WASHINGTON — The U.S. Marine Corps, tasked with accelerating its force modernization efforts, started the Advanced Naval Technology Exercise series to put promising technology prototypes in the hands of Marines for rapid feedback and learning.

Now, the Corps is planning its next step forward: a first-of-its-kind war-gaming center that will allow the service to repeatedly run scenarios, each time tweaking concepts, tactics and technologies to guide the Corps’ Force Design 2030 decision-making process at a rapid pace.

The Marine Corps Wargaming and Analysis Center will give the service this rapid learning capability, said Scott Lacy, the chief of staff of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, which will oversee the center’s operations.

“It’s beneficial because it enables us to speed up what we call the campaign of learning, which is about identifying a concept; war gaming that concept; ultimately taking that result and conducting a live, virtual or constructive experimentation with it; and also identifying where new technology on the horizon may fit in to that process, and then ultimately that turns into requirements, which ideally turns into acquisitions,” Lacy told Defense News on Aug. 27. “And so if you can hasten that process of campaign of learning and build a really rich body of analytic work that underpins those decisions, it’s really valuable to the institution.”

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Paul Crespo

Paul Crespo is the Managing Editor of American Defense News. A defense and national security expert, he served as a Marine Corps officer and as a military attaché with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) at US embassies worldwide. Paul holds degrees from Georgetown, London, and Cambridge Universities. He is also CEO of SPECTRE Global Risk, a security advisory firm, and President of the Center for American Defense Studies, a national security think tank. - paulcrespo.substack.com - PAULCRESPO.COM