Tag wide-area security

Should The Marines Take Responsibility For Counterinsurgency?

United States Marines in Nacaragua with the captured flag of Augusto César Sandino, 1932. [Wikipedia]

Sydney J. Freedberg, Jr recently reported in Breaking Defense that the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC), led by chairman Senator John McCain, has asked Defense Secretary James Mattis to report on progress toward preparing the U.S. armed services to carry out the recently published National Defense Strategy oriented toward potential Great Power conflict.

Among a series of questions that challenge existing service roles and missions, Freedberg reported that the SASC wants to know if responsibility for carrying out “low-intensity missions,” such as counterinsurgency, should be the primary responsibility of one service:

Make the Marines a counterinsurgency force? The Senate starts by asking whether the military “would benefit from having one Armed Force dedicated primarily to low-intensity missions, thereby enabling the other Armed Forces to focus more exclusively on advanced peer competitors.” It quickly becomes clear that “one Armed Force” means “the Marines.” The bill questions the Army’s new Security Force Assistance Brigades (SFABs) and suggest shifting that role to the Marines. It also questions the survivability of Navy-Marine flotillas in the face of long-range sensors and precision missiles — so-called Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) systems — and asked whether the Marines’ core mission, “amphibious forced entry operations,” should even “remain an enduring mission for the joint force” given the difficulties. It suggests replacing large-deck amphibious ships, which carry both Marine aircraft and landing forces, with small aircraft carriers that could carry “larger numbers of more diverse strike aircraft” (but not amphibious vehicles or landing craft). Separate provisions of the bill restrict spending on the current Amphibious Assault Vehicle (Sec. 221) and the future Amphibious Combat Vehicle (Sec. 128) until the Pentagon addresses the viability of amphibious landings.

This proposed change would drastically shift the U.S. Marine Corps’ existing role and missions, something that will inevitably generate political and institutional resistance. Deemphasizing the ability to execute amphibious forced entry operations would be both a difficult strategic choice and an unpalatable political decision to fundamentally alter the Marine Corps’ institutional identity. Amphibious warfare has defined the Marines since the 1920s. It would, however, be a concession to the reality that technological change is driving the evolving character of warfare.

Perhaps This Is Not A Crazy Idea After All

The Marine Corps also has a long history with so-called “small wars”: contingency operations and counterinsurgencies. Tasking the Marines as the proponents for low-intensity conflict would help alleviate one of the basic conundrums facing U.S. land power: the U.S. Army’s inability to optimize its force structure due to the strategic need to be prepared to wage both low-intensity conflict and conventional combined arms warfare against peer or near peer adversaries. The capabilities needed for waging each type of conflict are diverging, and continuing to field a general purpose force is running an increasing risk of creating an Army dangerously ill-suited for either. Giving the Marine Corps responsibility for low-intensity conflict would permit the Army to optimize most of its force structure for combined arms warfare, which poses the most significant threat to American national security (even if it less likely than potential future low-intensity conflicts).

Making the Marines the lead for low-intensity conflict would also play to another bulwark of its institutional identity, as the world’s premier light infantry force (“Every Marine is a rifleman”). Even as light infantry becomes increasingly vulnerable on modern battlefields dominated by the lethality of long-range precision firepower, its importance for providing mass in irregular warfare remains undiminished. Technology has yet to solve the need for large numbers of “boots on the ground” in counterinsurgency.

The crucial role of manpower in counterinsurgency makes it somewhat short-sighted to follow through with the SASC’s suggestions to eliminate the Army’s new Security Force Assistance Brigades (SFABs) and to reorient Special Operations Forces (SOF) toward support for high-intensity conflict. As recent, so-called “hybrid warfare” conflicts in Lebanon and the Ukraine have demonstrated, future battlefields will likely involve a mix of combined arms and low-intensity warfare. It would be risky to assume that Marine Corps’ light infantry, as capable as they are, could tackle all of these challenges alone.

Giving the Marines responsibility for low-intensity conflict would not likely require a drastic change in force structure. Marines could continue to emphasize sea mobility and littoral warfare in circumstances other than forced entry. Giving up the existing large-deck amphibious landing ships would be a tough concession, admittedly, one that would likely reduce the Marines’ effectiveness in responding to contingencies.

It is not likely that a change as big as this will be possible without a protracted political and institutional fight. But fresh thinking and drastic changes in the U.S.’s approach to warfare are going to be necessary to effectively address both near and long-term strategic challenges.

TDI Friday Read: Links You May Have Missed, 23 March 2018

To follow on Chris’s recent post about U.S. Army modernization:

On the subject of future combat:

  • The U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has issued a new report emphasizing the need for developing countermeasures against multiple small unmanned aerial aircraft systems (sUASs) — organized in coordinated groups, swarms, and collaborative groups — which could be used much sooner than the U.S. Army anticipates.  [There is a summary here.]
  • National Defense University’s Frank Hoffman has a very good piece in the current edition of Parameters, “Will War’s Nature Change in the Seventh Military Revolution?,” that explores the potential implications of the combinations of robotics, artificial intelligence, and deep learning systems on the character and nature of war.
  • Major Hassan Kamara has an article in the current edition of Military Review contemplating changes in light infantry, “Rethinking the U.S. Army Infantry Rifle Squad”

On the topic of how the Army is addressing its current and future challenges with irregular warfare and wide area security:

Combat Readiness And The U.S. Army’s “Identity Crisis”

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.

The U.S. Army’s Stryker Conundrum

Soldiers, of the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, tactically move a Stryker over the Mojave Desert during Decisive Action Rotation 15-10 at the National Training Center on Fort Irwin, Calif., Sept. 24, 2015. The Stryker and other ground combat vehicles are undergoing a number of upgrades, according to officials. (Photo Credit: Sgt. William Howard)

As part of an initiative to modernize the U.S. Army in the late 1990s, then-Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki articulated a need for combat units that were more mobile and rapidly deployable than the existing heavy armor brigades. This was the genesis of the Army’s medium-weight Stryker combat vehicle and the Stryker Brigade Combat Teams (SBCTs).

Since the Stryker’s introduction in 2002, SBCTs have participated successfully in U.S. expeditionary operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, validating for many the usefulness of Shinseki’s original medium-weight armor concept. However, changes in the strategic landscape and advances in technology and operational doctrine by potential adversaries are calling the medium armor concept back into question.

Medium armor faces the same conundrum that currently confronts the U.S. Army in general: should it optimize to conduct wide area security operations (which is the most likely type of future conflict) or combined arms maneuver (the most dangerous potential future conflict), or should it continue to hedge against strategic uncertainty by fielding a balanced, general purpose force which does a tolerable job of both, as it does now?

The Problem

In the current edition of Military Review, U.S. Army Captain Matthew D. Allgeyer presents an interesting critique of the Army’s existing medium-weight armor concept. He asserts that it is “is suffering from a lack of direction and focus…” Several improvements for the Stryker have been proposed based on perceptions of evolving Russian military capabilities, namely “a modern heavy-force threat supported by aviation assets.” The problem, according to Allgeyer, is that

The SBCT community wants all the positive aspects of a light force: lower cost, a small tooth-to-tail ratio, greater operational-level speed, etc. But, it also wants the ability to confront a heavy-armored force on its own terms without having to adopt the cost, support, and deployment time required by an armored force. Since these two ideas are mutuality exclusive, we have been forced to adopt a piecemeal response to shortcomings identified during training and training center rotations.

Even if the currently proposed improvements are adopted however, Allgeyer argues that updated Strykers would only provide the U.S. with a medium weight armor capability analogous to the 1960’s era Soviet motor-rifle regiment, a doctrinal step backward.

Allgeyer identifies the SBCT’s biggest weaknesses as a lack of firepower capable of successfully engaging enemy heavy armor and the absence of an organic air defense capability. Neither of these is a problem in wide area security missions such as peacekeeping or counterinsurgency, where deployability and mobility are priority considerations. However, both shortcomings are critical disadvantages in combined arms maneuver scenarios, particularly against Russian or Russian-equipped opposing forces.

Potential Solutions

These observations are not new. A 2001 TDI study of the historical effectiveness of lighter-weight armor pointed out its vulnerability to heavy armored forces, but also its utility in stability and contingency operations. The Russians long ago addressed these issues with their Bronetransporter (BTR)-equipped motor-rifle regiments by adding organic tank battalions to them, incorporating air defense platoons in each battalion, and upgunning the BTRs with 30mm cannons and anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs).

The U.S. Army has similar solutions available. It has already sought to add 30mm cannons and TOW-2 ATGMs to the Styker. The Mobile Protected Firepower program that will provide a company of light-weight armored vehicles with high-caliber cannons to each infantry brigade combat team could easily be expanded to add a company or battalion of such vehicles to the SBCT. No proposals exist for improving air defense capabilities, but this too could be addressed.

Allgeyer agrees with the need for these improvements, but he is dissatisfied with the Army “simply reinventing on its own the wheel Russia made a long time ago.”  His proposed “solution is a radical restructuring of thought around the Stryker concept.” He advocates ditching the term “Stryker” in favor of the more generic “medium armor” to encourage doctrinal thinking about the concept instead of the platform. Medium armor advocates should accept the need for a combined arms solution to engaging adversary heavy forces and incorporate more joint training into their mission-essential task lists. The Army should also do a better job of analyzing foreign medium armor platforms and doctrine to see what may be appropriate for U.S. adoption.

Allgeyer’s proposals are certainly worthy, but they may not add up to the radical restructuring he seeks. Even if adopted, they are not likely to change the fundamental characteristics of medium armor that make it more suitable to the wide area security mission than to combined arms maneuver. Optimizing it for one mission will invariably make it less useful for the other. Whether or not this is a wise choice is also the same question the Army must ponder with regard to its overall strategic mission.

More On The U.S. Army’s ‘Identity Crisis’

The new edition of the U.S. Army War College’s quarterly journal Parameters contains additional commentary on the question of whether the Army should be optimizing to wage combined arms maneuver warfare or wide-area security/Security Force Assistance.

Conrad Crane, the chief of historical services at the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center offers some comments and criticism of an article by Gates Brown, “The Army’s Identity Crisis” in the Winter 2016–17 issue of Parameters. Brown then responds to Crane’s comments.

What Would An Army Optimized For Multi-Domain Battle Look Like?

Raytheon’s new Long-Range Precision Fires missile is deployed from a mobile launcher in this artist’s rendering. The new missile will allow the Army to fire two munitions from a single weapons pod, making it cost-effective and doubling the existing capacity. [Raytheon]

As the U.S. Army develops its new Multi-Domain Battle (MDB) concept and seeks to modernize and upgrade its forces, some have called for optimizing its force structure for waging combined arms maneuver combat. What would such an Army force structure look like?

The active component of the Army currently consists of three corps, 10 divisions, 16 armored/Stryker brigade combat teams (BCTs), 15 light infantry BCTs, 12 combat aviation brigades, four fires brigades, three battlefield surveillance brigades, one engineer brigade, one Ranger brigade, five Special Forces groups, and a special operations aviation regiment.

U.S. Army Major Nathan A. Jennings and Lt. Col. Douglas Macgregor (ret.) have each proposed alternative force structure concepts designed to maximize the Army’s effectiveness for combined arms combat.

Jennings’s Realignment Model

Jennings’s concept flows directly from the precepts that MDB is being currently developed upon.

Designed to maximize diverse elements of joint, interorganizational and multinational power to create temporary windows of advantage against complex enemy systems, the Army’s incorporation of [MDB] should be accompanied by optimization of its order of battle to excel against integrated fire and maneuver networks.

To that end, he calls for organizing U.S. Army units into three types of divisions: penetration, exploitation and stabilization.

Empowering joint dynamism begins with creating highly mobile and survivable divisions designed to penetrate complex defenses that increasingly challenge aerial access. These “recon-strike” elements would combine armored and Stryker BCTs; special operations forces; engineers; and multifaceted air defense, indirect, joint, cyber, electromagnetic and informational fires to dislocate and disintegrate adversary defenses across theater depth. As argued by Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, then-director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center, they could “fight their way through long-range weapons fire and gain physical contact with hard-to-find opponents” while striking “from unexpected directions with multiple forms of firepower.”

Exploitation divisions would employ more balanced capabilities to destroy enemy concentrations, clear contested zones and seize key terrain. Comprising a variety of light, airborne, motorized and mechanized infantry BCTs with modest armor and engineer support—all empowered by destructive kinetic, electronic and virtual fires—these commands would attack through windows of opportunity created by deep strikes to overmatch paralyzed defenders. While penetrating formations would rapidly bridge air and land component efforts, their more versatile and flexible exploitation counterparts would allow joint commands to decisively shatter adversary warfighting capabilities through intensive fire and maneuver.

The third type of division would be made up of elements trained to consolidate gains in order to set the conditions for a sustainable, stable environment, as required by Army doctrine. The command’s multifaceted brigades could include tailored civil affairs, informational, combat advisory, military police, light infantry, aviation and special operations elements in partnership with joint, interdepartmental, non-governmental and coalition personnel. These stabilization divisions would be equipped to independently follow penetration and exploitation forces to secure expanding frontages, manage population and resource disruptions, negotiate political turbulence, and support the re-establishment of legitimate security forces and governance.

Jennings did not specify how these divisions would be organized, how many of each type he would propose, or the mix of non-divisional elements. They are essentially a reorganization of current branch and unit types.

Proposing separate penetration and exploitation forces hearkens back to the earliest concepts of tank warfare in Germany and the Soviet Union, which envisioned infantry divisions creating breaches in enemy defenses, through which armored divisions would be sent to attack rear areas and maneuver at the operational level. Though in Jennings’s construction, the role of infantry and armor would be reversed.

Jennings’s envisioned force also preserves the capability for conducting wide area security operations in the stabilization divisions. However, since the stabilization divisions would likely constitute only a fraction of the overall force, this would be a net reduction in capability, as all of the current general purpose force units are (theoretically) capable of conducting wide area security. Jennings’s penetration and exploitation divisions would presumably possess more limited capability for this mission.

Macgregor’s Transformation Model

While Jenning’s proposed force structure can be seen as evolutionary, Macgregor’s is much more radically innovative. His transformation concept focuses almost exclusively on optimizing U.S. ground forces to wage combined arms maneuver warfare. Macgregor’s ideas stemmed from his experiences in the 1991 Gulf War and he has developed and expanded on them continuously since then. Although predating MDB, Macgregor’s concepts clearly influenced the thinking behind it and are easily compatible with it.

In a 2016 briefing for Senator Tom Cotton, Macgregor proposed the following structure for U.S. Army combat forces.

The heart of Macgregor’s proposal are modular, independent, all arms/all effects, brigade-sized combat groups that emphasize four primary capabilities: maneuver (mobile armored firepower for positional advantage), strike (stand-off attack systems), ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) and sustainment (logistics). These modular groups would be the Army’s contribution to cross-domain, corps-level joint task forces, which is how he—and increasingly the rest of the U.S. armed forces—sees the U.S. military waging combat in the future.

Macgregor’s envisioned force structure adds his Reconnaissance Strike Group (RSG) to armored, mechanized infantry, and airborne/air-assault light infantry units. These would total 26 brigade-sized groups, down from the current 31 BCTs, with a ratio of 16 RSG/armored groups to 10 mechanized/airborne infantry.

Macgregor would also downsize the number of manned rotary wing combat aviation elements from 12 to four mostly be replacing them with drones integrated into the independent strike groups and into the strike battalions in the maneuver groups.

He would add other new unit types as well, including theater missile defense groups, C41I groups, and chem-bio warfare groups.

Macgregor’s proposed force structure would also constitute a net savings in overall manpower, mainly by cutting out division-level headquarters and pushing sustainment elements down to the individual groups.

Evolution or Revolution?

While both propose significant changes from the current organization, Jennings’s model is more conservative than Macgregor’s. Jennings would keep the division and BCT as the primary operational units, while Macgregor would cut and replace them altogether. Jennings clearly was influenced by Macgregor’s “strike-reconnaissance” concept in his proposal for penetration divisions. His description of them is very close to the way Macgregor defines his RSGs.

The biggest difference is that Jennings’s force would still retain some capacity to conduct wide area security operations, whether it be in conventional or irregular warfare circumstances. Macgregor has been vocal about his belief that the U.S. should avoid large-scale counterinsurgency or stabilization commitments as a matter of policy. He has also called into question the survivability of light infantry on future combined arms battlefields.

Even should the U.S. commit itself to optimizing its force structure for MDB, it is unclear at this point whether it would look like what Jennings or Macgregor propose. Like most military organizations, the U.S. Army is not known for its willingness to adopt radical change. The future Army force structure is likely to resemble its current form for some time, unless the harsh teachings of future combat experience dictate otherwise.

The U.S. Army’s Identity Crisis: Optimizing For Future Warfare

[GlobalSecurity.org]

As the U.S. national security establishment grapples with the implications of the changing character of warfare in the early 21st century, one of more difficult questions to be addressed will be how to properly structure its land combat forces. After nearly two decades of irregular warfare, advocates argue that U.S land forces are in need of recapitalization and modernization. Their major weapons systems are aging and the most recent initiative to replace them was cancelled in 2009. While some upgrades have been funded on the margins, U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps leaders have also committed to developing a new warfighting doctrine—Multi-Domain Battle (MDB)—to meet the potential challenges of 21st century warfare.

Because conflicts arising from Great Power rivalries and emerging regional challenges pose the greatest potential strategic danger to the U.S., some have called for optimizing the Army to execute combined arms maneuver warfare against peer or near-peer armies. Recent experience suggests however that the most likely future conflicts the U.S. will engage in will involve ongoing post-Cold War ethnic and nationalist-driven political violence, leading others to support a balanced force structure also capable of conducting wide-area security, or stabilization operations and counterinsurgency.

The Army attempted in 2011 to define wide-area security and combined arms maneuver as the two core competencies in its basic doctrine that would allow it to best prepare for these contingencies. By 2016, Army doctrine abandoned specific competencies in favor of the ability to execute “unified land operations,” broadly defined as “simultaneous offensive, defensive, and stability or defense support of civil authorities tasks to seize, retain, and exploit the initiative and consolidate gains to prevent conflict, shape the operational environment, and win our Nation’s wars as part of unified action.”

The failure to prioritize strategic missions or adequately fund modernization leaves the Army in the position of having to be ready to face all possible contingencies. Gates Brown claims this is inflicting an identity crisis on the Army that jeopardizes its combat effectiveness.

[B]y training forces for all types of wars it ends up lessening combat effectiveness across the entire spectrum. Instead of preparing inadequately for every war, the Army needs to focus on a specific skill set and hone it to a sharp edge… [A] well-defined Army can scramble to remedy known deficiencies in combat operations; however, consciously choosing not to set a deliberate course will not serve the Army well.

The Army’s Identity Crisis

To this point, the Army has relied on a balanced mix of land combat forces divided between armor (heavy tracked and medium wheeled) and light infantry formations. Although optimized for neither combined arms maneuver nor wide-area security, these general purpose forces have heretofore demonstrated the capability to execute both missions tolerably well. The Active Army currently fields 10 divisions comprising 31 Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs) almost evenly split between armor/mechanized and infantry (16 armored/Stryker and 15 infantry).

Major Nathan Jennings contends that the Army force structure should be specifically reorganized for combined arms maneuver and MDB.

Designed to maximize diverse elements of joint, interorganizational and multinational power to create temporary windows of advantage against complex enemy systems, the Army’s incorporation of the idea should be accompanied by optimization of its order of battle to excel against integrated fire and maneuver networks. To that end, it should functionalize its tactical forces to fight as penetration, exploitation and stabilization divisions with corresponding expertise in enabling the vast panoply of American and allied coercive abilities.

This forcewide realignment would enable “flexible and resilient ground formations [to] project combat power from land into other domains to enable joint force freedom of action,” as required by Gen. David G. Perkins, commander of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command. While tailored brigades and battalions would feature combined arms with the ability to maneuver in a dispersed manner, optimized divisions would allow functional expertise in rear, close, deep and non-linear contests while maintaining operational tempo throughout rapid deep attacks, decisive assaults, and consolidation of gains. The new order would also bridge tactical and operational divides to allow greater cross-domain integration across the full range of military operations.

On the other hand, Lieutenant Colonel Jason Nicholson advocates heeding the lessons of the last decade and a half of U.S. experience with irregular warfare and fielding an upgraded, yet balanced, force structure. He does not offer a prescription for a proper force mix, but sees the recent Army decision to stand up six Security Force Assistance Brigades (SFABs) as an encouraging development.

The last sixteen years of ongoing military operations have been conducted at the expense of future requirements of all types. The modernization problems presented by “small wars” challenge the Army as surely as those related to high-intensity conflicts. While SFABs are a step in the right direction, greater investment is required to maximize the lessons learned after sixteen years of counterinsurgency. Training for specific missions like combat advising and security force assistance should be institutionalized for tactical units beyond the designated SFABs. The need for additional capabilities for operating in austere environments will also drive equipment requirements such as lighter power generation and enhanced tactical mobility. Greater expeditionary logistics, armor, and fire support assets will also be critical in future operations. Hybrid warfare, from the Russian campaign in Ukraine to the French campaign in Mali, will continue to change the nature of “small wars.” Megacities, climate change, and other similar challenges will require the same attention to detail by the Army as near-peer conflict in order to ensure future operational success.

No Simple Answers To Strategic Insolvency

Decisions regarding the Army’s force structure will be in the hands of senior political and military decision-makers and will require hard choices and accepting risks. Proponents of optimizing for combined arms maneuver concede that future U.S. commitments to counterinsurgency or large-scale stabilization operations would likely have to be curtailed. Conversely, a balanced force structure is a gamble that either conventional war is unlikely to occur or that general purpose forces are still effective enough to prevail in an emergency.

Hal Brands and Eric Edelman argue that the U.S. currently faces a crisis of “strategic insolvency” due to the misalignment of military capabilities with geopolitical ends in foreign policy, caused by the growth in strategic and geopolitical challenges combined with a “disinvestment” in defense resources. They contend that Great Powers have traditionally restored strategic solvency in three ways:

  • “First, they can decrease commitments thereby restoring equilibrium with diminished resources.”
  • “Second, they can live with greater risk by gambling that their enemies will not test vulnerable commitments or by employing riskier approaches—such as nuclear escalation—to sustain commitments on the cheap.”
  • “Third, they can expand capabilities, thereby restoring strategic solvency.”

Brands and Edelman contend that most commentators favor decreasing foreign policy commitments. Thus far, the U.S. has seemingly adopted the second option–living with greater risk—by default, simply by avoiding choosing to reduce foreign policy commitments or to boost defense spending.

The administration of President Donald Trump is discovering, however, that simply choosing one course over another can be politically problematic. On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump called for expanding U.S. military capability, including increasing U.S. Army end strength to 540,000, rebuilding the U.S. Navy to at least 350 vessels, adding 100 fighter and attack aircraft to boost the U.S. Air Force to 1,200 aircraft, and boosting the U.S. Marine Corps from 24 battalions to 36. He signed an executive order after assuming office mandating this expansion, stating that his administration will pursue an as-yet undefined policy of “peace through strength.”

Estimates for the cost of these additional capabilities range from $55-$95 billion in additional annual defense spending. Trump called for an additional $54 billion spending on defense in his FY 2018 budget proposal. Secretary of Defense James Mattis told members of Congress that while the additional spending will help remedy short-term readiness challenges, it is not enough to finance the armed services plans for expansion and modernization. As Congress wrangles over a funding bill, many remain skeptical of increased government spending and it is unclear whether even Trump’s proposed increase will be approved.

Trump also said during the campaign that as president, he would end U.S. efforts at nation-building, focusing instead on “foreign policy realism” dedicated to destroying extremist organizations in conjunction with temporary coalitions of willing allies regardless of ideological or strategic differences. However, Trump has expressed ambivalent positions on intervention in Syria. While he has stated that he would not deploy large numbers of U.S. troops there, he also suggested that the U.S. could establish “safe zones” His cabinet has reportedly debated plans to deploy up to tens of thousands of ground troops in Syria in order to clear the Islamic State out, protect local populations, and encourage the return of refugees.

It does not appear as if the Army’s identity crisis will be resolved any time soon. If the past is any indication, the U.S. will continue to “muddle through” on its foreign policy, despite the risks.