Regional Slating for Intelligence Military Occupational Specialities

Regional Slating for Intelligence Military Occupational Specialities

A Square Peg in a Square Hole

Master Sergeant Paul R Carey

CMR 445 Box 231

APO AE 09046

+49 0152 0425 2074

paulrcarey@gmail.com

        In a May 2015 edition of the Marine Corps times, the acting undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness stated “this is a moment that calls for revolutionary change in the human resources practice of the DoD”. This article, and several other publications, including “Bleeding Talent: How the U.S. Military Mismanages Great Leaders and Why It's Time for a Revolution” by Tim Kane, have long called for change within the military personnel slating system, and have attributed a disturbing loss of talent to this anachronistic human resources system.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the intelligence occupational specialities within the Marine Corps, where a lack of technical expertise within its intelligence specialists and counterintelligence/human intelligence fields have made Marine Corps intelligence a well-rounded enterprise, but an enterprise lacking in depth and specialization.  To solve this experience shortfall and give commanders the tactical and technical expertise in specific geographic regions, Marines in intelligence military occupational specialities should be exclusively assigned to a geographic region for their career.

        The Regional Cultural Language and Familiarization (RCLF) program officially stood up in October 2012 through the publication of MARADMIN 619/12 and attempts to build regional and cultural professionals^[1].  However, the RCLF is a non-binding training course, meaning a Marine completing the Northeast Asia RCLF block has no guarantee that he/she will be assigned in Northeast Asia or supporting operations in Northeast Asia.  Even if a Marine serves in a billet supporting a respective geographic region, the Marine will be transferred in two to three years to an unrelated area of operations, taking the critical cultural knowledge and language expertise with them.  Marines are assigned RCLF regions at random^[2] under the auspices of the needs of the Marine Corps; however, there are more than a few instances of Marines with extensive cultural and language experience in one region are assigned another completely opposite region. Would it not be in the best interests of the Marine Corps to harness the past experiences of a Marine and use the RCLF to build upon those experiences vice starting from the ground up?

        There are many anecdotal instances of intelligence Marines with cultural and language experiences never being used to their full potential, or in some cases, being used at all.  Non-cryptologic intelligence Marines are often sent to the Defense Language Institute for one year or more, depending on the language, only to find themselves never using their target language.  Marines are taught Chinese, one of the top foreign language needs across the DoD^[3], only to return to an intelligence battalion set to deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan, never getting the chance to use their newly learned language and cultural knowledge.  This problem is common across the services, with the Army sending its Korean linguists to Iraq or taking their Arabic linguists to Iraq, then failing to use their language skills^[4].  This represents a huge waste of money and manpower, not only from the several hundred thousand dollars required to train Marines to linguistic standards but from the redundancy caused by hiring civilian contractors to do the jobs we train our Marines to do.