Marine Corps News, news from Iraq - Marine Corps Times

Corps creates intel cells at rifle-company level

A need for more intelligence analysts in the Corps is forcing infantry operations to get a whole lot smarter, under a new initiative that is for the first time pushing battalion-level intelligence know-how down to the rifle-company level.

The Corps is creating company-level intelligence cells — called C-LICs — in an attempt to plug the hole and curb the loss of valuable intelligence that often goes missing when units pass the baton on the battlefield, Marine officials said.

“We’ve been consistently short in retaining intel professionals in the Marine Corps,” said Master Sgt. Willard Dickey, intelligence operations chief for 1st Marine Division and a C-LIC training coordinator.

Intel skills are more lucrative in the civilian world than in the service, causing many Marines with those skills to seek other employment. Retention bonuses, however, have slowed down the attrition rate, Dickey said.

“The reality is because we were already experiencing manpower shortages, the people retained haven’t bumped us up to where we need to be,” Dickey said. “We’re so short in the intel community, we can’t meet all the needs.”

A Corps spokesman, however, downplayed the shortage, saying intelligence is considered a high-impact, low-density occupational specialty — one that is in more demand because of the war in Iraq. “There’s an increased need in intelligence analysts, not a shortage,” Maj. Jay Delarosa said. “It wouldn’t be appropriate to say across the board that there’s a shortage.”

The C-LIC initiative, launched under the direction of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab in Quantico, Va., will soon be battle-tested by California-based 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines, on its next Iraq deployment, slated for early 2008.

Today’s irregular warfare, with its lack of a uniformed enemy, makes intelligence gathering vital for enemy identification. To adapt to the emerging threat, infantry companies often create their own versions of ad hoc intelligence cells, said Vince Goulding, director of experimentation plans at the Warfighting Laboratory. But those individual efforts have been piecemeal, because the Corps had no standard training or equipment available, he said.

The new initiative for pushing intelligence analysis know-how down to the lower echelons, however, is about to change all that. Rifle companies will now be able to assess, analyze and disseminate information that they typically had relied on battalion or regimental command to produce.

Now, grunts have the gouge.

“On this battlefield, in this era, we’re asking those rifle companies to do, frankly, sorts of things and cover an area bigger than I was used to as a battalion commander,” Goulding said.

Preparation for how units approach intelligence collection on the distributed battlefield has been as varied as the units themselves, said Capt. Gabe Diana, project officer for C-LIC at the Warfighting Laboratory.

“Databases were normally made by somebody in the companies, so what you’d see is five different databases within a battalion. Then come [relief in place] time, five more databases and there’s just loads of information that’s just lost,” Diana said.

Rifle companies use the databases for vital intelligence procured from the local area, which can help avoid much of the time lost sending intelligence requests to the battalion or regimental level, Dickey said.

“If we can train ourselves at this level, we can produce the intelligence we’re asking for,” which could save days of waiting for responses over the duration of a unit’s deployment, he said.

“The concept of employing C-LIC in a combat environment, while not doctrine, has been in practice for at least the last 18 months,” said Dickey, who has trained almost 100 Marines in elements of company-level intelligence. Elements of the program have been used by several units in Iraq, he said.

However, 3/4 is the first Marine unit to go through what is considered the most formal training, he said. The battalion’s experience “will be the initial standard from which we will grow and evolve from,” he said.

As part of the trial, 28 Marines from 3/4 were selected for C-LIC training based on a laundry list of criteria.

Each of 3/4’s C-LIC Marines had to receive the required security clearance, said Lt. Col. William Visted, the battalion’s commander, in an e-mail. Those Marines also had to want the position, show an aptitude for computer skills and analytical analysis, show individual initiative and have high General Technical scores or some college experience, he added.

They also needed combat experience.

“We wanted guys who had at least one pump over there because they have done some of the Arabic training. They’re familiar with some of the tribal relationships,” Diana said.

The two-week training exercise helped many Marines make the shift in thinking from infantryman to intelligence analyst, said one corporal, in his written evaluation of the exercise. “This was [definitely] needed because we will clearly be using this process in Iraq,” he said.

“The training has been what has been the gap,” Diana said. “The Marine Corps already had programs of record. The problem was nobody knew how to use them down at the company level.”

The new intelligence roles will also translate into new gear for the battalion, including nine laptops loaded with intelligence programs. They will also receive several printers, external hard drives, thumb drives, scanners and digital cameras.

C-LIC Marines will also get an interim secret clearance, Diana said.

In a separate but concurrent initiative, 3/4 also will get 48 Wasp micro-unmanned aerial vehicles, outfitted with night vision. The Wasp is a backpack-sized UAV, referred to as “flying binoculars,” Goulding said. “We’re going to send that over as well, to kind of check how it works, the training, because [Marine Corps] Systems Command is getting ready to buy a lot of them and we want to make sure we train and distribute properly.”

C-LIC training for 3/4 wrapped up Nov. 9, and the new intel-grunts are already pulling information to study their various areas of operations before their deployment in early 2008.

“You’re starting to build that baseline and you’re starting to get a feel for your area of operations before you even get into theater,” Diana said.

But the real value of the initiative will be felt in theater, he said.

If, for example, a company commander wanted more information about roadside bombs and small-arms attacks in his area, the C-LIC would compile and analyze recent recorded events, then present the findings to the company, Diana said.

“They give the brief, and then squad leaders in the company can start putting requests for information in,” Diana explained. “Squad leaders, team leaders, are starting to see what the [C-LICs] can produce for them. And then, in turn, ‘here are areas where I’d like more information’ and now it becomes cyclical. It becomes a process, a battle drill, where the guys who are down on the ground and are going to be conducting the patrolling can now go back and pull information from these [C-LICs].”

Of the 28 intel-grunts, four will move up to the battalion’s intel shop as manpower replacements for the 0231 intelligence analysts headed to each company. The remaining 24 C-LIC Marines will return to their regular companies, but in support roles, commanded not by the company officer, but the battalion’s intelligence officer.

“What that means is, they’re not going to be filling sandbags,” Diana said. “They are going to be focused on intelligence.”

In the end, the intel capability for each company in Visted’s battalion will stand at one school-trained intel analyst, in addition to four or five C-LIC infantrymen.

“We anticipate that this will allow the [battalion]-level S-2 to focus on analyzing and disseminating, while the company-level cells focus on gathering the information, an initial analysis for the company-specific operational area, and the feeding [of] data into the Intel systems and pushing the initial analysis up to the [battalion],” Visted said.

Despite working as intel analysts, C-LIC Marines keep their original infantry military occupational specialty. Currently, there is no formal recognition at Marine Corps Headquarters that a leatherneck has the training under his belt, Dickey said. Those going through the training are issued a certificate, a copy of which is kept on file at the Marine’s division headquarters.

It’s a detail that could leave the C-LIC Marine shortchanged, he said.

“It is my personal opinion, with the amount of info that we’re giving the Marines, that they should have the secondary MOS, which is a designation of 0200,” Dickey said.

It’s a “double-edged sword,” he added. “Marines want to be acknowledged for the skills that they learn.“ However, “overwhelmingly, they’ve been adamant that they want to maintain their original MOS.”

If they are granted a secondary MOS in intelligence, however, the rarity of that experience will likely mark them for C-LIC duty in each new unit they’re assigned to, leaving them at risk for losing their original MOS capability, Dickey said.

“The problem we have institutionally is [that] you don’t want to rob one community to serve another,” he said.

Marines chosen for the C-LIC team, however, could also expect a little more love from command in the short term. “The benefit for the individual Marine is that it makes him a smarter war fighter,” Dickey said. “The skill set alone makes him, without exaggeration, twice as valuable as Marines without the training.”

Empowering grunts with the C-LIC capability could also help improve survivability, sources said.

“It’s going to help your learning curve,” Diana said. “Hopefully it will mean operational effectiveness sooner.”

“I anticipate the [relief in place] being improved based simply on the fact of having a dedicated cell conducting an Intel turnover as opposed to it being a portion of the company commander’s turnover,” Visted wrote.

While 3/4 is launching the lab’s trial for this initiative, the Corps isn’t waiting for the results at the end of the unit’s deployment before sharing its C-LIC model with other interested battalions, Diana said.

“What it really comes down to is finding the enemy,” Diana said. “It’s working more efficiently. If you can focus your operations through the use of this intel cell, then you’re just working more efficiently rather than just going out to do operations after operations,” he said.

More intel-centric operations also translate into increased tactical success on the battlefield in Iraq, which is increasingly disbursed by the irregular warfare, Dickey said.

“We’re disbursed throughout the indigenous people of another country where insurgents are embedded in with the population,” he said. “We have to go in and pull them out.”

The C-LIC concept is long overdue given the five years of counterinsurgency warfare, Visted said.

“My initial view was that [six] 03XX Marines per company would be painful, given force protection and troop-to-task requirements on the ground, but the benefit would outweigh the cost,” he wrote. “If we can generate faster, better, and more effective intelligence, it will compensate for the loss of a fire team in each company.”