SAN DIEGO – The Marine Corps and Navy need to keep investing in realistic training simulators, multi-domain integrated exercises, more lethality and advanced technologies that keep up with new threats to better prepare Marines and sailors to defeat adversaries in a future high-end fight, several operational commanders told a conference audience this week.

With global conflicts and tensions in the Mediterranean, Ukraine, the Red Sea and South China Sea and threats from adversaries including China and Russia, there’s little time to waste, they said. Training systems, and how the services prepare operational units and individual Marines and sailors’ warfighting skills, must adapt and adjust to the latest threats and tactics.

“The character of warfare… is changing right before our very eyes, whether it’s the range of sensors, the range and the value of the weapon systems, integration of manned, unmanned, artificial intelligence, from space all the way to seabed and everything in between, cyber, information, and it’s happening fast,” Vice Adm. John Wade, the U.S. Third Fleet commander in San Diego, said Wednesday during a panel discussion at the WEST 2025 conference co-hosted by the U.S. Naval Institute and AFCEA.

To keep up with pacing threats such as China, Wade said, “we’ve got to move at speed with high-velocity learning, at the same time integrating the modernization efforts and simultaneously planning for the future.”

The Navy’s surface fleet has been doing just that, analyzing and incorporating operational lessons into its schoolhouse learned from continuing operations in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden as well as Ukraine’s use of unmanned systems against Russian forces in the Black Sea.

“The Red Sea… and the Eastern Med has enabled us to take that time and to drive it with urgency,” Rear Adm. Joe Cahill, commander of Naval Surface Forces Atlantic in Norfolk, Va., told the audience. “So we’re doing a lot of understanding about what needs to be ready, when does it need to be ready, and what does it need to be ready to do as the changing character of war happens.”

The sea services, through their various restructuring and modernization campaigns, want to train, equip and posture their forces across the globe, including in the Indo-Pacific, where U.S. defense officials predict they might see potential conflict in the next few years. Top high-end threats include China’s aggression against Taiwan and other neighbors and saber rattling by Russia and North Korea – potential scenarios that senior commanders are counting on to drive how they train and prepare their Marines and sailors to be ready to fight and win.

“We don’t have that luxury (of time) in the United States Marine Corps or in the United States Navy,” said Lt. Gen. Michael Cederholm, who commands I Marine Expeditionary Force (I MEF) based at Camp Pendleton, Calif. “When that call comes for the next fight – and the next fight is going to be nasty, and it’s going to be ugly – we’d better take the maximum amount of time, maximize our training time to be ready.”

Readying for the Threats

The Marine Corps’ three expeditionary forces already have started training and preparing their operational units, including stand-in forces that would fight within the weapons engagement zone. These revamped unit training and large-scale service training exercises incorporate current and future threats and also provide more naval integration and more live-virtual-constructive (LVC) events with high-fidelity systems that connect live units at different locations ashore and at sea.

“It’s perhaps my most sacred obligation… to ensure that they’re ready. How do we do that? Through a very detailed oriented, constantly revising (training) to meet the threat and the mission standards,” said Cederholm, who oversees the West Coast-based I MEF and its 44,133 Marines and sailors.

The MEF also continues to take delivery of more lethal weapons, combat systems and equipment through the Marine Corps’ Force Design and Project Tripoli campaign. “We are putting function, capabilities and weapons systems in the hands of United States Marines. We let them experiment with them, let them get familiar with them and find out where the gaps and seams are so we can go do our nation’s bidding,” said Cederholm.

A recent change is the expansion of the predeployment composite training unit exercise, COMPTUEX, which stretches over 17 days on the West Coast and 15 days on the East Coast and also “takes into account real-world scenarios,” Cederholm said.

“The brilliance in the basics will lead us to lethality. It will lead us to all of our warfighting functions. More importantly, as we get better at those and we have a building block approach, even before we chop to undergo the whole training cycle with the ARG, the brilliance in the basics is even more important now because the emergent changes, be it ship scheduling, be it threat-driven, be it disaggregation,” he said. “If you don’t start from a good foundation, all the rest is difficult to do.”

The 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), which returned the last of its forces in late November after an unusually extended deployment , was the first MEU to go through the revised certification. The 2,500-member unit had trained and deployed with the USS Boxer Amphibious Ready Group, which included the big-deck amphibious ship Boxer (LHD-4), dock landing ship USS Somerset (LPD-25) and dock landing ship USS Harpers Ferry (LSD-49). “We had to rely on that training at COMPTUEX to get us through that, and I’m really thankful,” Cederholm said. Next up will be the 13th MEU, he said.

On the East Coast, II MEF continues to work through the ARG/MEU certification process with its naval counterparts. “But there’s more work to be done,” Lt. Gen. Calvert L. Worth Jr., who commands the Camp Lejeune, N.C.-based II MEF, told the audience.

“We need further integration of logistics challenges inside the live, virtual and constructive (training environments) to really work through what’s needed in distributed operations in a maritime domain in a contested environment , where the adversary is going to confuse and frustrate your efforts to keep those distributed formations sustained,” Worth said. LVC systems, he said, “will allow us to work the challenges and train as we will fight.”

His Marines and sailors with II MEF also are participating in Force Design “from the deckplate up, helping the commandant understand where he is today in Force Design implementation and where we might be tomorrow,” Worth said. The feedback helps refine operational requirements “to deliver capabilities that will make a difference (and) maintains our asymmetric advantage with allies and partners.”

“In EUCOM, our NATO allies are watching what it is we say with regard to Joint All Domain Command and Control,” said Worth, referring to JADC2, the Department of Defense’s concept for a single, integrated network battle management system. “There is an expectation that the United States and our maritime forces lead the way with regard to command and control in the maritime domain and in the littoral context – and certainly in the High North, in the Baltics, in the Bosphorus (Strait), and now we’ve seen over the last year, inside the Red Sea, in the Bab-el-Mandeb.”

“There are true missions and true requirements of capabilities that we need delivered – not tomorrow, but today – and they need to be delivered at speed and at the density that is relevant to our warfighting capability,” he said.

Advancing Surface Training

The Navy’s surface force, commanders said, continues to incorporate lessons from current events and operations and current threat and capability environment into technical, warfighting and leadership instruction at the schoolhouse and into predeployment training and certification events, including Surface Warfare Advanced Tactical Training.

The fleet has expanded its community of warfighting experts, with 768 weapons tactics instructors, or “Witties,” across the fleet today, Cahill said. Witties are assigned on 66 percent of warships, and 21 percent of their commanding officers and executive officers are certified Witties.

The surface fleet also “are now executing quarterly SWATTs for training that replicates – as realistic with LVC – combat conditions in the theater that the teams are going to operate in,” Cahill said. While firing a Standard Missile was rare even over his career, “now every single warship that goes out the door executes a live fire against a new representative threat,” he said.

“In the last few years, we’ve gotten live reps and sets of how to reload our warships in the control area,” he added. “We’re prototyping how to do that underway , and I’m seeing many things publicly, but we’re executing Tomahawks and standing missile reload prototypes at sea. That’s an incredible enabler for our force in the Indo-Pacific.”

And, lessons are drawn much more quickly. What once took three months to pull and analyze data by Naval Surface and Mine Warfare Development Center now takes less than two days, Cahill said, giving quicker feedback to those frontline commanders and crews as well as the next ships spinning up to deploy and students at the schoolhouse. “This is learning at speed – speed to enable us to fight and win with the urgency that I’ve never seen in my career,” he said.

The fleet’s recent experiences in the Red Sea also have cast a spotlight on the need to rethink the logistics of those warships and crews operating in a weapons engagement zone.

“This is really about a shift from just-in-time logistics to just-in-case, and it’s incredibly relevant in the Western Pacific,” Cahill said. “We now talk about find-to-fix timelines and driving down how we move those parts around. Our maintenance operations centers have really driven that,” with better visibility in what might be needed in a real warfighting environment.

“We are requesting a significant amount of resources and stocking out our warships with the right parts and the right technical capabilities so we can sustain our forces operating in the WEZ in a contested logistics space,” he said. “That’s fundamentally different for us as a Navy.”

As the fleet expands LVC trainers and modernizes weapons and sensors, it must find ways to do so while still incorporating existing systems, Wade said.

“In configuration variance with all our weapons and sensors, ones and zeros don’t necessarily translate to systems that are not built to be integrated. So there’s a lot of Band-Aid (fixes). As we partner with industry and look to the future of LVC, we’ve got to make it more plug-and-play, able to adapt and be able to spiral in new sensors, new software, firmware and hardware, because it makes it hard for those young sailors when they’re trying to get their reps and sets.”