CAMP PENDLETON, Ca. — When 1st Lt. Marshall Stevens graduated Yale with a 3.87 GPA, varsity letters in football and rugby, and one of only two coveted billets as an Assault Amphibious Vehicle Officer, he imagined a life of bold amphibious warfare. Instead, he now chairs meetings about spreadsheets.
“I joined to fight my way onto fortified beachheads, guns blazing in a swimming tank,” Stevens said. “Now I’m tracking tracker updates on trackers tracking trackers for tracked vehicles that don’t track anymore.”
Indeed, the Marines who crew the AAVP-7A1s, affectionately called "Trackers," have spent more time in Excel than in the field, thanks to a cascading series of initiatives aimed at improving visibility, accountability, and soul extraction.
Stevens, now the Assistant Operations Officer (S3A) for 1st Amphibious Assault Battalion, oversees the battalion-level tracker—an Excel sheet with 957 rows and 712 sortable columns. Its purpose: to compile tracker updates from subordinate company trackers tracking various tracked matters so the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Marc Franken, can view a “stop light” coded “snapshot” of battalion-level tracker updates from company-level trackers tracking critical factors affecting the track battalion, such as human trafficking training, individual plans for attendance at the Family Readiness Officer’s Fun Day, and which Marines have had their tires properly inspected before leaving the Camp Pendleton area.
"It started when the OpsO, Maj. Crandall, called me and Master Guns into his office talking about schwerpunkt this and center of gravity that," said Master Gunnery Sgt. Mario Forte. "I’ve known about fifty Command and Staff grads; they love the Prussians. But when he said he was a ‘disruptive thinker,’ I knew some stupid shit was coming. I told him I had to 'check on things down at the boat basin' and let the 3A own that bullshit."
The result? Stevens now chairs a 1600 sync three times a week with the Track Company XOs, focused exclusively on tracker update synchronization. "It’s super rewarding," Stevens said.
