These War Games Will Determine the Future of the Marine Corps by Hope Hodge Seck, Military.com

Marines from the Corps' East Coast and West Coast expeditionary forces will spend several months this summer in a competition of sorts to help determine how the service will fight and train ten years from now.

This week, top brass from around the Corps are meeting in an executive off-site meeting near Washington, D.C., to discuss a plan that will use war games to shape the future force. It's part of an initiative called Force 2025, said Lt. Gen. Robert Walsh, the deputy commandant of Marine Corps Combat Development Command, who described the plan to Military.com during a recent lecture at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

In July, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Robert Neller plans to choose one of two separately developed plans to shape the future force, Walsh said. On course of action favors an "evolutionary" approach, making changes in a more gradual fashion and building on existing methods and practices. The other, he said, is a "revolutionary" approach that emphasizes more "out of the box" ideas and disruptive thinking.

Neller has spoken often about the Marine Corps' need to develop its capabilities, particularly in the information warfare and cyber realm. In an order published in January, he set a 2017 deadline to expand information operations, cyber, and electronic warfare…

Read on.

ISIS's Alarming Inroads in the Southern Philippines by Per Liljas, Time

... Already, up to 1,200 Southeast Asians have joined ISIS in the Middle East. Experts now worry that an ISIS stronghold in the southern Philippines will act as a regional lure, providing extremists from across Asia with a place to gain combat experience, before they set act to attack Asian targets or even targets further afield. The Jakarta attack in January that killed four civilians is just a taste of what could come, says Greg Barton, chair in global Islamic politics at Deakin University in Melbourne.

“Next time they won’t mess around with pistols but bring assault rifles,” says Barton. “That’s all it takes to turn amateurs into a lethal bunch of killers.”

Some claim that the biggest threat currently is that competing, ISIS-inspired groups would seek to upstage each other with small-scale attacks. However, organized, international networks still exist, even if the influence of al-Qaeda, which once funded training camps in the southern Philippines, has waned, along with that of its affiliates…

Read.