TDI Friday Read: Multi-Domain Battle/Operations Doctrine

Shawn Woodford
January 4, 2019
2 Comments

With the December 2018 update of the U.S. Army’s Multi-Domain Operations (MDO) concept, this seems like a good time to review the evolution of doctrinal thinking about it. We will start with the event that sparked the Army’s thinking about the subject: the 2014 rocket artillery barrage fired from Russian territory that devastated Ukrainian Army forces near the village of Zelenopillya. From there we will look at the evolution of Army thinking beginning with the initial draft of an operating concept for Multi-Domain Battle (MDB) in 2017. To conclude, we will re-up two articles expressing misgivings over the manner with which these doctrinal concepts are being developed, and the direction they are taking.

The Russian Artillery Strike That Spooked The U.S. Army

Army And Marine Corps Join Forces To Define Multi-Domain Battle Concept

Army/Marine Multi-Domain Battle White Paper Available

What Would An Army Optimized For Multi-Domain Battle Look Like?

Sketching Out Multi-Domain Battle Operational Doctrine

U.S. Army Updates Draft Multi-Domain Battle Operating Concept

U.S. Army Multi-Domain Operations Concept Continues Evolving

U.S. Army Doctrine and Future Warfare

Shawn Woodford

Shawn Robert Woodford, Ph.D., is a military historian with nearly two decades of research, writing, and analytical experience on operations, strategy, and national security policy. His work has focused on special operations, unconventional and paramilitary warfare, counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, naval history, quantitative historical analysis, nineteenth and twentieth century military history, and the history of nuclear weapon development. He has a strong research interest in the relationship between politics and strategy in warfare and the epistemology of wargaming and combat modeling.

All views expressed here are his and do not reflect those of any other private or public organization or entity.

Articles: 302

2 Comments

Clinton Reilly

January 5, 2019 / 8:29 pm Reply

Interesting. Complex. Has anyone developed a war-game for this yet?
- Shawn Woodford
  
  January 7, 2019 / 10:53 am Reply
  
  I think MDB/MDO wargaming is going on at all levels throughout the U.S. DOD, and likely in other places as well. Chris wrote about the U.S. Army Center for Army Analysis’s (CAA) unclassified Wargaming Analysis Model (C-WAM) here:
  https://dupuyinstitute.dreamhosters.com/2018/03/27/c-wam-1/
  https://dupuyinstitute.dreamhosters.com/2018/03/28/c-wam-2/
  https://dupuyinstitute.dreamhosters.com/2018/04/02/c-wam-3/
  https://dupuyinstitute.dreamhosters.com/2018/04/16/c-wam-4-breakpoints/
  
  I would have to take a closer look at C-WAM to see exactly how it incorporates MDO aspects into the game. There may be some commercial wargames that do this as well, but I am not aware of them. I would be very curious to see the approaches to simulating the effects of MDO in such games.