As the military pushes ahead in an increasingly complex and uncertain world, the battlefield of the future will necessitate certain capabilities to fight and win in the information age.

Brig. Gen. Dimitri Henry, director of intelligence for the Marine Corps, outlined three things he believes are needed from industry and academic partners to help the service in this future fight.

The first is an agile network, Henry said Wednesday at the DoDIIS Worldwide Conference, detailing the mobility of Marines and the necessity of a network that can follow them in austere and expeditionary locations. They need information systems and data repositories — be they local or forward-deployed servers or the cloud — to move in the cyber and physical space in which Marines operate, he said.

Secondly, Henry called for resiliency and data integrity. “We get up close and personal with our adversaries, and we have data at rest around our formations,” he said.

The Marines need the “resiliency and data integrity” to make sound and timely decisions at the lowest level, he added. Marines fighting at the fire team level may be incapable of operating if the environment continues down its current path, he noted.

He emphasized that without this, Marines won’t be equipped, trained or educated on the network and the data needed for decision-making at the lowest levels.

Lastly, Henry said the force requires redundancy, not just in systems but in the ability to act as an enterprise. This includes the Marine Corps intelligence enterprise, the Defense Department’s information enterprise and the broader intelligence community.

About Mark Pomerleau

Mark Pomerleau is a reporter for C4ISRNET, covering information warfare and cyberspace.

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