Friday News Roundup–October 16, 2020
By: Center For The Study Of The Presidency
Tags: Politics, National Security, News, Supreme Court, International Relations

The Army resets crawl-walk-run for GPC

Ethan Brown

The U.S. Army is finally adapting how it prepares its maneuver units for warfare under the Great Powers Competition paradigm. Simply, this means responding to the incessant demands of the previous two decades of conflict and refocusing on the quality of its troops. “Operational Tempo” is a term bandied about in defense policy and higher headquarters circles which, like the phrase “lethality”, is often uttered without proper context. Simply, the phrase fails to effectively express the depth of meaning and significance in casual conversation.

In the Global War on Terror era, operational tempo refers to the number of deployments a service member or unit faces under the expeditionary tempo bands (to use Air Force lingo). Many units are not deployable, per se, such as administrative, finance, or certain cyber squadrons. Those units receive deployment taskings from their higher headquarters, who receive the manpower requests from combatant commands abroad, who’s mission requirements require those specific operational specialties. Sometimes these are one-off or a case-by-case basis, while often it is a recurring need, but not enough to substantiate placing a unit in expeditionary status. Other units, like special operations, infantry, flying squadrons, and your standard carrier strike groups, deploy on a repetitive, ops-calendar cycle.

This type of rotational cycle means repetition, repetition, and some more repetition. Beginning after my third deployment, I knew which of the transient bunks at each stopping point were most comfortable for a two-hour layover power nap, and those bunks remained reliably intransient for my next three trips. My phone also auto-connected to every AAFES/USO wifi on the way to Afghanistan or Iraq or elsewhere (I know, I should have used better device/network discipline, but I’m wiser now). My teammates and I had an unspoken contract on where in the C-17 we would always sit, to facilitate where hammocks were hung or air mattresses would be unrolled. The transit phase for those who lived in this high ops-tempo simply became a muscle-memory.

Even though the U.S. is supposed to be disengaging from endless wars, Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy made it clear this week that operational tempo remains “extremely high, even as the number of forces are coming down”. As such, Secy. McCarthy, in tandem with Army Chief of Staff General James McConville and Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Grintson, addressed some glaring issues within the Army regarding that operational tempo, and how they plan to address it.

Ordinarily, such an event serves as little more than a buzzword primer at a pontification opportunity (see: lethality). But to hear the idea’s being pushed downward from top Army brass offers a modicum of optimism for a beleaguered and tired service-branch. Secy. McCarthy quantified a review which has taken place over recent years, and summarized the key points for how the Army will better prepare its soldiers for future warfighting:

[Unit] commanders will have more flexibility to determine what training their soldiers need, a departure from big Army dictating so many individual soldier currency requirements

Focus training on the basics of individual, squad, platoon, and company-level training, as well as key-leader development

Reducing the requirement to conduct brigade and battalion live-fire exercises, and most significantly, reducing deployment durations and increasing dwell-time between these rotations

So let’s unpack these key points. The first point is not some new radical idea, where unit commanders (a position I heard over and over as ‘the most influential billet for an officer’, I’m inclined to agree) are given primacy over mission requirements. Ostensibly, former Air Force Chief of Staff General Goldfein pushed a similar agenda when he took over in 2017, eliminating hundreds of overarching requirements regulations, freeing up squadron commanders to drive their units to expeditionary proficiency, and it worked. These unit commander types are held responsible for mission success, so when big mil dictums occupy the bulk of training schedules, the quality of product or service will invariably wither. An Armor company commander should understand implicitly the skills that his maneuver, motor company, and support functions will require in order to be mission effective, which often has little or nothing to do with ancillary training provided by TRADOC in the form of mind numbing blackboard/canvas/Army portal computer based training. Which takes us to the next point…

While I was aligned with the Ranger Regiment, a premium was placed on individual marksmanship with fire and maneuver skills by my Joint force partners. There were times when my supported platoon would be missing multiple team members who owed their annual cyber-awareness training, MEDPROS, or other HHQ-driven mandates. Give a company commander the authority to secure block-training dates which syncs those requirements across the entire unit, then your soldiers have much more calendar space available to conduct actual warfighting skills. Focusing on those basics through the lower-levels of maneuver units is a sure-fire means of achieving proficiency in combat skills.

To alleviate any confusion on organization sizes, and how that plays into this analysis, let’s talk about the third point of reducing battalion and brigade exercises in favor of lower echelons conducting those live-fire training events. The Army has spent the last couple of decades relying heavily on the Combined Training Centers (the National Training Center [NTC] at Ft. Irwin, CA and the Joint Readiness Training Center [JRTC] at Ft. Polk, LA) to prepare its forces for all manner of overseas taskings. These consist of wargames for maneuver commands which offer an Afghanistan/MENA/EUROCOM environment, with tactical problem sets against grey forces (other US Army personnel as OPFOR) that must be solved through effective command and control and, you guessed it, fire and maneuver.

The typical U.S. Army Battalion is a command which varies from 300–1000 soldiers in various combat and support functions, as well as its core C2/command staff element. A Battalion presides over three to six maneuver companies- your basic maneuver element of 60–150 personnel. The Brigade will consist of two to five of these Battalions with additional support functions forming the standard U.S. Army Brigade Combat Team. Moving either a Brigade or Battalion to the NTC or JRTC sites is a monstrous endeavor, both in cost and effort. Despite the superlative efforts of the training staff at those CTC commands, it is incredibly difficult to effectively simulate a brigade-level fire and maneuver exercise. Due to the COVID pandemic, the Army has already absorbed the reality of losing those CTC training events this year, and plans to scrub several NTC/JRTC rotations in the coming fiscal year for Brigades and Battalions alike. It is much easier to move a company across the country, and provide those lower-level command teams and warfighters point training. Under Secy. McCarthys guidance, the command and control training normally ‘achieved’ at an NTC rotation will now be conducted via virtual and augmented simulations, despite limitations inherent with this method. Yes friends, even the Army is coming to terms with Zoom fatigue.

This paradigm shift doesn’t suggest a lack of strategic value in training those higher echelons on fire and maneuver, but the point is that those units don’t precisely perform that function. The training for war hasn’t changed dramatically, rather, who is being trained in a new strategic environment indeed has.

Here is the root of the matter- war has changed. It isn’t presently changing or evolving, the GWOT era rotational vacations to cozy, perma-FOBs in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria are already a thing of the past. Most of us will not miss those old familiar transient bunk beds. Russia and China are all the rage, yet the defense industry seemingly has a nostalgic addiction to chasing fragmented extremist networks in the name of national security. Agnostic of that comfort in familiarity, the national security paradigm has evolved, and the Army is overdue for some of these changes in training, deployment cycles, exercises, and force support architecture.

Contentious opinions suggest that the next conflict involving Russia or China will require Brigade-sized maneuvers and massing conventional troops in the anti-counter terror model (read here for the Special Operations role in that fight). Certainly, we cannot eschew the necessity of higher commands on these potential battlefields, but no good strategist pursues a land war in Asia. The use of the Battalions and up will not change, but if the company-level units lack proficiency in basic warfighting skills, the senior command and control functions cannot hope to compete effectively in a ‘new’ conflict paradigm.

On that note, and perhaps not coincidentally, just a few weeks ago the Army quietly pulled the plug on its Asymmetric Warfare Group- a warfighter-driven pseudo think tank within the Army modernization command, intended to rapidly apply lessons learned from the ‘new’, unconventional battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq (circa ‘03-onward), and quickly provide that data to big Army decision makers in order to adapt task organization and tactics. The ASG’s conjoined twin, the Rapid Equipping Force, died alongside the AWG. The REF was intended to- you guessed it- rapidly equip soldiers with newly adopted, commercially sourced equipment suited to the climes of counter-terror. It wasn’t a huge secret to those of us in the Joint Force family, who brushed the AWG and REF on occasion, that the Army has been trying to bury these two enterprises for some time. Rather than helping evolve the warfighter TTPs, the AWG and REF were closer to a gatekeeper on battlefield tendencies, while the knowledge of battlefield realities remained organic to the maneuver units returning from theater…”well, on my trip to Kandahar last year”…

It’s not a new Army, but the United States and the defense department certainly face a new type of battlefield- one that behooves proficiency at the lowest levels, and demands simple competency at higher echelons. Improving troop quality, focusing on basic skills, reducing the time spent on repeating deployments, and enabling commanders to prepare their soldiers for conflict are undoubtedly a positive shift in Army planning.