Then-Lt. Gen. James Mattis, commander of U.S. Marine Corps Forces, Central Command, speaks to Marines with Marine Wing Support Group 27, in Al Asad, Iraq, in May 2006. [Photo: Cpl. Zachary Dyer]
Ever since publication of the U.S. National Defense Strategy by then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis’s Defense Department in early 2018 made the term “lethality” a foundational principle, there has been an open-ended discussion as to what the term actually means.
In his recent memoir, co-written with Bing West, Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead (Random House, 2019), Mattis offered his own definition of lethality. Sort of.
At the beginning of Chapter 17 (pages 235-236), he wrote (emphasis added):
LETHALITY AS THE METRIC
History presents many examples of militaries that forgot that their purpose was to fight and win. So long as we live in an imperfect world, one containing enemies of democracy, we will need a military strictly committed to combat-effectiveness. Our liberal democracy must be protected by a bodyguard of lethal warriors, organized, trained, and equipped to dominate in battle. …
The need for lethality must be the measuring stick against which we evaluate the efficacy of our military. By aligning the entire military enterprise—recruiting, training, educating, equipping, and promoting—to the goal of compounding lethality, we best deter adversaries, or if conflict occurs, win at lowest cost to our troops’ lives. …
While not defining lethality explicitly, it would appear that Mattis equates it with “combat-effectiveness,” which he also does not explicitly define, but seems to mean as the ability “to dominate in battle.” It would seem that Mattis understands lethality not as the destructive quality of a weapon or weapon system, but as the performance of troops in combat.
More than once he also refers to lethality as a metric, which suggests that it can be quantified and measured, perhaps in terms of organization, training, and equipment. It is likely Mattis would object to that interpretation, however, given his hostility to Effects Based Operations (EBO), as implemented by U.S. Joint Forces Command, before he banned the concept from joint doctrine in 2008, as he related on pages 179-181 in Call Sign Chaos.
The U.S. Army has 10 divisions, one spare division headquarters (7th U.S. Division), three corps headquarters (I, III, XVIII Airborne Corps) and one (or seven) army headquarters (First Army). The U.S. Marine Corps has three divisions.
The norm is that a U.S. Division has three maneuver brigades, one artillery brigade and one combat aviation brigade. A number of our divisions have two maneuver brigades with a third one often being a national guard brigade. Let us count up the number of active duty maneuver brigades were currently have:
So, the total count is 42 maneuver brigades (not counting the national guard brigades). The +3 Infantry Brigades are national guard brigades. For the sake of simplicity, are infantry-like units (airborne, marines expeditionary brigades, marine regiments, ranger regiments, etc.) are counted as infantry brigades. The two cavalry regiments are counted as Stryker brigades. The three Marine air wings are counted at aviation brigades. The Marine artillery regiments are counted as artillery brigades. Not counted are the five special forces groups, which each consist of 4 battalions and tend to be 3,000-4,000 strong.
An armored brigade in 2014 has 4,743 troops (90 Abrams tanks, 90 Bradley IFVs and 112 M-113s), A Stryker brigade in 2014 has 4,500 troops and 300+ Strykers. An Infantry brigade in 2014 has 4,413 troops. The 75th Ranger Regiment has 3,623 personnel authorized. A Marine Regiment has around 4,900 personnel. The Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) is around 2,200 personnel and there are one to three MEUs in each of the three Marine Expeditionary Brigades.
The +1 is the regular army 3rd infantry brigade, which is listed above.
So the National Guard and Marine reserve has 29 maneuver brigades (counting the three assigned to regular army units and not counting the regular army unit assigned to the 36th Infantry Division) and 8 combat aviation brigades and Marine Corps air wings. There are also two national guard special forces groups.
This list originated in response to a Twitter query discussing the history of post-World War II U.S. Army doctrine development. It is hardly exhaustive but it does include titles and resources that may not be widely known.
Jensen focused on the institutional processes shaping the Army’s continual post-war World War II efforts to reform its doctrine in response to changes in the character of modern warfare.
In an excellent overview of the evolution of operational thought through the 20th century, Naveh devoted two chapters to the Army’s transition to Active Defense in the 70s and then to AirLand Battle in the 80s.
There are several interesting monographs that are available online:
A really useful place to browse is the Army Command and General Staff College’s online Skelton Combined Arms Research Library (CARL). It is loaded with old manuals and student papers and theses addressing a wide variety of topics related to the nuts and bolts of doctrine.
Another good place to browse is the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC), which is a huge digital library of government sponsored research. I recommend searches on publications by the Army’s defunct operations research organizations: Operations Research Office (ORO), Research Analysis Corporation (RAC), and the Special Operations Research Office (SORO). The Combat Operations Research Group (CORG), particularly a series of studies of Army force structure from squads to theater HQ’s by Virgil Ney. There is much more to find in DTIC.
Pre-war U.S. Army warfighting doctrine led to fielding the M10, M18 and M36 tank destroyers to counter enemy tanks. Their relatively ineffective performance against German panzers in Europe during World War II has been seen as the result of flawed thinking about tank warfare. [Wikimedia]
Two recently published articles on current U.S. Army doctrine development and the future of warfare deserve to be widely read:
“An Army Caught in the Middle Between Luddites, Luminaries, and the Occasional Looney,”
Contrary to what it says, the Army has always been a concepts-based, rather than a doctrine-based, institution. Concepts about future war generate the requirements for capabilities to realize them… Unfortunately, the Army’s doctrinal solutions evolve in war only after the failure of its concepts in its first battles, which the Army has historically lost since the Revolutionary War.
The reason the Army fails in its first battles is because its concepts are initially — until tested in combat — a statement of how the Army “wants to fight” and rarely an analytical assessment of how it “will have to fight.”
Starting with the Army’s failure to develop its own version of “blitzkrieg” after World War I, Johnson identified conservative organizational politics, misreading technological advances, and a stubborn refusal to account for the capabilities of potential adversaries as common causes for the inferior battlefield weapons and warfighting methods that contributed to its impressive string of lost “first battles.”
Conversely, Johnson credited the Army’s novel 1980s AirLand Battle doctrine as the product of an honest assessment of potential enemy capabilities and the development of effective weapon systems that were “based on known, proven technologies that minimized the risk of major program failures.”
“The principal lesson in all of this” he concluded, “is that the U.S. military should have a clear problem that it is trying to solve to enable it to innovate, and is should realize that innovation is generally not invention.” There are “also important lessons from the U.S. Army’s renaissance in the 1970s, which also resulted in close cooperation between the Army and the Air Force to solve the shared problem of the defense of Western Europe against Soviet aggression that neither could solve independently.”
“The US Army is Wrong on Future War”
The other article, provocatively titled “The US Army is Wrong on Future War,” was published by West Point’s Modern War Institute. It was co-authored by Nathan Jennings, Amos Fox, and Adam Taliaferro, all graduates of the School of Advanced Military Studies, veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, and currently serving U.S. Army officers.
They argue that
the US Army is mistakenly structuring for offensive clashes of mass and scale reminiscent of 1944 while competitors like Russia and China have adapted to twenty-first-century reality. This new paradigm—which favors fait accompli acquisitions, projection from sovereign sanctuary, and indirect proxy wars—combines incremental military actions with weaponized political, informational, and economic agendas under the protection of nuclear-fires complexes to advance territorial influence. The Army’s failure to conceptualize these features of the future battlefield is a dangerous mistake…
Instead, they assert that the current strategic and operational realities dictate a far different approach:
Failure to recognize the ascendancy of nuclear-based defense—with the consequent potential for only limited maneuver, as in the seventeenth century—incurs risk for expeditionary forces. Even as it idealizes Patton’s Third Army with ambiguous “multi-domain” cyber and space enhancements, the US Army’s fixation with massive counter-offensives to defeat unrealistic Russian and Chinese conquests of Europe and Asia misaligns priorities. Instead of preparing for past wars, the Army should embrace forward positional and proxy engagement within integrated political, economic, and informational strategies to seize and exploit initiative.
The factors they cite that necessitate the adoption of positional warfare include nuclear primacy; sanctuary of sovereignty; integrated fires complexes; limited fait accompli; indirect proxy wars; and political/economic warfare.
“Given these realities,” Jennings, Fox, and Taliaferro assert, “the US Army must adapt and evolve to dominate great-power confrontation in the nuclear age. As such, they recommend that the U.S. (1) adopt “an approach more reminiscent of the US Army’s Active Defense doctrine of the 1970s than the vaunted AirLand Battle concept of the 1980s,” (2) “dramatically recalibrate its approach to proxy warfare; and (3) compel “joint, interagency and multinational coordination in order to deliberately align economic, informational, and political agendas in support of military objectives.”
Future U.S. Army Doctrine: How It Wants to Fight or How It Has to Fight?
Readers will find much with which to agree or disagree in each article, but they both provide viewpoints that should supply plenty of food for thought. Taken together they take on a different context. The analysis put forth by Jenninigs, Fox, and Taliaferro can be read as fulfilling Johnson’s injunction to base doctrine on a sober assessment of the strategic and operational challenges presented by existing enemy capabilities, instead of as an aspirational concept for how the Army would prefer to fight a future war. Whether or not Jennings, et al, have accurately forecasted the future can be debated, but their critique should raise questions as to whether the Army is repeating past doctrinal development errors identified by Johnson.
[Sgt. Meghan Berry, US Army/adapted by U.S. Army Modern War Institute]
The U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) released draft version 1.5 of its evolving Multi-Domain Operations (MDO) future operating concept last week. Entitled TRADOC Pamphlet 525-3-1, “The U.S. Army in Multi-Domain Operations 2028,” this iteration updates the initial Multi-Domain Battle (MDB) concept issued in October 2017.
According to U.S. Army Chief of Staff (and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff nominee) General Mark Milley, MDO Concept 1.5 is the first step in the doctrinal evolution. “It describes how U.S. Army forces, as part of the Joint Force, will militarily compete, penetrate, dis-integrate, and exploit our adversaries in the future.”
TRADOC Commander General Stuart Townsend summarized the draft concept thusly:
The U.S. Army in Multi-Domain Operations 2028 concept proposes a series of solutions to solve the problem of layered standoff. The central idea in solving this problem is the rapid and continuous integration of all domains of warfare to deter and prevail as we compete short of armed conflict. If deterrence fails, Army formations, operating as part of the Joint Force, penetrate and dis-integrate enemy anti-access and area denial systems;exploit the resulting freedom of maneuver to defeat enemy systems, formations and objectives and to achieve our own strategic objectives; and consolidate gains to force a return to competition on terms more favorable to the U.S., our allies and partners.
To achieve this, the Army must evolve our force, and our operations, around three core tenets. Calibrated force posture combines position and the ability to maneuver across strategic distances. Multi-domain formations possess the capacity, endurance and capability to access and employ capabilities across all domains to pose multiple and compounding dilemmas on the adversary. Convergence achieves the rapid and continuous integration of all domains across time, space and capabilities to overmatch the enemy. Underpinning these tenets are mission command and disciplined initiative at all warfighting echelons. (original emphasis)
For a look at the evolution of the Army and U.S. Marine Corps doctrinal thinking about multi-domain warfare since early 2017:
This list originated in response to a Twitter query discussing the history of post-World War II U.S. Army doctrine development. It is hardly exhaustive but it does include titles and resources that may not be widely known.
