Why mid-level US military officers need to see the big picture of war and their options in a fight

• The US military wants to see more junior officers understand the rest of the military for future war.
• At one Marine Corps school, students are in the middle of waging a two-week war in the Pacific.
• Wargaming software is helping student officers prepare for complex future conflicts with adversaries.

It isn't just the US military's top generals and admirals who need to see the big picture clearly in large-scale warfare. One Marine Corps school is driving home the idea that mid-level officers need to know and understand every tool at their disposal when at war.

At Marine Corps Base Quantico on Monday, two dozen military officers huddled around tables surrounded by whiteboards with military planning notes scrawled on them. At the far end of the room stood a group of officers from three different services and NATO ally Italy in deep thought.

They were focused on "information" — a wide-ranging aspect of warfare that can run the gamut from overt propaganda to cyber warfare to interacting with local civilians affected by war — and grappling with how their piece of the wartime pie meshed with other tables working on the logistics of sustaining forces at war or those coordinating firepower.

Much of what the officers were working on had little to do with racking up kills but was crucial to the mission.

Seeing the big picture

"Do we understand all of what we consider DIME?" an Army student in the group asked, referring to the acronym used to describe diplomatic, information, military, and economic tools that servicemembers could have at their disposal when planning for war.

The goal, the officer explained, isn't just to be a gunslinging warfighter. "It's us putting our brains together and going: 'Are there other ways besides using a weapon system to handle this issue?'"

When Business Insider stopped by to observe their work and planning, the officer and around 200 other US and allied military students were in the middle of waging a two-week war against a fictional Pacific country, their final test to graduate from the Marine Corps Command and Staff College, a military school that helps prepare mid-level officers to eventually oversee larger and more complex formations.

"To hunt another human being who is hunting you, the winner is the one who's smarter," said Gen. Matthew Tracy, president of Marine Corps University and head of Marine Corps' Education Command, of the painstaking planning students face.

"Over the course of the year, we have been hunting each other at larger and larger levels," he said.

As the DoD moves further to prepare for future warfare, the idea of deeper, more intricate integration between the services has taken on new significance.

"The importance of doing unified joint operations is more important than ever," said Tim Barrick, who oversees wargaming for the Marine Corps University and helped develop a wargaming software system used by students to test their knowledge of capabilities across the both US and adversary militaries.

Just like many middle managers in the corporate world, where the big picture of company operations may be limited to C-suite executives, many mid-ranking military officers' knowledge of the larger armed forces comes from experiences in their narrowly assigned fields, like leading an infantry unit or flying a helicopter.

Each military service brings different capabilities and cultures to war. Making sense of what each has to offer and understanding things like how a Space Force guardian's efforts might shape the battlefield for an Army radio operator can be a messy endeavor.

Few of such ranks can easily speak the common "joint" language or easily translate unique capabilities between the services. Such fluency could look like a Navy warship effectively communicating with Space Force partners amid a ship cyber-attack, or Marine Corps and Army ground troops working together on the battlefield.

Multi-domain warfare, orchestrating war on land, at sea, and in space and cyberspace for maximum effect in battle, is key, but until now, many of these officers have not yet had to contend with how different "domains" of war interact during warfare, Barrick said.

Different capabilities and culture

In future fights with peer-level adversaries, US troops will "need to be prepared to fight at optimal efficiency and effectiveness," Barrick said. That means getting people from each service — not just generals and admirals— on the same page, with more intricate understandings of the entire DoD, especially for young leaders in the pipeline to one day command brigades and warships.

But achieving synchronization is much easier said than done and requires years of study, often with help from internal military service exchange programs, to comprehend.

The idea of fighting as a unified force isn't new. The services have long trained for unified operations and fought together throughout the two-decade Global War on Terror. But the GWOT often saw commands stovepiped in narrow areas of focus, with "joint" leadership typically much higher up the chains of command.

When fighting lower-level enemies who lack nuclear arsenals, "you can potentially make mistakes and recover from them and still have an advantage," Barrick said. That may not be so for future wars.

"We would much rather that they make those mistakes in a war game that we run here in the schoolhouse," he said. "Rather than having that first learning curve occur in real combat."

The wargaming software Barrick helped develop, which students found themselves up against at Quantico, is part of a military trend to harness technology for wartime preparations. The wargame, known as Digicat, short for "digital course of action tool," allows students access to the entire US military arsenal — as well as those of potential adversaries.

Say you want to take out an enemy carrier strike group, said faculty member and Army Lt. Col. Jay Bessey, pulling up the blue screen, filled with icons representing aircraft, submarines, and ships spread throughout the Pacific theater. He hovered over a B-21 stealth bomber — in this case, a Raider carrying a Quicksink anti-ship weapon.

"It very much helps us understand our capabilities and our adversary's, the pacing threat being China," Bessey said. Such a tool "helps you to understand the size and scope of the fight, the complexity of the operational level of war," he said, referring to the sphere of war where troops plan large-scale military campaigns. "There's nothing simple about it."