Recon-Strike Battle

The Army joins the Recon-Strike Tactics club

I’m slowly digging out of the fighting hole where I was buried by final papers and assignments for classes, but I wanted to highlight two recent Modern Warfare Institute articles in a series titled How We Fight. And not just because they were kind enough to link my JAMS article on reconnaissance-strike tactics. They’re also great context for the Army Transformation Initiative.

In the first one, The Case for Reconnaissance-Strike Battle, Zachary Spear and Michael Culler lay out what an Army version of recon-strike tactics might look like:

Properly designed and implemented, reconnaissance-strike battle should be built on four core imperatives. First, be a hard target. The enemy can see you and will strike you. You must be prepared to disperse, deceive, cover, conceal, and mask to avoid the enemy reconnaissance-strike complex. If you can’t do so because you are defending a fixed location, dig in and develop a hardened shelter, but never stop aggressive reconnaissance. Second, the reconnaissance-strike complex is the first objective. At any echelon of engagement, if the enemy has reconnaissance-strike complexes and you do not, you die. The first and most persistent priority, therefore, must be the enemy’s reconnaissance-strike complex at echelon. Third, the side that owns the reconnaissance-strike complex duel wins. If you find, fix, track, target, engage, and assess at larger scale, and faster than the enemy, you win. Finally, massing capability must come before massing maneuver. Massing all-domain capability to degrade, disintegrate, or destroy the enemy’s reconnaissance-strike complex is a prerequisite to mass combat power and defeat the enemy in detail. Overwhelming the enemy’s reconnaissance-strike complex with maneuver is possible only through an extraordinary expenditure of lives.

The second article, Manning, Training, and Equipping for Reconnaissance-Strike Battle, focuses on how to prepare units to execute the concept.

Interestingly, the first article mentions moving on from multi-domain operations in favor recon-strike battle as the authors call it. MDO never made much sense to me so bravo.

The Army is not alone of course. The British Army is pursuing a similar concept called Recce-Strike. And the Marine Corps has been moving in this direction since 2018.

Just like the Marine Corps though, the Army is already catching flak for this direction. But like critics of Force Design, they miss the point. Both services, but the Army especially, simply have to get lighter. A lot lighter. The Army is designed to be a heavy force deployable across uncontested seas to uncontested ports to which it has unfettered access. The Marine Corps (pre-Force Design) was designed to operate from untouchable and plentiful Navy amphibious ships which could concentrate wherever and whenever they wanted. In other words, they were both designed for a world that no longer exists and will never exist again. We can quibble over exactly how they should change, but the status quo has been dead for a long time. Frankly, General Krulak’s Sea Dragon innovations should have been pursued immediately rather than twenty years later under General Berger.

The recon-strike terminology is originally Russian, although they never managed to pull it off. But the idea isn’t terribly complex. In On Tactics terms, its designing units for maneuver, firepower, and tempo at the expense of mass. Viewed in that lens, the idea is far older than the Russian recon-strike concepts of the 1970s. Enhancing the idea with modern technology animated General Krulak’s Sea Dragon innovation process in the late 1990s which produced the Hunter-Warrior experiments. In Hunter-Warrior an experimental force organized around dispersed infantry squads equipped with long-range precision fires capabilities, dubbed SPMAGTF(X), manhandled a conventionally-organized mechanized force of 4,500 Marines. The same idea would go on to be the basis for Expeditionary Advance Base Operations and the Marine Littoral Regiments, although the kit required to make them as agile as they need to be hasn’t arrived yet.

If the Russo-Ukraine War tells us anything, it’s that infantry is still the dominant force in land warfare. Both sides are employing unmanned systems, artificial intelligence, and satellite imagery in mass. Russia employs its advantage in armored vehicles, strategic bombers, and ballistic missiles routinely, albeit mostly at civilian targets for the latter two. Despite all of this, neither side can break lines held by motivated infantry. It is still very difficult to break properly-equipped, motivated infantry in the defense.

Let’s hope Taiwan is learning this lesson.