MOVING THE CORPS INTO THE INFORMATION AGE: DATA-DRIVEN TRAINING STANDARDS AND ANALYTICS TO SUPPORT EVALUATION

Abstract

In 2014 the Marine Corps authorized the Ground Combat Element Integrated Task Force experiment. This resulted in the activation of a battalion consisting of eight combat arms Military Occupational Specialties, combat engineers, and provisional infantry Marines, their equipment, and necessary support personnel. This experiment, costing $36 million and using nearly a century of man hours, produced what is possibly the most robust and diverse dataset involving Marine Corps training metrics ever collected at one time. Since the completion of the 1,000-page experimental assessment report in 2015, the data has garnered limited acknowledgment and application beyond the study’s original aims. The data generated from this experiment contains individual and small unit performance metrics and measurements, including, but not limited to: rate of movement with various combat loads, live-fire accuracy statistics (from tanks, mortars, artillery, crew served, and individual weapons systems), physiological measurements, and combat task evaluations recorded over a three-month simulated deployment. This data has the potential to provide a basis for truly quantitative training standards by marrying data-driven metrics with time-tested doctrine and to improve the accuracy of combat models. This thesis transforms the data into an environment amenable to analysis by future researchers and provides a roadmap for the development of quantitative measures of training performance and other applications.