Tech savvy young Marines a new guiding force on adaptation of technology

USNI News:

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“They might be a rifleman in the third squad, but they’re into racing drones, and the next thing you know you have a world-class racing drone concept that can be fully developed just by incorporating the bottom-up feedback. So it’s a bit of a merging of generations in a way that we’re not really used to. Our young Marines, not only are they steeped in the traditions and the history of the service but they’re also bringing the quick-changing adaptive modern world into it, and we’re formalizing the harnessing of that.”

So far, Schmitt said, the results have been impressive.

“You get a guy with a great technical idea in electronic warfare but he’s not educated in it, and you put him with the labs where the scientists are, and you put your chocolate and peanut butter together and it’s much better than each one of them alone. Once we started seeing that, we starting using couch change to pay for it, and we scraped up that change, paid for those first few … and got some immediate successes out of it, which gave us more confidence as an institution to say this is really harnessing these guys’ ideas,” he said.
“We don’t know where it’s going to take us, but we know it’s going to be good.”

Capt. Eric McCrery, a project officer at MCWL, said the first couple NCO fellows were found more informally, but their six-month stints at the lab were so successful MCWL was able to make the argument for a formal and funded fellowship.

“The first one was two summers ago, so July/August of 2016 we came across a sergeant who was very savvy with information operations, very good at creating very compelling videos that we applied in tactical situations to replicate kind of what some of our adversaries are using today on social media. So we found him and basically brought him to the lab to work for us,” McCrery said.

“Since then we had two more NCOs through the winter and spring time: one specialized in additive manufacturing, creating small UAS (unmanned aerial systems) or drones, and then one is kind of a cyber guru. So all three of those were very ad hoc-ish, we just coordinated with those commands and brought them in and the lab paid for them. However, within the last couple of months we actually professionalized the fellowship with the Office of Naval Research and basically we will be sending a MARADMIN, which is just an official memo to the rest of the Marine Corps, for NCOs to apply, and then when we select those individuals – up to 20 within a six-month timeframe – they will come to the lab and through the Warfighting Lab and ONR we will help them with whatever projects they want to work on. Anything from autonomous systems to weapons systems to UAS, big data, really anything that’s tactically applicable to the Marine Corps.”

Schmitt said the current 16 fellows were selected based on the topics they were passionate about and also their relevance to a future urban fight, to support the Urban Technology Demonstration planned for the spring at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, Calif. The next cohorts will be selected with a particular emphasis on two areas: integrating artificial intelligence, machine learning, and manned/unmanned teaming in support of distributed logistics; and leveraging the information environment at the tactical edge. Those not selected for the fellowship can also contribute ideas online via chatrooms and forums, he said.
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There is more.

The Marines have also found that these Marines adaptation may mimic that of adversaries which makes it easier to prepare to deal with them.  The Marines have always been an innovative branch of the service that does it on a tight budget.