Programming Note: Weekly posts will have to shift to Sunday due to my new schedule.
I mentioned in my State of Force Design 2030 that we might see something similar from the Army too. And so we have. This week, the Army released a white paper detailing its trimming effort.
There are plenty of run downs of the Army’s plan already. Breaking Defense. DefenseOne. DefenseNews. At least one retired Army general officer has already weighed in.
But the bottom line is the Army is trimming fat in the form of reducing structure that is already unfilled, bringing it closer to (but still far over) its authorized end strength. Why the Army is larger than its authorized end strength is a mystery to me, but that’s not really relevant here. It’s shedding structure that it doesn’t actually use and has a hard time staffing anyway.
But there’s also force design components of the white paper. The primary place the Army seeks to expand is in air defense, the reasons for which are obvious. Aerial drones are ubiquitous now along with a range of air and missile threats.
The other big ticket item is the expansion of Multi-Domain Task Forces, an unwieldy name for what is corps artillery in all but name. The multi-domain aspect comes from the non-lethal electronic and cyber warfare capabilities that are organic to the MDTF. A corps should definitely have these assets in large-scale combat operations and I think that’s where MDTFs make the most sense. Army employment plans don’t make so much sense though. They intend to employ them not in support of a corps but by themselves and inside the range of adversary ballistic missiles which, in the case of China at least, are all longer range than anything the MDTF or the Army writ large employs. An MDTF is simply not survivable or sustainable in the First Island Chain unless the PLA is already significantly degraded, at which point one won’t be needed. Elsewhere they may find some use. A standing MDTF in support of V Corps in EUCOM makes total sense and would be both survivable and sustainable. Elsewhere not so much.
I’m more skeptical of the cuts to cavalry formations. Modern cavalry formations handle the important reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance tasks that any military force has to perform in order to maneuver in any way: gaining and maintaining contact with the enemy and screening friendly forces to facilitate both maneuver and fires. The white paper linked above seems to refer to these formations as counterinsurgency focused, which couldn’t be farther from the truth: they are vital in all operations. This comes on the heels of the Army’s cancellation of its manned scout aircraft program. That’s probably the right call as there are a range of uncrewed options that can perform aerial reconnaissance, but aerial reconnaissance is not a replacement for ground reconnaissance and the humans that do it. Cutting them is definitely a straight cut to Army capability that will not be replaced with technology.
Also, one wonders who is going to find targets for an MDTF if not Army scouts? Yes, drones can do this, at least against an opponent that lacks air defense. But there is no technological replacement for a trained and experienced scout that can understand the context of a situation and nominate the right targets, as well as feed a maneuver force’s information requirements.
My big surprise though is they kept the Security Force Assistance Brigades with only a few reductions. It was a worthy experiment, but they’re not being employed and the brigades have been plagued by scandal after scandal. Probably time to wrap it up.
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