The Angry Staff Officer says, “Safety is paramount in all things. Terrorists fear safety glasses that are also reflective.”
If you like military history and podcasts, then I would like to recommend that you give War Stories a listen. It is a new production from two members of the Military Writers Guild, Adin Dobkin and a serving Army National Guardsman who posts publicly under the nom de guerre, Angry Staff Officer. Seeking to bridge the gap between military history that focuses on engagements or battles, and broad sweeping analysis, Dobkin and ASO tell stories that link specific instances with a broader narrative arc. In doing so, they hope to “engage the human interest angle while also tracing broader trends in warfare, through balancing narrative and dialogue.”
The first season of the podcast is tracing the development of modern tank warfare from its dawn on the battlefields of France in the First World War, through the present day. The result is Basil Liddell Hart meets This American Life. Dobkin and ASO both have engaging personalities and military history nerd-wit in abundance. They bring a youthful perspective leavened by recent military experience and the perceptive eye of today’s well-trained and highly educated military officer corps.
The first four episodes begin with doomed British cavalry charges on the Somme battlefield in 1916, to George Patton’s first combat experiences at the St. Mihiel salient in 1917, to the clash of Russian and German inter-war tanks in the Spanish Civil War, to the baptism of fire of the American tank destroyer corps in Tunisia in 1943.
The results are both informative and quite entertaining. My only (minor) quibble is that it would help to have some maps and photographs to go with the narrative to help pin down places, faces, and tank silhouettes. If you appreciate the fact — as Dobkin and ASO do — that the Soviet T-34 tank owes its existence to the American engineer J. Walter Christie, this is the podcast for which you have been searching.
Fox assesses current Russia Army tactical and operational capabilities as quite capable.
Russia’s contemporary operations embody the characteristic of surprise. Russian operations in Georgia and Ukraine demonstrate a rapid, decentralized attack seeking to temporally dislocate the enemy, triggering the opposing forces’ defeat. These methods stand in stark contrast to the old Soviet doctrine of methodical, timetable-and echelon-driven employment of ground forces that sought to outmass the opposing army. Current Russian land-warfare tactics are something which most armies, including the U.S. Army, are largely unprepared to address.
Conversely, after achieving limited objectives, Russia quickly transitions to the defense using ground forces, drones and air-defense capabilities to build a tough, integrated position from which extrication would be difficult, to be sure. Russia’s defensive operations do not serve as a simple shield, but rather, as a shield capable of also delivering well-directed, concentrated punches on the opposition army. Russia’s paradoxical use of offensive operations to set up the defense might indicate an ascendency of the defense as the preferred method of war in forthcoming conflicts.
These capabilities will pose enormous challenges to U.S. and allied forces in any potential land combat scenario.
Russia’s focus on limited objectives, often in close proximity to its own border, indicates that U.S. Army combined-arms battalions and cavalry squadrons will likely find themselves on the wrong end of the “quality of firsts” (Figure 4). The U.S. Army’s physical distance from those likely battlefields sets the Army at a great disadvantage because it will have to hastily deploy forces to the region, meaning the Army will arrive late; the arrival will also be known (location, time and force composition). The Army will have great difficulty seizing the initiative due to its arrival and movement being known, which weakens the Army’s ability to fight and win decisively. This dynamic provides time, space and understanding for the enemy to further prepare for combat operations and strengthen its integrated defensive positions. Therefore, U.S. Army combined-arms battalions and cavalry squadrons must be prepared to fight through a rugged enemy defense while maintaining the capability for continued offensive operations.
The MPF’s historical antecedent: the German Army’s 7.5 cm leichtes Infanteriegeschütz.
Historically, one of the challenges of modern combat has been in providing responsive, on-call, direct fire support for infantry. The U.S. armed forces have traditionally excelled in providing fire support for their ground combat maneuver elements, but recent changes have apparently caused concern that this will continue to be the case in the future.
Case in point is the U.S. Army’s Mobile Protected Firepower (MPF) program. The MPF seems to reflect concern by the U.S. Army that future combat environments will inhibit the capabilities of heavy artillery and air support systems tasked with providing fire support for infantry units. As Breaking Defense describes it,
“Our near-peers have sought to catch up with us,” said Fort Benning commander Maj. Gen. Eric Wesley, using Pentagon code for China and Russia. These sophisticated nation-states — and countries buying their hardware, like Iran — are developing so-called Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD): layered defenses of long-range sensors and missiles to keep US airpower and ships at a distance (anti-access), plus anti-tank weapons, mines, and roadside bombs to decimate ground troops who get close (area denial).
… to provide a company of vehicles—which the Army adamantly does not want to refer to as light tanks—to brigades from the 82nd Airborne Division or 10th Mountain Division that can provide heavy fire support to those infantry units. The new vehicle, which is scheduled to enter into full-scale engineering and manufacturing development in 2019—with fielding tentatively scheduled for around 2022—would be similar in concept to the M551 Sheridan light tank. The Sheridan used to be operated the Army’s airborne units unit until 1996, but was retired without replacement. (Emphasis added)
As Chris recently pointed out, General Dynamics Land Systems has developed a prototype it calls the Griffin. BAE Systems has also pitched its XM8 Armored Gun System, developed in the 1990s.
The development of a dedicated, direct fire support weapon for line infantry can be seen as something of an anachronism. During World War I, German infantrymen sought alternatives to relying on heavy artillery support that was under the control of higher headquarters and often slow or unresponsive to tactical situations on the battlefield. They developed an expedient called the “infantry gun” (Infanteriegeschütz) by stripping down captured Russian 76.2mm field guns for direct use against enemy infantry, fortifications, and machine guns. Other armies imitated the Germans, but between the wars, the German Army was only one to develop 75mm and 150mm wheeled guns of its own dedicated specifically to infantry combat support.
The Germans were also the first to develop versions mounted on tracked, armored chassis, called “assault guns” (Sturmgeschütz). During World War II, the Germans often pressed their lightly armored assault guns into duty as ersatz tanks to compensate for insufficient numbers of actual tanks. (The apparently irresistible lure to use anything that looks like a tank as a tank also afflicted the World War II U.S. tank destroyer as well, yielding results that dissatisfied all concerned.)
Other armies again copied the Germans during the war, but the assault gun concept was largely abandoned afterward. Both the U.S. and the Soviet Union developed vehicles intended to provide gunfire support for airborne infantry, but these were more aptly described as light tanks. The U.S. Army’s last light tank, the M551 Sheridan, was retired in 1996 and not replaced.
It appears that the development of new technology is leading the U.S. Army back to old ideas. Just don’t call them light tanks.
Raytheon’s new Long-Range Precision Fires missile is deployed from a mobile launcher in this artist’s rendering. The new missile will allow the Army to fire two munitions from a single weapons pod, making it cost-effective and doubling the existing capacity. (Ratheon)
While the U.S. Army has made major advances by incorporating precision into artillery, the ability and opportunity to employ precision are premised on a world of low-intensity conflict. In high-intensity conflict defined by combined-arms maneuver, the employment of artillery based on a precise point on the ground becomes a much more difficult proposition, especially when the enemy commands large formations of moving, armored vehicles, as Russia does. The U.S. joint force has recognized this dilemma and compensates for it by employing superior air forces and deep-strike fires. But Russia has undertaken a comprehensive upgrade of not just its military technology but its doctrine. We should not be surprised that Russia’s goal in this endeavor is to offset U.S. advantages in air superiority and double-down on its traditional advantages in artillery and rocket mass, range, and destructive power.
Jacobson and Scales provide a list of relatively quick fixes they assert would restore U.S. superiority in long-range fires: change policy on the use of cluster munitions; upgrade the U.S. self-propelled howitzer inventory from short-barreled 39 caliber guns to long-barreled 52 calibers and incorporate improved propellants and rocket assistance to double their existing range; reevaluate restrictions on the forthcoming Long Range Precision Fires rocket system in light of Russian attitudes toward the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces treaty; and rebuild divisional and field artillery units atrophied by a decade of counterinsurgency warfare.
Their assessment echoes similar comments made earlier this year by Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, director of the U.S. Army’s Capabilities Integration Center. Another option for countering enemy fire artillery capabilities, McMaster suggested, was the employment of “cross-domain fires.” As he explained, “When an Army fires unit arrives somewhere, it should be able to do surface-to-air, surface-to-surface, and shore-to-ship capabilities.
The notion of land-based fire elements engaging more than just other land or counter-air targets has given rise to a concept being called “multi-domain battle.” It’s proponents, Dr. Albert Palazzo of the Australian Army’s War Research Centre, and Lieutenant Colonel David P. McLain III, Chief, Integration and Operations Branch in the Joint and Army Concepts Division of the Army Capabilities Integration Center, argue (also at War on the Rocks) that
While Western forces have embraced jointness, traditional boundaries between land, sea, and air have still defined which service and which capability is tasked with a given mission. Multi-domain battle breaks down the traditional environmental boundaries between domains that have previously limited who does what where. The theater of operations, in this view, is a unitary whole. The most useful capability needs to get the mission no matter what domain it technically comes from. Newly emerging technologies will enable the land force to operate in ways that, in the past, have been limited by the boundaries of its domain. These technologies will give the land force the ability to dominate not just the land but also project power into and across the other domains.
Palazzo and McClain contend that future land warfare forces
…must be designed, equipped, and trained to gain and maintain advantage across all domains and to understand and respond to the requirements of the future operating environment… Multi-domain battle will create options and opportunities for the joint force, while imposing multiple dilemmas on the adversary. Through land-to-sea, land-to-air, land-to-land, land-to-space, and land-to-cyberspace fires and effects, land forces can deter, deny, and defeat the adversary. This will allow the joint commander to seize, retain, and exploit the initiative.
As an example of their concept, Palazzo and McClain cite a combined, joint operation from the Pacific Theater in World War II:
Just after dawn on September 4, 1943, Australian soldiers of the 9th Division came ashore near Lae, Papua in the Australian Army’s first major amphibious operation since Gallipoli. Supporting them were U.S. naval forces from VII Amphibious Force. The next day, the 503rd U.S. Parachute Regiment seized the airfield at Nadzab to the West of Lae, which allowed the follow-on landing of the 7th Australian Division. The Japanese defenders offered some resistance on the land, token resistance in the air, and no resistance at sea. Terrain was the main obstacle to Lae’s capture.
From the beginning, the allied plan for Lae was a joint one. The allies were able to get their forces across the approaches to the enemy’s position, establish secure points of entry, build up strength, and defeat the enemy because they dominated the three domains of war relevant at the time — land, sea, and air.
The concept of multi-domain warfare seems like a logical conceptualization for integrating land-based weapons of increased range and effect into the sorts of near-term future conflicts envisioned by U.S. policy-makers and defense analysts. It comports fairly seamlessly with the precepts of the Third Offset Strategy.
However, as has been observed with the Third Offset Strategy, this raises questions about the role of long-range fires in conflicts that do not involve near-peer adversaries, such as counterinsurgencies. Is an emphasis on technological determinism reducing the capabilities of land combat units to just what they shoot? Is the ability to take and hold ground an anachronism in anti-access/area-denial environments? Do long-range fires obviate the relationship between fire and maneuver in modern combat tactics? If even infantry squads are equipped with stand-off weapons, what is the future of close quarters combat?
Chris and I both have discussed previously the apparent waning interest on the part of the Department of Defense to sponsor empirical research studying the basic phenomena of modern warfare. The U.S. government’s boom-or-bust approach to this is long standing, extending back at least to the Vietnam War. Recent criticism of the Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment (OSD/NA) is unlikely to help. Established in 1973 and led by the legendary Andrew “Yoda” Marshall until 2015, OSD/NA plays an important role in funding basic research on topics of crucial importance to the art of net assessment. Critics of the office appear to be unaware of just how thin the actual base of empirical knowledge is on the conduct of war. Marshall understood that the net result of a net assessment based mostly on guesswork was likely to be useless, or worse, misleadingly wrong.
This lack of attention to the actual conduct of war extends beyond government sponsored research. In 2004, Stephen Biddle, a professor of political science at George Washington University and a well-regarded defense and foreign policy analyst, published Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle. The book focused on a very basic question: what causes victory and defeat in battle? Using a comparative approach that incorporated quantitative and qualitative methods, he effectively argued that success in contemporary combat was due to the mastery of what he called the “modern system.” (I won’t go into detail here, but I heartily recommend the book to anyone interested in the topic.)
Military Power was critically acclaimed and received multiple awards from academic, foreign policy, military, operations research, and strategic studies organizations. For all the accolades, however, Biddle was quite aware just how neglected the study of war has become in U.S. academic and professional communities. He concluded the book with a very straightforward assessment:
[F]or at least a generation, the study of war’s conduct has fallen between the stools of the institutional structure of modern academia and government. Political scientists often treat war itself as outside their subject matter; while its causes are seen as political and hence legitimate subjects of study, its conduct and outcomes are more often excluded. Since the 1970s, historians have turned away from the conduct of operations to focus on war’s effects on social, economic, and political structures. Military officers have deep subject matter knowledge but are rarely trained as theoreticians and have pressing operational demands on their professional attention. Policy analysts and operations researchers focus so tightly on short-deadline decision analysis (should the government buy the F22 or cancel it? Should the Army have 10 divisions or 8?) that underlying issues of cause and effect are often overlooked—even when the decisions under analysis turn on embedded assumptions about the causes of military outcomes. Operations research has also gradually lost much of its original empirical focus; modeling is now a chiefly deductive undertaking, with little systematic effort to test deductive claims against real world evidence. Over forty years ago, Thomas Schelling and Bernard Brodie argued that without an academic discipline of military science, the study of the conduct of war had languished; the passage of time has done little to overturn their assessment. Yet the subject is simply too important to treat by proxy and assumption on the margins of other questions In the absence of an institutional home for the study of warfare, it is all the more essential that analysts in existing disciplines recognize its importance and take up the business of investigating capability and its causes directly and rigorously. Few subjects are more important—or less studied by theoretical social scientists. With so much at stake, we surely must do better. [pp. 207-208]
Biddle published Military Power 12 years ago, in 2004. Has anything changed substantially? Have we done better?
Revolutionary new technologies such as nanotechnology, robotics and artificial intelligence will drive that fundamental change. But while Milley said that a revolution is coming, how exactly the character of ground warfare will shape up remains an open question. “Exactly what that’s going to look like, I don’t know,” Milley said. “I just know that we’re there. We’re on the leading edge of it. I think we’ve got a few years to figure it out—probably less than ten. But I think by 2025, you’re going to see armies—not only the American Army but armies around the world—will be fundamentally and substantively different than they are today.”
In related news, the Army’s Paladin Integrated Management program to upgrade 133 M109A6 Paladin self-propelled howitzers to M109A7’s to improve the weapon’s reliability, maintainability, performance, responsiveness, and lethality has run into problems. The Department of Defense Inspector General found the M109A7 failed to meet maximum rate-of-fire requirements in tests and requires additional fire extinguisher capabilities in crew compartments. Army observers have warned of recent advances in Russian artillery technology and the need for effective countering capabilities. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld cancelled the Army’s proposed next-generation XM2001 Crusader self-propelled howitzer in 2002.
Last week, I touched on the ongoing effort by the U.S. Army to assess the nature of Russian advances in military technology and how they might affect the nature of combat on future battlefields. In a previous post, I highlighted that the Army’s preliminary conclusions about changes in near-future ground combat were being challenged by the other armed services in the context of debates over the next fiscal year U.S. military budget.
According to recently-confirmed Secretary of the Army, Eric Fanning, in order to persuade its critics, the Army needs to a better job of explaining the role it plays. “What I would have to do first of all is… tell the Army story… and the reason to do that is to make sure that the Army is properly resourced.”
Nadia Schadlow, a senior program officer at the Smith Richardson Foundation, pushed back against the idea that the Army needs a better narrative. She contends that the Army has already developed a theory of warfare that spells out how it believes near and medium-term wars will be fought and that it is now up to the critics to explain what aspects of this theory they object to and why.
Schadlow sketched out the U.S. Army’s current theory of warfare as it has been explained by senior Army leaders and in doctrinal publications.
The Army view is that conflicts in the future, like those in the past, will ultimately be resolved on land. Army forces will be essential components of joint operations to create sustainable political outcomes while defeating enemies and adversaries who challenge U.S. advantages in all domains: land, air, maritime, space, and cyberspace. Army contributions to joint operations provide multiple options to civilian and military leaders. These capabilities include tailorable and scalable combinations of special operations and conventional forces, regionally aligned and globally responsive combined arms teams, and foundational theater capabilities to enable joint operations.
The notion of a military service defining its own theory of warfare—as opposed to adopting a general theory of warfare—is an interesting one. [Schadlow drew the paragraph above from TRADOC Pamphlet 525-3-1The U.S. Army Operating Concept 2020-2040: Win in a Complex World (2014)] Schadlow referenced a recent article by U.S. Army Major Robert Chamberlain that assessed the German Army’s theory of warfare in the context of its military defeat at Verdun in 1916. Chamberlain defines a theory of warfare as
[A] description of how a military intends to produce strategic outcomes. In making a decision to apply a military remedy to a strategic problem, one employs a theory of warfare to determine how and if the proposed solution will work. In the modern world, the development of grand strategy often receives theories of warfare as a given. Due to the time and expense required to develop and train a modern military, the strategic decision-makers are bound by the military capabilities and doctrine that exist when they assume power.
He spelled out what a theory of warfare does for a military organization.
A theory of warfare provides the ordering principles of a military whether made explicit or not. It is a description of the strategic environment, of what the military is, and how it applies itself against an adversary. Everything else that a military does—how it dresses, organizes itself, procures equipment, imposes discipline, generates force, sees terrain, treats captured enemies, deals with civilians, and so forth—is largely a function of how it defines and achieves success in war.
Chamberlain’s definition for a theory of warfare is idiosyncratic and he does not make reference to the very large body of existing scholarship on warfare theory. It sounds a good deal more like an operating concept rather than a general theory of warfare. Schadlow’s definition is also problematic in that it seems like a self-referential description of how the U.S. conceptualizes the contemporary operating environment and the tasks the Army carries out as part of the overall joint force responsibilities. She twice cites the Army’s contention that future conflicts will be ultimately decided on land, but does not explain why. An Army theory of warfare would be more compelling if it also explained warfare in the other domains, not just on the ground.
Nevertheless, theories and theorizing are useful exercises in critical thinking. Even if Chamberlain’s concept does not rise to the level of a theory of warfare, it does show that effort is being made within the U.S. military to break down these ideas into their constituent parts and rethink how they work together. This is a subject I plan to return to in the near future.
According to McMaster, “the Russians have superior artillery firepower, better combat vehicles, and have learned sophisticated use of UAVs for tactical effect. Should U.S. forces find themselves in a land war with Russia, he said, they would be in for a rude, cold awakening.”
The Army evidently envisions a future clash between U.S. and Russian or Russian-backed forces will begin with long-range missile exchanges.
“We spend a long time talking about winning long-range missile duels,” said McMaster. But long-range missiles only get you through the front door. The question then becomes what will you do when you get there.
The tactics of Russian-backed irregular forces in the Ukraine have demonstrated effective leveraging of the new technological capabilities.
“Look at the enemy countermeasures,” [McMaster] said, noting Russia’s use of nominally semi-professional forces who are capable of “dispersion, concealment, intermingling with civilian populations…the ability to disrupt our network strike capability, precision navigation and timing capabilities.”
The implication of this, McMaster contends, would be that “you’re probably going to have a close fight… Increasingly, close combat overmatch is an area we’ve neglected, because we’ve taken it for granted.”
One big reason for the perceived Russian overmatch is a due to an advantage in artillery, both in terms of range and in power.
[Phil] Karber, the president of the Potomac Foundation, went on a fact-finding mission to Ukraine last year, and returned with the conclusion that the United States had long overemphasized precision artillery on the battlefield at the expense of mass fires. Since the 1980s, he said last October, at an Association for the United States Army event, the U.S. has given up its qualitative edge, mostly by getting rid of cluster munitions.
Munitions have advanced incredibly since then. One of the most terrifying weapons that the Russians are using on the battlefield are thermobaric warheads, weapons that are composed almost entirely of fuel and burn longer and with more intensity than other types of munitions.
“In a 3-minute period…a Russian fire strike wiped out two mechanized battalions [with] a combination of top-attack munitions and thermobaric warheads,” said Karber. “If you have not experienced or seen the effects of thermobaric warheads, start taking a hard look. They might soon be coming to a theater near you.”
McMaster believes that the combination of heavier, longer-ranged artillery abetted by the targeting capabilities afforded by hordes of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) provides the Russians with a significant battlefield advantage.
“We’re out-ranged by a lot of these systems and they employ improved conventional munitions, which we are going away from. There will be a 40- to 60-percent reduction in lethality in the systems that we have,” he said. “Remember that we already have fewer artillery systems. Now those fewer artillery systems will be less effective relative to the enemy. So we need to do something on that now.”
One potential solution is to develop more flexibility in existing U.S. Army fires capabilities.
To remedy that, McMaster is looking into a new area called “cross domain fires,” which would outfit ground units to hit a much wider array of targets. “When an Army fires unit arrives somewhere, it should be able to do surface-to-air, surface-to-surface, and shore-to-ship capabilities. We are developing that now and there are some really promising capabilities,” he said.
Men dressed as First World War soldiers mingle with regular commuters aboard an underground tube train in London, to mark 100-years since the start of the Battle of the Somme, early Friday July 1, 2016. London commuters were met by the eerie sight of people dressed as World War I soldiers as they made their way to work Friday, with the soldiers singing wartime songs or remaining silent, revealed later Friday as a Somme tribute, the work of Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller, National Theatre Director Rufus Norris and thousands of volunteers. (Sarah Perry / PA via AP) The Associated Press
Another entry in the lessons of World War I department comes in the pages of the current edition of Military Review. Major Robert Chamberlain (USA) examines the role theories of warfare influence the planning, conduct and outcome of battles, looking specifically at the case of the German Army during the Battle of Verdun (pp. 78-87). He then looks at the lessons of Verdun regarding the relationship between a theory of warfare, political objectives, and outcomes and applies them to the current state of U.S. military thinking.
U.S. Army Major Amos Fox, currently a student at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, has produced 
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