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1973 was a pivotal year for the American military. The unit took a beating from Vietnam and disintegrated. In January, the Secretary of Defense announced the end of military conscription. Two months later, the last combat troops left Vietnam. But the Arab-Israeli war that broke out on Yom Kippur in October sowed the seeds of rebirth. The lessons of this war were absorbed by American officers sent to Israel and led to the reorganization of the U.S. Army into a modern, professional force that led to the conquest of Iraq in 1991.
Today’s generals, who came of age during that period of change, are keenly aware of its resonance. “There are loose parallels between the military of the early 1970s and Desert Storm and the military that invaded Iraq in the early 2000s and where we need to be in 2040,” he says of the future of the Army. General James Rainey, who heads the command, said: Two decades of war in Afghanistan and Iraq have exhausted troops, equipment and ideology. The shortage of human resources remains unresolved. Now, the rise of China and the lessons of the Ukraine war are prompting introspection, renewal, and reform.
Three big questions remain unanswered among military civilian and military leaders, according to people familiar with these discussions. One is that the profound changes in the nature of warfare evident in Ukraine may make ground forces less important, if not irrelevant.
The second is how to balance resources between Asia and Europe (Asia is a priority for the Pentagon and Europe, where Russia is rapidly rearming). Although the military can prepare for conflict in both places, it cannot actually fight them at the same time, and is no longer required to do so. The 2018 National Defense Strategy ended the “two wars” standard, a change the Biden administration has embraced.
That brings me to the third thing that is most important for the military. What will be the role of ground forces in a future Pacific war beyond providing logistics and air defense?
When Army Chief of Staff General Randy George was recently asked to recommend a book, he cited young British analyst Jack Watling’s “Weapons of the Future.” The book explores how combat brigades, faced with increasingly better sensors and longer-range, more powerful weapons, suffered heavy losses during the recent round of Warfighter, a massive annual exercise led by the United States. It explains how it suffered and showed a combat efficiency of 20%. Cannons destroy infantry and armored troops long before they can reach the enemy.
The Ukraine war confirmed these findings. Some argue that the U.S. military, which is better trained and armed than the Ukrainian military and has air cover in the skies, would fare better. Still, General Rainey is assuming the worst. “We’re going to fight under constant surveillance,” General Rainey said. There are no breaks. There’s no sanctuary. He said an American “lessons learned” team was deployed to collect observations three days before the invasion. They would be in for some nasty surprises. American-made GPS-guided artillery shells and rockets worked well at first. Recently, it has struggled with Russian sabotage.
Where once we were able to patiently rally forces before launching a major attack, as we did against Iraq in 1991 and 2003, we must now prioritize dispersion, mobility, and concealment. The military is aware that this is not the case. The drone strike that killed three soldiers in Jordan on January 28 was the first successful attack on U.S. forces by aircraft since the Korean War. In a recent paper, Army officer Katie Klombu and John Nagl, a professor at the Army War College of Pennsylvania, found that a battalion command post in Ukraine is made up of seven soldiers who dig into the ground and move twice a day. Pointed out. “That standard,” they warn, “will be difficult for the U.S. military to achieve,” pointing to ingrained habits in hardened command centers.
Battalion (approximately 1,000 soldiers) and brigade (several thousand soldiers) commanders, the core units of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, will be consumed by this intense fighting in a way that is different from counterinsurgency missions. . As a result, the Army is undergoing realignment, with much of the burden of planning, logistics, command and control, and long-range firepower falling on divisions. Large formations are usually located further back from the front lines and are commanded by two-star generals with more time and time to spare. A space to organize futuristic frenetic battles.
Billy Fabian, a former infantry officer and Pentagon planner, says what remains unanswered is exactly how to organize the military’s fighting force for future wars. He says it is a balance between Ukraine’s superior firepower and so-called mobility. On the other hand are elements such as infantry and armor. “Fighting ground wars is the military’s raison d’être,” he says, “and Ukraine poses tough questions that challenge deeply ingrained elements at the core of the military’s self-conception.”
military dreamer
At stake in these reforms is the larger question of where the military will be required to fight. The National Defense Strategies released by the Trump and Biden administrations direct the Pentagon to focus on China. Indeed, after Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, the Army expanded its presence in Europe. Since then, it has strengthened continental Europe with corps and division headquarters, infantry and armored brigades, rocket artillery battalions, and numerous other support units. In contrast, relatively few new powers have entered Asia.
For many years, the U.S. Army’s primary role in the Pacific was to guard bases, provide air defense, and handle logistics. Insofar as it was a “task force” in military parlance, it was focused on North Korea. Other services looked down on it. “The Navy is in control of the leadership of the Indo-Pacific Command,” says Stacey Pettyjohn of the Center for a New American Security, a think tank in Washington. “They see the military only in a supporting role in the maritime theater.”
Gen. Charles Flynn, commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, vehemently refuted such ideas when speaking to The Economist from his home base in Hawaii. “Humans have a unique tendency to live on land,” he says. “At the end of the day, decisions are made with the pointy end of the gun.” Land advantage is not just in Europe, he argues, but also in Asia, especially in countries like India and Indonesia. They argue that the reason for this is that the region’s largest countries have military powers dominated by military forces. The idea is that by building relationships with them in peacetime, the military can be in a position to project military power to the West.
The expansion of the pace of exercises (more than 40 each year) is a central part of this. General Flynn cites the examples of Australia’s Talisman Saber and Indonesia’s Garuda Shield. Both were once relatively small-scale military-on-military exercises. They have grown and now involve the Navy and Air Force. Both also involve the Army’s Pacific Joint Multinational Readiness Center (JPMRC), essentially physical and virtual training that can be deployed throughout the region to conduct activities that could only be done at a large base in Louisiana. It is a device. Such training is turning into a near-permanent presence, with troops deployed to the region for eight months a year.
Additionally, we need to rethink how the military fights. The premise is that China is optimizing its forces to attack U.S. satellites, ships, and air bases. General Bernard Harrington said it was “not designed to locate, modify, and complete distributed, mobile, and networked land formations.” This prompted the creation of three experimental “Multi-Domain Task Forces” (MDTFs), the first of which is focused on Asia and is commanded by General Harrington.
Each MDTF has four battalions and can deploy small units along the First Island Chain from Japan to the Philippines. The idea is that you can fight not only on land, but also across territories, such as soldier to soldier, tank to tank. Imagine if America needed to target Chinese ships. MDTF “effects” battalions can jam radars and hack networks. If it does not disable the ship, there is a high chance that anti-ship missiles fired by the “firing” battalion will pass. The military’s long-range hypersonic missiles, deployed last year, have a range of just under 3,000 kilometers, enough to reach from Japan to Taiwan or from the Philippines to the South China Sea.
Although early experiments by the MDTF have shown promise, some are skeptical whether this high-tech vision of war can survive contact with reality. They also brought valuable lessons. General Harrington said last year’s exercises in the Philippines were a reminder that HIMARS rocket launchers and intelligence equipment, packed with sensitive electronics, fare worse in the heat and humidity of tropical Asia than at the American test site where they were first tested. said. Currently, two of his MDTFs are focused on Asia and a third is focused on Europe. Original plans envisioned a total of five, with an additional one in the Arctic and one for global missions.
All this seems to provide a definitive answer to the military’s identity crisis: Asia First. However, there are doubts within the Department of War, which is within the Department of Defense. One question is whether its own plans are consistent with those of the military as a whole. “The military still feels marginalized in the Pacific,” Pettyjohn said. The other question is whether the military itself has changed direction sufficiently ruthlessly. For example, the number of ships in our fleet has decreased significantly in recent years. “Watercraft are an absolute indicator of true contribution to the Pacific,” says JP Clark, another professor at the War College. “They’re very expensive and the only thing that’s really useful is that theater, which is absolutely essential.”
The MDTF itself remains a “niche” organization, Fabian argues. He noted that the largest formation assigned to the region is Hawaii’s 25th Infantry Division, a light infantry division. “It seems like the Army is trying to have it both ways,” Fabian argued. “Let’s talk about fire and air defense in the Pacific, but continue to be a coalition organized for close combat as we have always been.” Because militaries rarely make the wars they expect, they It’s risk-averse, insiders say.
There are many trade-offs. Short-range artillery is essential for Europe. Not so much in Asia. “Shooting 155 rounds in the Pacific Ocean outside of the ocean makes no sense to me,” a senior Pentagon official recently quipped. Officials say the military will have to make firm choices in the next year or two. That’s partly because they’re creating more units than they can reliably staff. The Army expects to end last year with fewer than 10,000 new recruits, a shortfall of 15% and the second year in a row that there has been a shortfall in enlistments. Much of this is due to a tight U.S. labor market, but it also reflects a decline in enthusiasm for military service, particularly combat arms.
The problem has been exacerbated by the decline in the size of the Individual Ready Reserve (reservists not assigned to a specific unit) from 450,000 in 1994 to 76,000 in 2018. Ukraine shows that violent wars tend to decimate regular armies and that there is a need to inject military experience into the population. A shortage of combat soldiers today will result in a shortage of reservists tomorrow. Mr. Klombu and Mr. Nagl are among those who support the concept of “partial conscription,” which only 20 percent of Americans support. Today, as during the pivotal period of the mid-1970s, the military is grappling with serious questions about its size, shape, and purpose, which ultimately, as then, will affect its relationship with American society. It will have an impact.
© 2023, The Economist Newspaper. All rights reserved. Published under license by The Economist. Original content available at www.economist.com.
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