Information: Too Important to Centralize

One of the central questions in modern warfare is how to organize military forces to fight with information effects to gain an advantage. Across the military services, commanders grapple with how to harness data, employ sensors, and use influence to generate real combat power. Within the Marine Corps circles, this debate has centered on the role and structure of the Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group (MIG). On one hand, there’s a sense that the information group is a failed concept; on the other, several authors propose taking the idea a step further and forming “information combat elements” led by their own commander. The creation of the MIG was a necessary corrective that injected critical planning factors into the understanding of modern war, but the idea of an information commander pushes a good thing too far.

Modern war is an information war. But the question isn’t whether information matters—it’s how to best organize to fight in an information-saturated environment. Every drone video, radio transmission, and social media post generates a potentially overwhelming stream of information. Making operations in the information environment the responsibility of any single commander is a mistake. Information is the coin of the realm for all commanders. Subordinate commanders should be able to understand their battlespace independently of higher headquarters in order to act effectively in the absence of orders. Every commander must be able to sense the threats and opportunities they face (physically and in the electromagnetic spectrum) without requesting that information from a higher headquarters that may have other priorities. Winning the battle for information, by blinding, deceiving, and confusing the adversary to out-cycle their OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, and act), isn’t the concern of any individual commander. It’s the primary concern of every commander. Information is too important to centralize.

The Temptation to Centralize

Information is the necessary raw material for decisionmaking and decisionmakers. Understanding and deciding are the essence of command. Commanders starved for information make bad decisions, or just as dangerous, good decisions that are late and irrelevant. Making a single commander in the Marine Air Ground Task Force (hereafter also “task force”) responsible for information will isolate the other commanders from responsibility and centralize a function that risks depriving them of the required situational awareness. The idea of an information commander echoes “methodical battle,” the historical opposite of the Marine Corps’ doctrine of maneuver warfare.

The advocates for an information combat element aren’t wrong about the problem. They see staff overwhelmed by data, confusing authorities, and clumsy integration of the warfighting functions. Their response is to unify the information functions under one commander to generate coherence and speed. The problem is that centralization in combat rarely produces either. The idea that a senior-level headquarters can determine with precision the needs of all subordinates and synchronize their actions is a lofty goal and certainly one that has the advocates’ best intentions. But centralization has rarely worked in high-intensity combat. From the French doctrine of the 1930s to target selection in the White House during Vietnam, centralization has a long record of failure. Because of centralization’s regular failings, Marine Corps doctrine has been purposefully built on the premise of subordinate initiative as the remedy for the inevitable absence or incompleteness of orders during the confusion of battle.

The urge to centralize new technology into specialized formations isn’t a recent one. Machine guns were originally considered so niche that they were fielded in separate battalions because only experts could be trusted with their employment. So powerful compared to bolt-action rifles, force designers believed that their use needed to be controlled at higher echelons to maximize the weapons’ effect. As processes to mass-produce machine guns improved, the weapons were pushed to lower echelons. Now every Marine rifle squad has multiple machine guns with the fielding of the M-27 automatic rifle. What was niche is now ordinary. Information should follow the same trend line. The goal should be to decentralize so it’s collected by everyone and available to anyone, rather than gathered and employed under the authority of a single commander.

Authorities and Priorities

Some of the arguments to centralize information operations are highly pragmatic. Certain information authorities are held at the highest levels to minimize escalation risks, so their full integration can only occur at those levels and above. But authorities retained anywhere other than the most effective level are a self-imposed limitation that an adversary may not share. If structures built in peacetime lock in prewar restrictions, the likelihood of those authorities being delegated to those who can fully exploit them in wartime is slim. If authority to employ the various blinding tools is held at the highest levels, the ability to exploit their effects must also be held at the highest levels and, therefore, guarantee that more junior commanders must wait for decisions that may be made too late or not at all.

There is also a process problem. All commanders have information requirements because they are responsible for making timely decisions. Those commanders who control information collectors, both humans and sensors, get to determine and prioritize what information is collected. Typically, the Marine Air Ground Task Force commander determines the priorities with the support of the intelligence and operations section. If a subordinate commander is also the information commander, then they have a far broader set of information collection requirements that will inevitably clash with the needs of the task force commander and the other subordinate commands. The task force commander can overcome this by rank and position. The other commanders probably cannot. This internal competition for prioritized information gathering will be unhelpful and generate more friction than it can solve.

The task force commander is the decisionmaker who allocates resources between the various domain-based combat elements of the force. The facilitators of those decisions within the command element are generally the operations section and the fires and effects section. It’s implied in their roles that the staff leaders of those sections have considerable sway over the access to information necessary to accomplish their tasks. Whoever controls the understanding of the fight is effectively the coordinator of all efforts. The appropriate person to coordinate Marine Air Ground Task Force operations is the task force operations officer. Having an information commander at a subordinate echelon, determining information flow would further muddle the already complex domain-oriented command arrangement.

Vulnerabilities

There is an alarming belief that today’s technology has finally made complete centralization possible. Efforts are being made across the joint force to achieve truly global command and control, where distant headquarters will direct detailed execution of widely dispersed operations. That may work against a violent extremist organization, but against hypersonic weapons and global surveillance of a peer competitor that can contest every domain—it is a dangerous assumption that defies the destructive logic of war.

Lessons from Ukraine indicate that headquarters are vulnerable and routinely destroyed. The Marine Corps experience at the Marine Air Ground Task Force warfighting exercise demonstrated similar challenges. Large command posts struggle to survive and seek sanctuary to operate, but there is no sanctuary in modern war. If a command post can be found, it can be struck. Command post destruction is a regular feature of modern war and should be a basic assumption for anyone designing combat formations. Centralizing the information function under a single commander will only make the problem worse. The answer isn’t more protection; it’s greater dispersion and node replication. Place information capabilities at all echelons and disperse the collection, fusion, and analysis to redundant subordinates who can employ the information in their own area of operation or feed a larger picture at higher headquarters—if that command post survives.

What Should Be Done

Those advocating for an information combat element with a commander are certainly correct about information’s importance. The Marine Corps’ creation of the Marine expeditionary force information groups brought progress and understanding where there were only glimmers of possibility before. Incorporating information as a warfighting function also ensured that information-related capabilities aren’t an afterthought added when the maneuver plan is complete. But before another commander is added to the mix, leaders should pause.

The next evolutionary step is further dispersion, not centralization. Small permanently attached information teams should be assigned to all units expected to control an area of operation down to at least the battalion level. These teams would be sufficiently trained and equipped to ensure that the unit commander could physically and in the spectrum sense understand the unit’s area of operations without augmentation from a higher headquarters. A common counterargument is that the necessary personnel to do this are hard to recruit, difficult to train, and even harder to retain after their first enlistment. This might be true if the information teams were human, but they don’t need to be fully or even primarily manned. Ukraine’s rapid integration of drone technology shows what’s possible: small tactical units with a majority of unmanned systems dedicated to information collection, blinding and counter-intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance targeting. Ukraine’s efforts to stand up independent drone units, called the “Drone Line,” were driven by manpower shortages due to combat losses, but they show what’s possible when the broadest range of functions is automated.

Scaling up to the Marine expeditionary force level, the role of the information group should be the coordinator of effects, not the commander of them. Effective Marine Air Ground Task Force commanders fight via warfighting functions to generate the required conditions for subordinate unit success: fires here, maneuver there, information throughout. Which unit delivers the function is less important than the effect achieved, so a variety of options is a benefit, not a risk. Many units provide fires; the same should be the case for information. The task force command element should retain cognizance over the information functions to ensure unity across all warfighting functions. The Marine Expeditionary Force information group would still have a vital role to play, however. Serving as the information experts inside the Marine expeditionary force command element, they would plan and conduct large-scale analysis and coordination with echelons above or outside that deliver the effects necessary for success. The information coordination center with the ability to mass effects to support a main effort remains a powerful planning and coordination node. The information group remains the essential connector between tactical units and joint- or national-level organizations. Its strength should lie in amplifying rather than owning the information fight.

The bulk of the sensing, blinding, and deceiving forces would be commanded at the lowest levels, where those sufficiently close to the fight can exploit the fleeting opportunities that they detect in time to make a difference, but coordination of the whole task force effort still matters. Decentralization does not mean anarchy. Unity of effort stems from a clear commander’s intent, well-rehearsed procedures, clear authorities, and detailed planning.

Conclusion

Information is too important to centralize. The service doesn’t need a dedicated information commander or information combat element; it needs every commander to be an information commander. All tactical commanders must be capable and ready to blend the full range of war-fighting functions into the necessary combinations to generate advantage. All must assume they will be electronically isolated from their higher commander at some point and need to act without “reach-back.” The future fight will belong to those who fully understand their area of operations, act to exploit fleeting opportunities without waiting for permission, while adhering to the higher commander’s last intent. The Marine Expeditionary Force information groups provided a vital head start for the Marine Corps. Now it’s time to push that information competence and capability down to the lowest echelons.

Todd P. Simmons is a non-resident fellow in the Futures Lab at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. The views in this article are those of the author and not those of Marine Corps University, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.