Pushing the Envelope

The marines' commitment to decentralized management and bottom-up thinking has evolved gradually over the corps' more-than-200-year-old existence. It's come about for a simple reason: high-risk, high-speed, high-focus assaults tend to be unforgiving on bureaucratic or autocratic management styles. The pressure to decentralize has increased in recent years as the shadow of military downsizing has forced the marines to further differentiate themselves from the army to stave off steep cuts -- and that means gearing up for even faster, more-effective responses to an ever-wider range of scenarios.

To do it, the marines are trying to invent entirely new forms of decentralization based on new technologies. One series of experiments run by the two-year-old Marine Warfighting Iaboratory in Quantico, had 18 squads of marines fanning out over 1,500 square miles of desert. Normally, squads remain within sight and radio range of one another, avoiding the disaster of inadvertently calling in artillery fire on another squad's position. But these squads were equipped with handheld computers into which enemy positions could be typed, as well as global positioning systems to track their own locations. The data from each squad were sent to a single command post, where officers could put together a coherent picture of the entire battle scene. The goal of a new computer system, says experiment leader Colonel James Lasswell, is to get enough of this information back to the squads so they can make better decisions about where to call in fire. "It allows the squads to act like ground sensors for all the precision weapons we have coming on line," he says.

Lasswell has also arranged for officers to visit traders on Wall Street to get a lesson in how to make fast decisions based on information flowing in through banks of monitors-which may be exactly the way colonels operate in future conflicts. While the experience has been helpful, Lasswell notes there's a limit to how much the marines want to emulate the traders, given a fundamental difference in the way they view end states. "The traders are happy as long as they win more than they lose," he says. "When losing means you bring home bodies, that's not good enough."

One idea being tossed around is a return to the World War 11 practice of bringing civilian business managers into the marines as instant colonels or other high-ranking officers. While such managers wouldn't have the benefit of such unique experiences as OCS and the Basic School, the marines are quick to admit that the outside world may have expertise and management solutions that can be translated to meet their own needs-and they don't necessarily want to wait to grow such capabilities on their own. Besides, notes General Admire, the marines and the business world have at least one thing in common. "Whether you're pursuing peace or profit," he says, "there's a lot of tough competition out there."