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There is an active debate in the U.S. Marine Corps about the value of operations in the information environment as a central aspect of maneuver warfare. Some critics have called new force structure like the Marine expeditionary force information group a failed experiment. Separately, some leaders may be wondering whether marines should alter how they organize for combat. For example, should the Marine air-ground task force include an information combat element?
If war is violent, what do we mean by operations in the information environment? Sticks and stones break your bones, but what about words? They can trick enemies and set them up for a mighty fall. These operations use cyber tools, electronic warfare, deception, operational security, and targeted messaging to deny an adversary the ability to orient and coordinate on the battlefield. Joint doctrine treats these capabilities as central. If the Marine Corps is to be “first to fight,” it must be first to blind, mislead, and deny the enemy the means to respond. And that requires units designed to fight in the information environment.
Yet, while many commanders and staff sections understand the need to destroy, displace, disintegrate, and isolate an enemy physically, some struggle to see how information capabilities support these efforts as a core ingredient of modern combined arms. Each physical effect — whether isolation or destruction — depends on shaping how the enemy sees the battlespace. Know how the enemy sees and decides, blind them, and every strike can break their cohesion. Warfare rewards asymmetry.
We aim to close that gap by analyzing operations in the information environment alongside established military theory and by reviewing recent II Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group experiments with new concepts and task organizations.
We are not neutral. One of us commands the information group discussed. The other has been his longtime collaborator in thinking about how to fight and win by leveraging effects in the information environment. Through this collaboration we have learned that on a transparent battlefield, the most reliable path to advantage is to disorient the enemy: deny their sensors and signals, feed them false indicators, then strike decisively while they search for ghosts or exhaust themselves chasing phantoms. Our experience also shows that some critical aspects of combat are hard to recreate on a training range or in a schoolhouse. It requires broader discussion and dialogue in forums like War on the Rocks.
What is a Marine Information Group?
The II Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group is a brigade-sized formation that combines intelligence, cyber, space, information activities, communications, and electronic warfare capabilities to support global contingencies ranging from reinforcing embassies and counter terrorism to amphibious operations and large-scale combat. Currently, the Marine Corps fields three of these formations.
The doctrinal basis is Marine Corps Warfighting Publication 8-10, Information in Marine Corps Operations. That publication treats the conversion of raw data into usable knowledge as a core element of combat power. The ability to generate, preserve, protect, and deny information — while disrupting an adversary’s ability to make information into combat power — creates a new form of advantage: systems overmatch. This term describes the technical advantage that accrues to the force better able to harness information to direct fires, maneuver combat formations, protect lines of supply, and make decisions. Winning requires seeing what the opponent cannot and exploiting that edge.
The central idea is that there is a single underlying fight for information in modern war. It links reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance to social media campaigns that shape morale and to cyber operations against enemy command and control systems. Like classic cavalry doctrine, victory depends on retaining freedom of action, hiding what matters from the enemy, developing the situation to clarify intent, and targeting enemy vulnerabilities quickly. In modern military operations envisioned in joint doctrine, this struggle reaches into cyberspace and space — and into a contest of narratives that determines how an adversary perceives and processes information.
The Theory of Victory: Disorientation
This central idea links to the OODA loop — observe, orient, decide, and act. The orient step is a crucial phase of synthesizing observed data by applying new information and mental models — often linked to past experiences and even cultural traditions — to create an understanding of the situation. It involves assessing your position, capabilities, and the environment, identifying gaps or errors in thinking, and forming a hypothesis of how to gain an advantage in time and space.
Operations in the information environment disrupt what an adversary observes through electronic warfare, deception, and operational security measures designed to limit what the enemy can see. Jam their communications. Trick their sensors. Hide your signatures. More important, these operations can reshape orientation by injecting true and false information and by exploiting psychological operations so the enemy acts based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the battlespace. Framed this way, disorienting an opponent is a form of maneuver: create shock and confusion, then exploit the resulting gaps in enemy action.
The Marines aren’t alone in seeing a new role for broad-based information operations that combine cyber, space, intelligence, electronic warfare, deception, and messaging. Joint doctrine names information as one of seven joint functions. In 2024, Adm. Samuel J. Paparo Jr., the commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, told the Senate that this capability was his number one priority. Specifically, he said “the joint force requires capabilities to blind … see … and kill.” Blinding and seeing are the heart of what doctrine calls information warfare and our vision of disorientation as new theory of victory.
The U.S. Army has likewise introduced concepts for “counter-command and control” warfare and created theater information advantage detachments to provide persistent sensing, targeting, and informational effects. And the Army is buying new equipment. Its Terrestrial Layer System family of systems converges cyber operations, electronic warfare, and signals intelligence to give brigade and division commanders organic tools to degrade enemy networks.
This is not new in concept. Wayne Hughes discussed anti-scouting and command and control countermeasures in Fleet Tactics decades ago, and Cold War maritime planners long debated how to defeat reconnaissance-strike networks that threaten capital ships. NATO even uses the phrase “cognitive warfare” to describe actions that degrade adversary rationality and create systemic fragility. After Desert Storm, analysts called that campaign the “first information war,” and the U.S. military codified command and control warfare in the mid-1990s: attack adversary command and control to blind and disorient their sequencing and response. Along the same lines, the Army integrated signals intelligence-driven targeting and electronic warfare central to Airland Battle with emerging concepts about computer network operations and inform and influence activities.
That history clarifies why the Marine Corps needs units organized to win the fight for information. Prior efforts often struggled since they relegated information operations, broadly defined, to a staff synchronization exercise at higher headquarters. Colonels stuck in endless meetings and removed from the battlefield struggle to respond in a timely manner. The bureaucracy takes its toll. Winning a fight for information requires more. It requires seeing information as a maneuver space, not as bureaucratic debate between competing staff sections. It requires dedicated formations that generate options for gaining operational advantages in the information environment to support offensive and defensive operations. And it needs unity of command under a commander responsible for information operations — not just coordination by a staff section.
This perspective is why II Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group has experimented with reorganizing into more flexible task groups, forces, and elements that can be integrated with expeditionary forces. Each is led by a commander. Each is charged to generate options in the information environment that disorient the enemy. For example, a task unit assigned to support a Marine expeditionary unit might pull signals intelligence Marines from 2nd Radio Battalion, all-source analysts from 2nd Intelligence Battalion, a fires liaison from 2nd Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Company, expeditionary communications and defensive cyber operators from 8th Communications Battalion, and influence and civil reconnaissance teams from an information maneuver company. This information task unit — led by a major — can provide timely options for the expeditionary commander to attack and protect information in ways that disorient the enemy while conducting amphibious operations.
This design also enables deeper joint and naval integration. The Navy’s information warfare commanders have proved valuable in recent campaigns against the Houthis, where they helped generate battlespace awareness (i.e., observe), deny the enemy easy attack vectors (i.e., disorient), protect command and control (i.e., decide) and synchronize combined kinetic and non-kinetic fires (i.e., act). Embedding similar capabilities with Marine expeditionary units and joint task forces expands options for forward deployed formations. You can fight outnumbered when you fight a blind man by putting a premium on disorientation as a key line of effort.
This vision set the stage for a series of experiments designed to test how to build and integrate specialized units into Marine formations that treat information as a maneuver space. First, in summer 2024, the information group embedded a task element with 2nd Marine Infantry Division to test integrating composite information capabilities — cyber, electronic warfare, psychological operations, and deception — with traditional combined arms. In early 2025, the focus shifted from the division to a regiment to test the ability of smaller detachments to support tactical units in large-scale exercises. In spring 2025, the experiments went international and tested supporting U.S. European Command as part of exercise Joint Viking, with the information group integrating with 10,000 servicemembers from nine different countries to signal NATO’s ability to deter Russia in the high north. The experiments culminated in August 2025 when a task unit from the II Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group completed external certification, signaling wider recognition of its ability to operate.
Why This is Needed to Wage Modern Warfare
Although Marine expeditionary force information groups were activated in 2017, the Marine Corps has a longer lineage of experimenting with information effects. That lineage reaches back to Gen. Al Gray’s intelligence-driven experiments in Vietnam and to surveillance and reconnaissance groups that operated from 1988 to 1999. The pattern is familiar and costly: Wars teach the Marine Corps the value of the fight for information, and peacetime often redirects attention and resources away from it.
The service should not repeat that mistake. Locking in the ability to operate in the information environment requires deliberate organizational and resourcing changes. At the center of the debate is whether to add an information combat element to the Marine air-ground task force. This should happen. You can’t fight on the modern battlefield without the ability to disorient the enemy. It is that simple.
This reform requires also adopting the coordination centers pioneered at the II Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group. These entities serve as the nervous system and brain for operations in the information environment. They monitor trends across the electromagnetic spectrum, data networks, and social media platforms, and deliver regular updates that link deployed units with higher headquarters. Those updates help commanders see the information landscape and take action to influence it and set conditions for follow-on operations.
Using tools like the Maven Smart System and established Marine Corps processes for managing information tasks, coordination centers can both track day-to-day competition in the information environment and provide reach-back support to deployed forces. Crucially, the centers give commanders a single place to synchronize effects, analyze options, and create unity of action.
When competition turns to crisis, these centers use subordinate information support elements that connect theater commanders’ needs to Marine forces preparing to deploy. These elements are aligned to specific threats and geography and perform a modern form of advance force operations in the information environment: securing critical data terrain, confusing an adversary, and shaping conditions while friendly forces close. This model operationalizes longstanding calls to align authorities for information operations across services.
These coordination elements also facilitate joint integration. When an information support element aligns with Army theater information advantage detachments, they can rapidly combine cyber operations, electronic warfare, and signals intelligence alongside deception and strategic communication to disorient the enemy. When marines arrive already integrated with those capabilities and across services, the joint force gains multiple ways to disrupt an adversary’s decision-making and create the systemic shock and dislocation the joint force needs to deploy and attack. Both services need deep sensing and counter-reconnaissance capabilities in the information environment if they are to realize Paparo’s goal of disorienting opposing battle networks like those fielded by China.
Attacking an adversary’s ability to orient has become a theory of victory: it is how marines win the fight for information. Marine expeditionary force information groups need not be a boutique experiment. They demonstrate how to practice maneuver warfare in the 21st century. To seize the initiative in an era of proliferated sensors, AI-enabled networks, and swarming systems, the Corps should task-organize information groups as tailored, multi-domain units of action tied to information coordination centers and support elements. Those capabilities let commanders blind, mislead, and fracture enemy decision cycles while protecting friendly information advantage — enabling multi-domain fires, safeguarding logistics, and opening seams for maneuver.
Benjamin Jensen is the Frank E. Petersen chair at the School of Advanced Warfighting, Marine Corps University and the director of the Futures Lab at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Ian Fletcher is a Marine officer currently commanding the II Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group. The article includes comments and suggestions by the marines in his formation.
The views in this article are those of the authors and not those of Marine Corps University, the Defense Department, or any part of the U.S. government.
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Image: Lance Cpl. Alexander Hires via U.S. Marine Corps
