MOC Intelligence Professionals Enable Decision Advantage for the High-End Fight

NIP Readbook, Fall/Winter 2025… by Lieutenant Bryan Smith, U.S. Navy

The Chief of Naval Operations’ “Fight from the Maritime Operations Center (MOC)” strategic priority represents a fundamental rethinking of how the Navy executes at the operational level of war. The MOC is no longer just a coordination hub—it must operate as the fleet commander’s primary warfighting platform. In a future “high end” fight, our adversaries will benefit from the significant recent investments they have made in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), as well as increasingly accurate long-range fires. Decisions made at the MOCs are integral to the U.S. Navy’s ability to conduct long-range fires while maneuvering to reduce unit vulnerability and proactively driving fleet replenishment to sustain combat operations. 

The MOC will have to sense, decide, and communicate orders under degraded conditions, exercising command and control (C2) of large scale naval, joint, and combined forces across vast distances and domains. The key to prevailing against a nearpeer adversary is to achieve and sustain decision advantage—to make better-informed decisions faster than our adversary’s commanders. Intelligence is foundational to each MOCs’ ability to make these decisions.

The Critical Role of Intelligence in the MOC

Timely, accurate, and comprehensive intelligence enables commanders’ decision-making and supports the MOC’s  integration of joint warfighting functions: command and control, information, fires, movement and maneuver, protection, and sustainment. How our MOCs use intelligence governs their ability to out-think adversaries in real-time—understanding adversary patterns, anticipating their moves, providing opportunity analysis, and assessing risks.

Operational intelligence must be fused into every phase of fleet operations, not siloed or delayed by peacetime processes, limited by data flows, or diluted by legacy organizational concepts. Maritime domain awareness, threat warning, targeting, and combat assessment are not parallel functions. They are an integrated continuum that, when executed effectively, deliver a decisive edge. Predicting enemy movement, evaluating intent, and enabling rapid, lethal options depend on intelligence support to every phase in a MOC’s decision cycle. Operational intelligence is part of a warfighting function, not a supporting task.

This task grows more urgent as adversaries develop capabilities designed to fracture our decision-making processes, deny our communications, and blind our ISR networks. Adversary concepts are specifically designed to break the links and nodes that allow us to operate as an integrated force. Fighting from the MOC means we have geographically extended command, control, computing, communications, cyber, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting (C5ISR-T) paths, each of which has multiple dependencies. The introduction of these multiple dependencies can become a vulnerability for the MOC. To counter that vulnerability and effectively fight from the MOC, the MOC must be supported by a secure and redundant C5ISR-T architecture.

The Navy Concept for Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO) requires MOCs that deliver information advantage, resilient C2, and synchronized fires and sustainment across a fluid, fast-moving battlespace. DMO, playing out in exercises and experiments in the Indo-Pacific Command area of responsibility, helps to counter that threat by dispersing the fleet across a broad geographic area while coordinating fires to concentrate effects. The Navy’s ability to deliver these effects depends on readiness, integration, and training of the intelligence personnel on MOC staffs who operate intelligence systems and applications under pressure.

Under the Navy’s “Get Real, Get Better” call to action, a single accountable officer is a designated individual responsible for overseeing and ensuring the achievement of specific goals. The CNO designated the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare (OPNAV N2N6) as the Navy’s single accountable officer for “Fight from the MOC” in the 2024 Navigation Plan, which states: “By 2027, all fleet headquarters, starting in the Pacific Fleet, will have ready MOCs certified and proficient in [the seven joint warfighting functions].” By applying Get Real, Get Better principles and coordinating with fleet, type command, and systems command stakeholders, the OPNAV N2N6 Fight from the MOC project team identified and mapped key relationships between different drivers of MOC performance, identifying cause-and-effect relationships between the MOC functions. This analysis highlighted the central relationship of intelligence to all MOC functions. A common intelligence picture (CIP), fused with a common operating picture (COP), creates a shared baseline of known information on which the MOC’s cross functional teams and working groups analyze courses of action and present recommendations to the commander for decisions about fires, movement and maneuver, protection, and sustainment. Each decision is enabled by and dependent on intelligence.

Over the past decade, the Navy has made commendable progress across the Information Warfare enterprise. Battlespace awareness, assured C2, and integrated fires have coalesced into a framework supporting fleet commanders at sea and staffs ashore. We must continue to evolve our organizational structures and roles and focus on increasing our adoption of artificial intelligence to accelerate analytic speed to deliver superior decision advantage. MOC responsibilities nested within the kill chain could expand in a contested operating environment, where the MOC must close intelligence gaps that communication-denied units cannot. This expansion of responsibilities would increase the demands on MOC Maritime Intelligence Operations Centers (MIOCs) to support target engagement further left and right of launch.

The Call for Action

Naval Intelligence personnel must take ownership of the intelligence function joint peers may expect them to fulfill, execute their duties at MOCs with precision and accuracy, and recognize the contribution they can make for commanders. That means aligning training pipelines, career incentives, and operational expectations for 183Xs and enlisted intelligence personnel alike. Naval Intelligence must value MOC assignments as high-consequence operational tours critical to the Navy’s success. Designating the MIOC Director as an O-5 operational milestone is a great start.

Intelligence professionals must train to operate at the operational level of war, ensuring they are prepared to work within, support, or rely on MOCs—whether from below (strike groups, task groups, or task forces), or above (combatant commands and joint task forces). We must invest in fused common intelligence and operating pictures (CIP/COP), complementary tools, and institutionalized processes that deliver real-time intelligence into decision cycles under contested conditions. Fighting from the MOC also requires that we build the network architecture and establish multilateral intelligence sharing policy that allows us to share the common picture with partners and allies—integration at a level beyond traditional bilateral and Five Eyes networks.

This is not a call for wholesale restructuring. It is a call to prioritize the execution and sustainment of operational intelligence at MOCs with urgency and unity. Fighting from the MOC is not just a technical or procedural upgrade. It is a cultural shift, where MOC intelligence staffs orient their efforts to deliver decision advantage. It demands that we train MOC staffs as warfighters, not facilitators; that we treat information and decision-making as weapons, not support functions; and that we prepare to execute under stress, in real time, against a capable adversary.

History teaches that mindset shifts often follow crises. The challenge is whether we can lead that change now, before conflict compels us. Fighting from the MOC is how the Navy will command in future wars. Naval Intelligence has an opportunity now to set the scene for success at MOCs by training, organizing, and delivering with purpose before the test comes. About the author: Lieutenant Bryan Smith is an intelligence officer, assigned to OPNAV N2N6I, performing duties as an action officer for the OPNAV N2N6 Fight from the MOC core team (Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare, Warfighting Integration). He completed a tour as a Fleet Intel Watch Officer at the COMNAVCENT / COMFIFTHFLT MOC, 2020-2021