Capt. Christopher Hawkins, 1st Squadron, 38th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Security Force Assistance Brigade, middle, and an interpreter speaks with local national soldiers to gain information about a village during an enacted military operation on urban terrain event at Lee Field, Oct. 23, 2017, on Fort Benning, Ga. (Photo Credit: Spc. Noelle E. Wiehe)
The Army intends to establish five Regular Army and one Army National Guard SFABs. In December it stated that the 2nd SFAB would stand up in January 2018 at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
The Army created the SFABs and MATA in an effort to improve its capabilities to resource and conduct Security Force Assistance (SFA) missions and to relieve line Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs) of these responsibilities. Each SFAB will be manned by 800 senior and noncommissioned volunteer officers with demonstrated experience training and advising foreign security forces.
Specialized training at MATA includes language, foreign weapons, and the Joint Fires Observer course. SFAB commanders and leaders have previous command experience and enlisted advisors hold the rank of sergeant and above. As of August 2017, recruiting for the first unit had been short by approximately 350 personnel, though the shortfall appears to have been remedied. The Army is working to address policies and regulations with regard to promotion rates and boards, selection boards, and special pay.in order to formalize a SFAB career path
The constituents of combat power as described in current U.S. military doctrine. [The Lightning Press]
One of the fundamental concepts of U.S. warfighting doctrine is combat power. The current U.S. Army definition is “the total means of destructive, constructive, and information capabilities that a military unit or formation can apply at a given time. (ADRP 3-0).” It is the construct commanders and staffs are taught to use to assess the relative effectiveness of combat forces and is woven deeply throughout all aspects of U.S. operational thinking.
To execute operations, commanders conceptualize capabilities in terms of combat power. Combat power has eight elements: leadership, information, mission command, movement and maneuver, intelligence, fires, sustainment, and protection. The Army collectively describes the last six elements as the warfighting functions. Commanders apply combat power through the warfighting functions using leadership and information. [ADP 3-0, Operations]
Yet, there is no formal method in U.S. doctrine for estimating combat power. The existing process is intentionally subjective and largely left up to judgment. This is problematic, given that assessing the relative combat power of friendly and opposing forces on the battlefield is the first step in Course of Action (COA) development, which is at the heart of the U.S. Military Decision-Making Process (MDMP). Estimates of combat power also figure heavily in determining the outcomes of wargames evaluating proposed COAs.
The Existing Process
The Army’s current approach to combat power estimation is outlined in Field Manual (FM) 6-0 Commander and Staff Organization and Operations (2014). Planners are instructed to “make a rough estimate of force ratios of maneuver units two levels below their echelon.” They are then directed to “compare friendly strengths against enemy weaknesses, and vice versa, for each element of combat power.” It is “by analyzing force ratios and determining and comparing each force’s strengths and weaknesses as a function of combat power” that planners gain insight into tactical and operational capabilities, perspectives, vulnerabilities, and required resources.
That is it. Planners are told that “although the process uses some numerical relationships, the estimate is largely subjective. Assessing combat power requires assessing both tangible and intangible factors, such as morale and levels of training.” There is no guidance as to how to determine force ratios [numbers of troops or weapons systems?]. Nor is there any description of how to relate force calculations to combat power. Should force strengths be used somehow to determine a combat power value? Who knows? No additional doctrinal or planning references are provided.
Planners then use these subjective combat power assessments as they shape potential COAs and test them through wargaming. Although explicitly warned not to “develop and recommend COAs based solely on mathematical analysis of force ratios,” they are invited at this stage to consult a table of “minimum historical planning ratios as a starting point.” The table is clearly derived from the ubiquitous 3-1 rule of combat. Contrary to what FM 6-0 claims, neither the 3-1 rule nor the table have a clear historical provenance or any sort of empirical substantiation. There is no proven validity to any of the values cited. It is not even clear whether the “historical planning ratios” apply to manpower, firepower, or combat power.
During this phase, planners are advised to account for “factors that are difficult to gauge, such as impact of past engagements, quality of leaders, morale, maintenance of equipment, and time in position. Levels of electronic warfare support, fire support, close air support, civilian support, and many other factors also affect arraying forces.” FM 6-0 offers no detail as to how these factors should be measured or applied, however.
FM 6-0 also addresses combat power assessment for stability and civil support operations through troop-to-task analysis. Force requirements are to be based on an estimate of troop density, a “ratio of security forces (including host-nation military and police forces as well as foreign counterinsurgents) to inhabitants.” The manual advises that most “most density recommendations fall within a range of 20 to 25 counterinsurgents for every 1,000 residents in an area of operations. A ratio of twenty counterinsurgents per 1,000 residents is often considered the minimum troop density required for effective counterinsurgency operations.”
The Army Has Known About The Problem For A Long Time
The Army has tried several solutions to the problem of combat power estimation over the years. In the early 1970s, the U.S. Army Center for Army Analysis (CAA; known then as the U.S. Army Concepts & Analysis Agency) developed the Weighted Equipment Indices/Weighted Unit Value (WEI/WUV or “wee‑wuv”) methodology for calculating the relative firepower of different combat units. While WEI/WUV’s were soon adopted throughout the Defense Department, the subjective nature of the method gradually led it to be abandoned for official use.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the U.S. Army Command & General Staff College (CGSC) published the ST 100-9 and ST 100-3 student workbooks that contained tables of planning factors that became the informal basis for calculating combat power in staff practice. The STs were revised regularly and then adapted into spreadsheet format in the late 1990s. The 1999 iteration employed WEI/WEVs as the basis for calculating firepower scores used to estimate force ratios. CGSC stopped updating the STs in the early 2000s, as the Army focused on irregular warfare.
With the recently renewed focus on conventional conflict, Army staff planners are starting to realize that their planning factors are out of date. In an attempt to fill this gap, CGSC developed a new spreadsheet tool in 2012 called the Correlation of Forces (COF) calculator. It apparently drew upon analysis done by the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command Analysis Center (TRAC) in 2004 to establish new combat unit firepower scores. (TRAC’s methodology is not clear, but if it is based on this 2007 ISMOR presentation, the scores are derived from runs by an unspecified combat model modified by factors derived from the Army’s unit readiness methodology. If described accurately, this would not be an improvement over WEI/WUVs.)
The COF calculator continues to use the 3-1 force ratio tables. It also incorporates a table for estimating combat losses based on force ratios (this despite ample empirical historical analysis showing that there is no correlation between force ratios and casualty rates).
While the COF calculator is not yet an official doctrinal product, CGSC plans to add Marine Corps forces to it for use as a joint planning tool and to incorporate it into the Army’s Command Post of the Future (CPOF). TRAC is developing a stand-alone version for use by force developers.
The incorporation of unsubstantiated and unvalidated concepts into Army doctrine has been a long standing problem. In 1976, Huba Wass de Czege, then an Army major, took both “loosely structured and unscientific analysis” based on intuition and experience and simple counts of gross numbers to task as insufficient “for a clear and rigorous understanding of combat power in a modern context.” He proposed replacing it with a analytical framework for analyzing combat power that accounted for both measurable and intangible factors. Adopting a scrupulous method and language would overcome the simplistic tactical analysis then being taught. While some of the essence of Wass de Czege’s approach has found its way into doctrinal thinking, his criticism of the lack of objective and thorough analysis continues to echo (here, here, and here, for example).
Despite dissatisfaction with the existing methods, little has changed. The problem with this should be self-evident, but I will give the U.S. Naval War College the final word here:
Fundamentally, all of our approaches to force-on-force analysis are underpinned by theories of combat that include both how combat works and what matters most in determining the outcomes of engagements, battles, campaigns, and wars. The various analytical methods we use can shed light on the performance of the force alternatives only to the extent our theories of combat are valid. If our theories are flawed, our analytical results are likely to be equally wrong.
For a while now, military pundits have speculated about the role robotic drones and swarm tactics will play in future warfare. U.S. Army Captain Jules Hurst recently took a first crack at adapting drones and swarms into existing doctrine in an article in Joint Forces Quarterly. In order to move beyond the abstract, Hurst looked at how drone swarms “should be inserted into the tactical concepts of today—chiefly, the five forms of offensive maneuver recognized under Army doctrine.”
Hurst pointed out that while drone design currently remains in flux, “for assessment purposes, future swarm combatants will likely be severable into two broad categories: fire support swarms and maneuver swarms.”
In Hurst’s reckoning, the chief advantage of fire support swarms would be their capacity for overwhelming current air defense systems to deliver either human-targeted or semi-autonomous precision fires. Their long-range endurance of airborne drones also confers an ability to take and hold terrain that current manned systems do not possess.
The primary benefits of ground maneuver swarms, according to Hurst, would be their immunity from the human element of fear, giving them a resilient, persistent level of combat effectiveness. Their ability to collect real-time battlefield intelligence makes them ideal for enabling modern maneuver warfare concepts.
Hurst examines how these capabilities could be exploited through each of the Army’s current schemes of maneuver: infiltration, penetration, frontal attack, envelopment, and the turning maneuver. While concluding that “ultimately, the technological limitations and advantages of maneuver swarms and fire support swarms will determine their uses,” Hurst acknowledged the critical role Army institutional leadership must play in order to successfully utilize the new technology on the battlefield.
U.S. officers and noncommissioned officers can accelerate that comfort [with new weapons] by beginning to postulate about the use of swarms well before they hit the battlefield. In the vein of aviation visionaries Billy Mitchell and Giulio Douhet, members of the Department of Defense must look forward 10, 20, or even 30 years to when artificial intelligence allows the deployment of swarm combatants on a regular basis. It will take years of field maneuvers to perfect the employment of swarms in combat, and the concepts formed during these exercises may be shattered during the first few hours of war. Even so, the U.S. warfighting community must adopt a venture capital mindset and accept many failures for the few novel ideas that may produce game-changing results.
An imaginative, knowledgeable leadership focused on military affairs, supported by extensive knowledge of, and competence in, the nature and background of the existing military system.
Effective coordination of the nation’s economic, technological-scientific, and military resources.
There must exist industrial or developmental research institutions, basic research institutions, military staffs and their supporting institutions, together with administrative arrangements for linking these with one another and with top decision-making echelons of government.
These bodies must conduct their research, developmental, and testing activities according to mutually familiar methods so that their personnel can communicate, can be mutually supporting, and can evaluate each other’s results.
The efforts of these institutions—in related matters—must be directed toward a common goal.
Opportunity for battlefield experimentation as a basis for evaluation and analysis.
A paratrooper from the French Foreign Legion (1er REP) with a captured fellagha during the Algerian War (1954-1962). [Via Pinterest]
Today’s edition of TDI Friday Read is a compilation of posts addressing the question of manpower and counterinsurgency. The first four posts summarize research on the question undertaken during the first decade of the 21st century, while the Afghan and Iraqi insurgencies were in full bloom. Despite different research questions and analytical methodologies, each of the studies concluded that there is a relationship between counterinsurgent manpower and counterinsurgency outcomes.
The fifth post addresses the U.S. Army’s lack of a formal methodology for calculating manpower requirements for counterinsurgencies and contingency operations.
A Stryker Infantry Carrier Vehicle-Dragoon fires 30 mm rounds during a live-fire demonstration at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., Aug. 16, 2017. Soldiers with 2nd Cavalry Regiment spent six weeks at Aberdeen testing and training on the new Stryker vehicle and a remote Javelin system, which are expected to head to Germany early next year for additional user testing. (Photo Credit: Sean Kimmons)
In 2001, The Dupuy Institute conducted a study for the U.S. Army Center for Army Analysis (CAA) on the historical effectiveness of lighter-weight armored forces. At the time, the Army had developed a requirement for an Interim Armored Vehicle (IAV), lighter and more deployable than existing M1 Abrams Main Battle Tank and the M2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle, to form the backbone of the future “Objective Force.” This program would result in development of the Stryker Infantry Fighting Vehicle.
CAA initiated the TDI study at the request of Walter W. “Don” Hollis, then the Deputy Undersecretary of the Army for Operations Research (a position that was eliminated in 2006.) TDI completed and submitted “The Historical Combat Effectiveness of Lighter-Weight Armored Forces” to CAA in August 2001. It examined the effectiveness of light and medium-weight armored forces in six scenarios:
Conventional conflicts against an armor supported or armor heavy force.
Emergency insertions against an armor supported or armor heavy force.
Conventional conflict against a primarily infantry force (as one might encounter in sub-Saharan Africa).
Emergency insertion against a primarily infantry force.
A small to medium insurgency (includes an insurgency that develops during a peacekeeping operation).
A peacekeeping operation or similar Operation Other Than War (OOTW) that has some potential for violence.
The historical data the study drew upon came from 146 cases of small-scale contingency operations; U.S. involvement in Vietnam; German counterinsurgency operations in the Balkans, 1941-1945; the Philippines Campaign, 1941-42; the Normandy Campaign, 1944; the Korean War 1950-51; the Persian Gulf War, 1990-91; and U.S. and European experiences with light and medium-weight armor in World War II.
The major conclusions of the study were:
Small Scale Contingency Operations (SSCOs)
Implications for the Interim Armored Vehicle (IAV) Family of Vehicles. It would appear that existing systems (M-2 and M-3 Bradley and M-113) can fulfill most requirements. Current plans to develop an advanced LAV-type vehicle may cover almost all other shortfalls. Mine protection is a design feature that should be emphasized.
Implications for the Interim Brigade Combat Team (IBCT). The need for armor in SSCOs that are not conventional or closely conventional in nature is limited and rarely approaches the requirements of a brigade-size armored force.
Insurgencies
Implications for the Interim Armored Vehicle (IAV) Family of Vehicles. It would appear that existing systems (M-2 and M-3 Bradley and M-113) can fulfill most requirements. The armor threat in insurgencies is very limited until the later stages if the conflict transitions to conventional war. In either case, mine protection is a design feature that may be critical.
Implications for the Interim Brigade Combat Team (IBCT). It is the nature of insurgencies that rapid deployment of armor is not essential. The armor threat in insurgencies is very limited until the later stages if the conflict transitions to a conventional war and rarely approaches the requirements of a brigade-size armored force.
Conventional Warfare
Conventional Conflict Against An Armor Supported Or Armor Heavy Force
Implications for the Interim Armored Vehicle (IAV) Family of Vehicles. It may be expected that opposing heavy armor in a conventional armor versus armor engagement could significantly overmatch the IAV. In this case the primary requirement would be for a weapon system that would allow the IAV to defeat the enemy armor before it could engage the IAV.
Implications for the Interim Brigade Combat Team (IBCT). The IBCT could substitute as an armored cavalry force in such a scenario.
Conventional Conflict Against A Primarily Infantry Force
Implications for the Interim Armored Vehicle (IAV) Family of Vehicles. This appears to be little different from those conclusions found for the use of armor in SSCOs and Insurgencies.
Implications for the Interim Brigade Combat Team (IBCT). The lack of a major armor threat will make the presence of armor useful.
Emergency Insertion Against An Armor Supported Or Armor Heavy Force
Implications for the Interim Armored Vehicle (IAV) Family of Vehicles. It appears that the IAV may be of great use in an emergency insertion. However, the caveat regarding the threat of being overmatched by conventional heavy armor mentioned above should not be ignored. In this case the primary requirement would be for a weapon system that would allow the IAV to defeat the enemy armor before it could engage the IAV.
Implications for the Interim Brigade Combat Team (IBCT). Although the theoretical utility of the IBCT in this scenario may be great it should be noted that The Dupuy Institute was only able to find one comparable case of such a deployment which resulted in actual conflict in US military history in the last 60 years (Korea, 1950). In this case the effect of pushing forward light tanks into the face of heavier enemy tanks was marginal.
Emergency Insertion Against A Primarily Infantry Force
Implications for the Interim Armored Vehicle (IAV) Family of Vehicles. The lack of a major armor threat in this scenario will make the presence of any armor useful. However, The Dupuy Institute was unable to identify the existence of any such cases in the historical record.
Implications for the Interim Brigade Combat Team (IBCT). The lack of a major armor threat will make the presence of any armor useful. However, The Dupuy Institute was unable to identify the existence of any such cases in the historical record.
Other Conclusions
Wheeled Vehicles
There is little historical evidence one way or the other establishing whether wheels or tracks are the preferable feature of AFVs.
Vehicle Design
In SSCOs access to a large-caliber main gun was useful for demolishing obstacles and buildings. This capability is not unique and could be replaced by AT missiles armed CFVs, IFVs and APCs.
Any new lighter tank-like vehicle should make its gun system the highest priority, armor secondary and mobility and maneuverability tertiary.
Mine protection should be emphasized. Mines were a major threat to all types of armor in many scenarios. In many SSCOs it was the major cause of armored vehicle losses.
The robust carrying capacity offered by an APC over a tank is an advantage during many SSCOs.
Terrain Issues
The use of armor in urban fighting, even in SSCOs, is still limited. The threat to armor from other armor in urban terrain during SSCOs is almost nonexistent. Most urban warfare armor needs, where armor basically serves as a support weapon, can be met with light armor (CFVs, IFVs, and APCs).
Vehicle weight is sometimes a limiting factor in less developed areas. In all cases where this was a problem, there was not a corresponding armor threat. As such, in almost all cases, the missions and tasks of a tank can be fulfilled with other light armor (CFVs, IFVs, or APCs).
The primary terrain problem is rivers and flooded areas. It would appear that in difficult terrain, especially heavily forested terrain (areas with lots of rainfall, like jungles), a robust river crossing capability is required.
Operational Factors
Emergency insertions and delaying actions sometimes appear to be a good way to lose lots of armor for limited gain. This tends to come about due to terrain problems, enemy infiltration and bypassing, and the general confusion prevalent in such operations. The Army should be careful not to piecemeal assets when inserting valuable armor resources into a ‘hot’ situation. In many cases holding back and massing the armor for defense or counter-attack may be the better option.
Transportability limitations have not been a major factor in the past for determining whether lighter or heavier armor were sent into a SSCO or a combat environment.
Casualty Sensitivity
In a SSCO or insurgency, in most cases the weight and armor of the AFVs is not critical. As such, one would not expect any significant changes in losses regardless of the type of AFV used (MBT, medium-weight armor, or light armor). However, the perception that US forces are not equipped with the best-protected vehicle may cause some domestic political problems. The US government is very casualty sensitive during SSCOs. Furthermore, the current US main battle tank particularly impressive, and may help provide some additional intimidation in SSCOs.
In any emergency insertion scenario or conventional war scenario, the use of lighter armor could result in higher US casualties and lesser combat effectiveness. This will certainly cause some domestic political problems and may impact army morale. However by the same token, light infantry forces, unsupported by easily deployable armor could present a worse situation.
The Army also plans to field the new vehicle quickly. It is dispensing with the usual two-to-three year technology development phase, and will ask for delivery of the first sample vehicles by April 2018, one month after the RFP phase is scheduled to end. This will invariably favor proposals using existing off-the-shelf vehicle designs and “mature technology.”
The Army apparently will also accept RFPs with turret-mounted 105mm main guns, at least initially. According to previous MFP parameters, acceptable designs will eventually need to be able to accommodate 120mm guns.
I have observed in the past that the MPF is the result of the Army’s concerns that its light infantry may be deprived of direct fire support on anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) battlefields. Track-mounted, large caliber direct fire guns dedicated to infantry support are something of a doctrinal throwback to the assault guns of World War II, however.
There was a noted tendency during World War II to use anything on the battlefield that resembled a tank as a main battle tank, with unhappy results for the not-main battle tanks. As a consequence, assault guns, tank destroyers, and light tanks became evolutionary dead-ends in the development of post-World War II armored doctrine (the late M551 Sheridan, retired without replacement in 1996, notwithstanding). [For more on the historical background, see The Dupuy Institute, “The Historical Effectiveness of Lighter-Weight Armored Forces,” August 2001.]
The Army has been reluctant to refer to MPF as a light tank, but as David Dopp, the MPF Program Manager admitted, “I don’t want to say it’s a light tank, but it’s kind of like a light tank.” He went on to say that “It’s not going toe to toe with a tank…It’s for the infantry. It goes where the infantry goes — it breaks through bunkers, it works through targets that the infantry can’t get through.”
Major General David Bassett, program executive officer for the Army’s Ground Combat Systems concurred. It will be a tracked vehicle with substantial armor protection, Bassett said, “but certainly not what you’d see on a main battle tank.”
It will be interesting to see what the RFPs have to offer.
SFA is the umbrella term for U.S. whole-of-government support provided to develop the capability and capacity of foreign security forces and institutions. SFA is intended to help defend host nations from external and internal threats, and encompasses foreign internal defense (FID), counterterrorism (CT), counterinsurgency (COIN), and stability operations.
Rick Montcalm has a nice piece up at the Modern War Institute describing the doctrinal and organizational challenges the Army faces in implementing the SFABs. The Army’s existing SFA structure features regionally-aligned Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs) providing combined training and partnered mission assistance for foreign conventional forces from the team to company level, while ARSOF focuses on partner-nation counterterrorism missions and advising and assisting commando and special operations-type forces.
Ideally, the SFABs would supplement and gradually replace most, but not all, of the regionally-aligned BCTs to allow them to focus on warfighting tasks. Concerns have arisen with the ARSOF community, however, that a dedicated SFAB force would encroach functionally on its mission and compete within the Army for trained personnel. The SFABs currently lack the intelligence capabilities necessary to successfully conduct the advisory mission in hostile environments. Although U.S. Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley asserts that the SFABs are not Special Forces, properly preparing them for advise and assist roles would make them very similar to existing ARSOF.
Montcalm also points out that Army personnel policies complicate maintain the SFABs in the long-term. The Army has not created a specific military advisor career field and volunteering to serve in a SFAB could complicate the career progression of active duty personnel. Although the Army has taken steps to address this, the prospect of long repeat overseas tours and uncertain career prospects has forced the service to offer cash incentives and automatic promotions to bolster SFAB recruiting. As of August, the 1st SFAB needed 350 more soldiers to fully man the unit, which was scheduled to be operational in November.
SFA and the Army’s role in it will not decline anytime soon, so there is considerable pressure to make the SFAB concept successful. Yet, in light of the largely unsuccessful efforts to build effective security forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, it remains an open question if the SFAB’s themselves will be enough to remedy the Army’s problematic approach to building partner capacity.
The update is the result of the initial round of work between the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force to redefine the scope of the multi-domain battlespace for the Joint Force. More work will be needed to refine the concept, but it shows remarkable cooperation in forging a common warfighting perspective between services long-noted for their independent thinking.
What difference can it make if those designing Multi-Domain Battle are acting on possibly the wrong threat diagnosis? Designing a solution for a misdiagnosed problem can result in the inculcation of a way of war unsuited for the wars of the future. One is reminded of the French Army during the interwar period. No one can accuse the French of not thinking seriously about war during these years, but, in the doctrine of the methodical battle, they got it wrong and misread the opportunities presented by mechanisation. There were many factors contributing to France’s defeat, but at their core was a misinterpretation of the art of the possible and a singular focus on a particular way of war. Shaping Multi-Domain Battle for the wrong problem may see the United States similarly sow the seeds for a military disaster that is avoidable.
He suggests that it would be wise for U.S. doctrine writers to take a more considered look at potential implications before venturing too far ahead with specific solutions.
The fundamental building blocks of history are primary sources, i.e artifacts, documents, diaries and memoirs, manuscripts, or other contemporaneous sources of information. It has been the availability and accessibility of primary source documentation that allowed Trevor Dupuy and The Dupuy Institute to build the large historical combat databases that much of their analyses have drawn upon. It took uncounted man-hours of time-consuming, pain-staking research to collect and assemble two-sided data sufficiently detailed to analyze the complex phenomena of combat.
Going back to the Civil War, the United States has done a commendable job collecting and organizing captured military documentation and making that material available for historians, scholars, and professional military educators. TDI has made extensive use of captured German documentation from World War I and World War II held by the U.S. National Archives in its research, for example.
The documents date from 1978 up until Operation Desert Storm (1991). The collection includes Iraq operations plans and orders; maps and overlays; unit rosters (including photographs); manuals covering tactics, camouflage, equipment, and doctrine; equipment maintenance logs; ammunition inventories; unit punishment records; unit pay and leave records; handling of prisoners of war; detainee lists; lists of captured vehicles; and other military records. The collection also includes some manuals of foreign, non-Iraqi weapons systems. Some of Saddam Hussein’s Revolutionary Command Council records are in the captured material.
According to Cox, DIA began making digital copies of the documents shortly after the Gulf War ended. After the State Department requested copies, DIA subsequently determined that only 60% of the digital tapes the original scans had been stored on could be read. It was during an effort to rescan the lost 40% of the documents that it was discovered that the entire paper collection had been contaminated by mold.
DIA created a library of the scanned documents stored on 43 compact discs, which remain classified. It is not clear if DIA still has all of the CDs; none had been transferred to the National Archives as of 2012. A set of 725,000 declassifed pages was made available for a research effort at Harvard in 2000. That effort ended, however, and the declassified collection was sent to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The collection is closed to researchers, although Hoover has indicated it hopes to make it publicly available sometime in the future.
While the failure to preserve the original paper documents is bad enough, the possibility that any or all of the DIA’s digital collection might be permanently lost would constitute a grievous and baffling blunder. It also makes little sense for this collection to remain classified a quarter of a century after end of the Gulf War. Yet, it appears that failures to adequately collect and preserve U.S. military documents and records is becoming more common in the Information Age.
Servicemen of the U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team (standing) train Ukrainian National Guard members during a joint military exercise called “Fearless Guardian 2015,” at the International Peacekeeping and Security Center near the western village of Starychy, Ukraine, on May 7, 2015. [Newsweek]
Last week, Wesley Morgan reported in POLITICO about an internal readiness study recently conducted by the U.S. Army 173rd Airborne Infantry Brigade Combat Team. As U.S. European Command’s only airborne unit, the 173rd Airborne Brigade has been participating in exercises in the Baltic States and the Ukraine since 2014 to demonstrate the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) resolve to counter potential Russian aggression in Eastern Europe.
The experience the brigade gained working with Baltic and particularly Ukrainian military units that had engaged with Russian and Russian-backed Ukrainian Separatist forces has been sobering. Colonel Gregory Anderson, the 173rd Airborne Brigade commander, commissioned the study as a result. “The lessons we learned from our Ukrainian partners were substantial. It was a real eye-opener on the absolute need to look at ourselves critically,” he told POLITICO.
The study candidly assessed that the 173rd Airborne Brigade currently lacked “essential capabilities needed to accomplish its mission effectively and with decisive speed” against near-peer adversaries or sophisticated non-state actors. Among the capability gaps the study cited were
The lack of air defense and electronic warfare units and over-reliance on satellite communications and Global Positioning Systems (GPS) navigation systems;
simple countermeasures such as camouflage nets to hide vehicles from enemy helicopters or drones are “hard-to-find luxuries for tactical units”;
the urgent need to replace up-armored Humvees with the forthcoming Ground Mobility Vehicle, a much lighter-weight, more mobile truck; and
the likewise urgent need to field the projected Mobile Protected Firepower armored vehicle companies the U.S. Army is planning to add to each infantry brigade combat team.
The report also stressed the vulnerability of the brigade to demonstrated Russian electronic warfare capabilities, which would likely deprive it of GPS navigation and targeting and satellite communications in combat. While the brigade has been purchasing electronic warfare gear of its own from over-the-counter suppliers, it would need additional specialized personnel to use the equipment.
As analyst Adrian Bonenberger commented, “The report is framed as being about the 173rd, but it’s really about more than the 173rd. It’s about what the Army needs to do… If Russia uses electronic warfare to jam the brigade’s artillery, and its anti-tank weapons can’t penetrate any of the Russian armor, and they’re able to confuse and disrupt and quickly overwhelm those paratroopers, we could be in for a long war.”
While the report is a wake-up call with regard to the combat readiness in the short-term, it also pointedly demonstrates the complexity of the strategic “identity crisis” that faces the U.S. Army in general. Many of the 173rd Airborne Brigade’s current challenges can be traced directly to the previous decade and a half of deployments conducting wide area security missions during counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The brigade’s perceived shortcomings for combined arms maneuver missions are either logical adaptations to the demands of counterinsurgency warfare or capabilities that atrophied through disuse.
The Army’s specific lack of readiness to wage combined arms maneuver warfare against potential peer or near-peer opponents in Europe can be remedied given time and resourcing in the short-term. This will not solve the long-term strategic conundrum the Army faces in needing to be prepared to fight conventional and irregular conflicts at the same time, however. Unless the U.S. is willing to 1) increase defense spending to balance force structure to the demands of foreign and military policy objectives, or 2) realign foreign and military policy goals with the available force structure, it will have to resort to patching up short-term readiness issues as best as possible and continue to muddle through. Given the current state of U.S. domestic politics, muddling through will likely be the default option unless or until the consequences of doing so force a change.
During this phase, planners are advised to account for “factors that are difficult to gauge, such as impact of past engagements, quality of leaders, morale, maintenance of equipment, and time in position. Levels of electronic warfare support, fire support, close air support, civilian support, and many other factors also affect arraying forces.” FM 6-0 offers no detail as to how these factors should be measured or applied, however.
For a while now, military pundits have speculated about the role robotic drones and swarm tactics will play in future warfare. U.S. Army Captain Jules Hurst recently took a first crack at adapting drones and swarms into existing doctrine in 
The U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command has released a revised draft version of its 