort of firing solutions that they may need to protect their country that we're operating in. And that's just something that's really important that we're, the Marine Corps is part of the stand in force, but so are our allies and partners who live there. Thanks for that. And Sean, I also want to just drag out the combined piece of that. And I think it's very important. Many of us, the guests and myself recently came from 3MATH, where we were chewing on that problem, literally in Okinawa, Japan, which is sovereign Japanese territory, right? And so, hey, guess what? We may have a certain capability we want to put on that sovereign Japanese territory and be sensing and potentially controlling aircraft and missiles or other assets in the territory of our Mutual Defense Treaty Ally. And that's very important then that we are ensuring that we are coordinating and communicating together in terms of de-conflicting what is going where and when, de-conflicting those fires, making sure we don't have any form of fracture side, ally on ally fracture side.

That would be absolutely tragic. And ensuring that all those things are able to have a sensor, say from maybe it's a U.S. sensor, as you described, Sean, maybe pushing that target quality track to a Japanese shooter of some variety or the other way around, a Japanese sensor sending a target quality track to a U.S. shooter. And you can apply that to any ally or partner that we may be working with, and not just that theater, but any theater in which we may be employed. And that just emphasizes the complexity, but the importance of that problem of C-JADC2. When we say every sensor to every shooter in the middle, there's this battle network or this communications architecture between that becomes a very, very challenging thing, especially when we're talking different allied nations and their systems that may or may not have different levels of interconnectivity. So I'll stop there. And let me go back to another concept that your article discussed. So based on everything we just discussed, your article, it also notes certain assumptions about this concept, that this joint kill web of relying on the CJETC2 concepts we discussed, that it must be available, but that the People's Liberation Army or the PLA, that it has a doctrine deliberately targeting such information networks. Can you go ahead and explain that doctrine and its threat to the networks that the standing force is going to use? Yeah, so I think two concepts that people should probably be aware of if they're thinking about this problem set is the PLA concept of informatized local wars, number one. And that's sort of the idea that if you can set up – and a local war, by local, I think it really means regional. So think of the Western Pacific as the region of interest for this.

If you can build up an area where you have dominance in terms of information, reconnaissance, and being able to sense targets and move targets, and also disrupt your adversary's ability to do the same. So your C5 ISRT is working better than your adversary's C5 ISRT. you can control the battle space and you can do what you want to do at sort of a high level that's the idea of informatized local wars is and think about it they the the prc has not they've thought about this problem set for a long time right they've been thinking about taiwan since the 50s how to do that and as it's evolved they've been able to to think about this concept and they've also, uh, witnessed how the U S projects power, right? Um, they, they witnessed the invasion of Iraq, um, invasion of Afghanistan, the assets that were relied upon, um, in the mid nineties,

the Taiwan straight crisis, they, they saw how the U S joint force projects power. And so really built these concepts around, um, how do we create dominance in our sphere that disrupts the way that the joint force um likes to project its combat power another concept that you should be uh probably familiar with is since systems confrontation so that's the idea um basically looking at an adversary's kill chain kill web and knowing that um you just have to disrupt any component within it that would make um that system not work right uh so if you're trying to you know deliver a munition or deliver a munition off of like a surface vessel you don't have to kill the surface vessel you just have to disrupt its ability to you know its targeting

cycle so any any point in that that you can disrupt the adversary is not able to do employ their effects but you're able to uh maneuver and do do what what it is you want to do on the battlefield so that's those are kind of the concepts from from their perspective and in that the capability set that gets thrown around a lot is their anti-access aerial denial so that's the capabilities that they've built to sort of uh get after those concepts informatized local wars and systems confrontation which is saying that particularly when the pla is looking at the u.s joint force and its allies and partners how do we make sure that the preponderance of U.S. combat power can't get into the region that we care about right and that's what the whole

the the standing force concept was designed to to add an additional layer within that competition as the as the joint forces kept at distance by these anti-access areas denial capabilities the joint forces in there to persist and sort of from Pat's comments earlier when we were originally thinking about it we as in the service the Marine Corps was thinking about building this force, it was really focused on those organic fires and being able to, you know, employ naval strike missiles and take out Chinese surface combatants. And whether it was a recognition that that was like a really hard thing to do organically, and we didn't really have that capability or not, over time, this concept has gotten more and more

reliant on cjad c2 right the the value proposition of the stand-in force is reliant on our ability to sense and then pass those targets uh to the joint force and thinking about their doctrine is the those same information networks that they were disrupting to keep the u.s surface fleet at a distance are the same sort of capability sets that the stand-in force is now relying on to pass information to uh to the rest of the joint force so think about platforms that um to to cover this distance are really in the air and space layers um those are the same type of assets that the the navy would be trying to rely on if the marine corps wasn't there right to to see into this area so what what we saw as a as a potential you you do your your center of

gravity and critical vulnerability analysis on this um they they were kind of designing this thing potentially in a way where we're lining those up for the adversary where the standing force is both reliant on cjc2 working but we're also saying that we're there because we don't think it's going to work that great um it's it's not it's not necessarily a great argument so uh and some of the contributions that the marine corps has had in uh two joint projects like project convergence is army owned a way to get after building cjc2 and so his project over matches the navy's version of of that what what the marine corps has gone to do in those exercises is really is put out a lot of organic sensors

and show off how much sensor depth we can add to it. But what we haven't really done yet is demonstrate how we make the kill chain more resilient as a whole. Those intermediate C2 nodes, those decision-making nodes, the controlling of those fires that's going to take place. So that's what we were really trying to highlight

of how the Marine Corps could get better is taking a look at those intermediate nodes. Really appreciate that analysis. And just to show my colors a little bit, as you're describing that tension between, hey, we want to make sure that this really big joint thing is going to work really well

and give us all this advantage, but we also believe it's not going to work so we're going to have marines there. The analogy I would use, which is a wrong analogy because it makes it almost more complicated, is, hey, we're going to do all this cloud computing stuff,

but if that fails, we're going to use some edge computing, right? And the edge computing is the stand-in force, is the Marine Force. So let me back away from that super technical analogy there and really refocus it back to a related thing, which is you were talking about the various service projects contributing to SeaJet C2. In your article, it also mentions using Project Dynamis as a means to get after this potential shortfall. So what is Project Dynamis and how can the Marine Force use it to shore up the threats to the kill webs? Yeah, so Project Dynamis, it seems like sort of it's a bottom-up initiative started. I think people are recognizing that this is a problem that the Marine Corps as a service is following in the wake of other services.

And it's sort of a homegrown project from Marine Air Control Group 38. It started there and now has the backing of Deputy Commandant for Information. And so it really is trying to take a look at this problem, reassert the Marine Corps' interest in CJADC2 and how the Marine Corps needs to build out its contributions instead of just following along and seeing where CJADC2 takes us. And hopefully, you know, not being super involved in all aspects of it, that some of the concepts that we're talking about right now can make its way into how Project Dynamis moves forward. And by that, we mean not just owning those sensors at the forward edge of the battlefield and then hoping that the joint information networks work without securing a holistic architecture that supports what it is we want to do. And so hopefully Project Dynamist is taking a look at that. And I know at least one smart Marine who has a stake in that. And hopefully he's taking a good look at those problems.

And I know he's got a whole bunch of good smart Marines working for him. So, you know, maybe, sir, you should have answered this question, but that's what we got. Well played. Yeah, turning it around on me. So just to, again, show my hand a little bit, leading the Marines at Mighty Comm Squadron 38 or Red Lightning, we are within Control Group 38. So the Marines do, in fact, get to play a lot in things like we previously did in Project Convergence Capstone 4, and then later on in Gray Flag. Later on, we'll be doing Project Convergence Capstone 5. And in every other exercise, we're integrating some of these project dynamics objectives, which I, in my mind, I simply think of it as a Marine Corps' contribution to CJADC-2. And so, yeah, it's a real thing.

You know, a headquarters Marine Corps DCI owns it. Control Group 38 has a stake in organizing many of the efforts from science and industry local to the Southern California area, but also across the globe and the United States. some supporting establishment organizations such as mctissa and the marine corps war fighting lab all organize many of those things and some of the squadrons within the control group become action arms of experimentation and so uh it's not just com squadron you know many other max agencies or squadrons that support the max agencies they participate like mass three blacklist uh but yeah i can tell you in addition to the com squadron 38 uh primary mission of enabling c2 for the marine aircraft wing uh project dynamis is a lot of our bread and butter right now so happy to talk much

more technical details in another forum uh but uh i appreciate you turning that right one right back on me so uh back to you guys um and your article your excellent article so a key element of your argument is that the stand-in force it needs organic capabilities to employ but you know a bit of tension between the service's stated philosophy of wanting to develop the the affordable and the plentiful rather than the exquisite and the few, and the cost of the munitions that the service is planning to buy or platforms that the service is planning to buy. So can you discuss this challenge and potential solutions? Yeah. So I think to address that, I'd like to go back a little bit to about five years ago when I

started thinking about this problem set. And really that happened when I was at NPS doing some thesis work on employing loitering munitions to defeat amphibious operations. At this point, this was pre-Ukraine, pre-FPV drones in mass being employed on the front lines. And the whole idea behind that was how many loitering munitions does an infantry company need to defeat an amphibious operation of a certain size? So imagine you have a set of ZBD-5s, which is an amphibious infantry fighting vehicle employed by China, coming ashore, how many of these things does a company need to defeat that? And what I found out with the modeling and simulation was that we just didn't have enough javelins. We didn't have enough of

these exquisite munitions and that we needed quite a few, what we in the Marine Corps call organic precision fires, which is our infantry loitering munitions that we're developing. And so starting in 2019 and then to today, what I've been looking at is how do we get more precision mass into the fight and how does that affect how the Marine Corps does business? And so quick shout out to Wayne Hughes, author of Fleet Tactics, who writes about salvo equations. um definitely something that the marine corps if we're getting into the missile business uh we need to be very cognizant of um but he talks about this and he was uh he was very forward uh forward looking on this uh this sort of thing um and so what you want to achieve essentially

is the right mixture of munitions so you have an appropriate salvo size and throw weight of these different uh sets of munitions that are going out to to achieve uh what you need on the battlefield. And it becomes very highly technical very, very quickly and can evolve, devolve into an attrition fight very quickly, which we try to avoid in the Marine Corps being maneuverous. But that's kind of the world that we're entering and we're having to reassess some things. So to get back to the question specifically, what is the Marine Corps doing in this realm? So we have long range anti-ship missiles. We're starting to field Tomahawks, naval strike missiles. We have the good old trusty harpoon. It's been around for quite a

long time, but definitely would still have some play in any future conflict. And that's kind of the set of munitions that the Marine Corps is really looking at for sea denial. And all of those are exquisite. And as we outlined in our article, that exquisite nature makes them very, very expensive. And they're very, very good at what they do. It's just that we can't make enough of them fast enough for the right price point. So if we were to put on an NBA hat and start talking about the business of war, and can we buy enough of these things? We kind of start to get that a little bit in the article, but I think there's more area for exploration there. How do we get there though? I think in peace, it's very easy to cut munition budgets and promise yourself

that in war, you can quickly ramp up production. I think that's something we did before the Ukraine War, and the Ukraine War has proven that's not necessarily true as much as we would like it to be. And as this precision mass has evolved through a tactical reconnaissance strike complex in Ukraine, something that was brought up in a recent Institute for the Study of War report that went out, that's really changing the battlefield in a big way. So what can the Marine Corps do about it going forward. I think there's a lot of value to be had in the defense innovation ecosystem that's really been growing up the past couple of years. And I think the Marine Corps really needs to engage with that ecosystem to come up with innovative solutions to these problems.

So very recently, Replicator was announced, and that's a big initiative coming from all the way from the top, the Secretary of Defense's office, OSD. And the idea here is that we're going to build a tritable mass that we can employ in any sort of contingency operation to help overcome this issue. And there's just a lot of good stuff happening out there. Like Anduril just announced its Barracuda cruise missile, which has a much cheaper price point than some of the stuff we're fielding right now. Ares Industries, a bunch of young engineers and entrepreneurs just recently funded by Y Combinator, making low cost anti-ship cruise missiles, A big opportunity there. Serana just came out and announced the Corsair, which is its largest unmanned surface vessel to date, which you can put sensors on.

You can put munitions on all sorts of capability there. High-tech AI doing some very, very similar things. Um, so I think the, really the, the value is that, um, America has a lot of great entrepreneurs and, uh, there's a lot of innovation, uh, that is happening and can continue to happen. And the Marine Corps needs to engage with that innovation to bring some of those capabilities forward for experimentation and then fielding as quick as possible. And, uh, I, I don't think I need to tell you that our PPBE process, our, our five-year acquisition uh you know central planning that we do is maybe not the best to make this happen

um but but we need to to solve that and if we can bring these technologies to maturity and produce enough of them to matter fast enough then we can arm marines as a stand-in force to really uh do what we want them to do which is deter the enemy from even fighting we can just deter any sort of war from happening because the cost is just too much to the adversary and they do that calculus and we can we can show that they they don't want to uh they don't want to engage in that war then uh then that's a win for everybody well said so first of all listeners your homework is wayne hughes fleet tactics and eagle operations third edition if you have not read that it is it is phenomenal uh and it will accelerate your appreciation of this conversation uh and

And then secondly, I definitely appreciate the discussion of all the examples of the many cheaper munitions that are being produced much more rapidly outside of the PPE process. I think a lot of listeners and readers focusing in the space might have felt like they were banging their head against the wall in terms of, we hear all these senior leaders saying we need the cheap, the tradable, and the many at the expense of the exquisite and the few. And it felt like we were all saying that, but we weren't seeing much progress. And we were running into the acquisitions process, which is just eating our lunch. But we're seeing the results of that now.

We're seeing the fruition of that, which means there was an awful lot of things happening in the background perhaps we were not aware of. And it's great to see us finally putting our money where our mouth is and seeing the results and the fruits of that labor. So that's all phenomenal stuff. And I implore listeners to do some Google food and check out those very specific examples you cited. And I'm sure they'll find some others connected to Replicator very, very soon. So, gentlemen, hey, we're coming up on time, but before we tap out here, are there any other key points that we didn't discuss that you want to hit on? I think I was really appreciative of you bringing this up earlier, but I kind of just wanted to foot stomp the kind of Houthi case study. with respect to this sense that I have that there's kind of a sentiment that there really

is no value in Marine Corps organic capabilities really making a significant contribution as a stand-in force and that that really all the value is to be had in this interoperability with the joint force but you know I got to look back at the what the Houthis have been able to do in the Red Sea. They've over the last year frustrated the United States, the EU, Israel, and Saudi efforts to kind of stop this maritime trade disruption. And not because any of those actors are necessarily doing a bad job, but this is just a really challenging problem and right now a really effective means of applying this asymmetric disruption that is just frankly really hard to counter without um taking actions that are strategically or or tactically unpalatable and

and i think that they've been able to do this without necessarily being that effective in you know fundamentally like hitting the things that they're shooting at but just by by threatening an entire maritime choke point um with a relatively minimal technological baseline compared to the the our allies and partners that are kind of trying to put a stop to this. It's just an incredibly resilient and asymmetric way of fighting, and I think it illustrates the potential value proposition of the Marine Corps in a stand-in-force-like environment, if we can bring similar organic capabilities to the fight at an American technological baseline. I mean, imagine what a bunch of Marines could do, given a similar opportunity.

i really appreciate that you you leave us on a really powerful note so just as many naval theorists or warfighters would describe the the effect of a fleet in being and the fact that you can achieve some pretty significant effects without that fleet actually fighting just its very existence creates a dilemma for the adversary you could make the same case for a stand-in force in being and and you laid out the huthi case uh very very well and as much as We laid out some of the doctrinal challenges before that we are, in fact, chewing on because it's important to coordinate with the joint force. I have a feeling that the Houthis don't have like these really hard conversations about their version of a double ADC or a JFAC or all those things and let them stop them from just hurling missiles into the Red Sea at targets and just confounding the folks that need to use that space. So that's a very, very powerful point.

Definitely appreciate you highlighting that. So finally, gentlemen, where can listeners find you online? Yeah, so you can find us all on LinkedIn. If you just search us, we put content out there. We comment on a lot of things trying to add to the discussion. We'll also continue to hopefully publish with SimSec, try to expand the number of places that we put some of our work. And then we also have a nascent project, actually,

that we'd like to talk about today. one of the things that we've identified is kind of a lack of quantitative analysis and a lot of the op-eds that we see being written in some of the larger publications out there, you know, whether you name, you know, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, some of these other different places. And so what we'd like to do is start to kind of fill in there with some more math and some of the calculus of conflict. So the project that we're working on is called Warquants. And we're trying to take a quantitative lens to some of this,

do some missile math for Marines, if you will, like we started to do with this article. And so we'll be launching soon on Substack for some just quick turn analysis to some of the day-to-day events that are happening in the world and hopefully contribute more to the conversation going forward. feeling that missile math for marines is going to be the hit of the year uh so definitely looking forward to that with bated breath uh that is fantastic and uh gentlemen i laud your efforts

not just with this but all the work you're doing now and the work you just advertised uh you truly care about this you're putting in the midnight oil uh and it shows in in the case you just made and the passion that i know you're putting into your work so i'll go ahead and stop there uh thank you one more time thanks again for joining us good luck at your current assignments fair winds and following seas and to the listeners bravo zulu for tuning in and we'll see you next time Help me, Bob, I'm bullied in the alley Bullied on the shimbo now A porter, oh, and a porter, gin, oh

Way, hey, bullied in the alley A porter, wine, both white and red, oh Bullied on the shimbo now So help me, Bob, I'm bullied in the alley Way, hey, bullied in the alley Help me, Bob, I'm bullied in the alley Put it out in your mouth