Douglas Macgregor
Today, Americans are disinclined to support mili-tary interventions in conflicts where the United States itself is not attacked, and American economic prosper-ity is not at risk.1 In 1975, it was “No more Vietnams”;
today, it is “No more Iraqs!”2 This attitude is reinforced by both the current absence of an existential military threat to the United States and the American public’s demand for jobs and economic growth instead of military spending.3
Yet, it would be wrong to conclude that the pub-lic’s attitude emanates from complacency about the nation’s security or from some naïve view of inter-national politics.4 On the contrary, American public support for a robust defense establishment remains strong. The American experience in Iraq simply im-parted the lesson that open-ended missions involv-ing masses of U.S. ground troops designed to occupy backward, hostile societies are unaffordable and stra-tegically self-defeating.5 For the first time in decades, the pressure on American political and military lead-ers to formulate strategic aims worth fighting and dy-ing for before American blood and treasure are sacri-ficed is enormous and growing.
Regrettably, the growing demand for a new and less belligerent foreign policy has yet to be matched by coherent strategic guidance to the armed forces from the President and the Secretary of Defense. The
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resulting mismatch between forces and capabilities on the one hand, and missions and political-military objectives on the other, is staggering.6 The Army, along with the rest of the U.S. Armed Forces, is adrift, floating on a sea of strategic uncertainty. A new U.S.
National Military Strategy will eventually emerge, but until it does, the U.S. Army’s leadership confronts austere, interwar levels of defense spending and con-strained budgets that require an effective and efficient organization of Army fighting power for conflicts in 5, 10, or 15 years.7
In fact, future conflicts are more likely to resem-ble the Balkan Wars of the early-20th century; brutal conflicts involving Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Turkey in fights to secure ports, cities, and territory abandoned by the retreating Turkish armies. Today and in the future, similar fights for regional power and influence will overlap with interstate competi-tion for energy, water, food, mineral resources, and the wealth they create. These conflicts promise to be far more lethal and dangerous than any the United States has experienced since 1991.8 More important, without a robust and capable integrated Army warf-ighting component, salvos of precision guided weap-ons from the nation’s aerospace and naval forces will become the 21st century equivalent of siege warfare.
They will decide little of strategic importance on land.
In this new environment, shrinking the 1990s Army to a lower number of divisions and brigades while maintaining the three- and four-star headquarters to expand the old Cold War Army if needed is not the formula for success.
Instead, the U.S. Army should be organized for the unexpected, strategic surprise; a “Korea-like Emer-gency” in 1950 or a “Sarajevo-like” event in 1914;
pu-nitive expeditionary operations to destroy imminent threats or deployments of ground forces to support al-lies already engaged in conflict will take center stage.
The changes in technology, society, and the interna-tional system already underway make the case for a new 21st century Army that can do the following:
• Organize scalable, self-contained, lego-like Army formations for joint, “all arms” op-erations in a nonlinear, nodal, and dispersed, mobile warfare environment—a future battle space potentially more lethal than anything seen since World War II.
• Develop ground forces packaged for joint warf-ighting operations; formations that integrate functional capabilities—Maneuver, Strike, In-telligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance (ISR), and Sustainment—across Service lines inside an integrated framework for joint, operational command and control (C2).
• Train and equip Army formations that punch above their weight, mobilizing fighting power disproportionate to their size (high lethality, low density); formations with the capability to close with the enemy, take hits, sustain losses, keep fighting, and attack decisively (mobile, ar-mored firepower).
• Prepare formations to surge from a joint rota-tional readiness base, not from a tiered readi-ness, Cold War mobilization posture.
• Demand that all Soldiers from squad leader to four stars demonstrate performance against an objective standard in training and readiness;
character, competence, and intelligence (C2I) must trump all other considerations in the con-text of promotions in order to nourish a new,
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core group of military leaders prepared to cope with the unexpected when it arises.
Now is not the time for the Army’s senior leader-ship to cling to the past. Poorly thought out solutions rooted only in tradition will cause the future Army to relive the past, not master the future. For the present, the Army’s senior leadership does not have the luxury of knowing precisely which power or alliance of pow-ers the United States may eventually confront in war.
Thus, the Army’s task is to build a mix of capability-based expeditionary fighting formations that will be strategically decisive wherever and whenever they come ashore to fight. A new Army organization for combat is indispensable to this process.