03 Mar 04. General Kevin Burns told a large audience during AUSA Florida that a huge number of lessons had been leant from the U.S. Army’s deployment in Afghanistan and Iraq over the pat two years. “WE are now an Army at War,” Burns told his audience, “This means we have to re-look at all our doctrine, training, modernization programs and combat techniques to remain at the forefront of our operations.” When a nation goes to war, things change with the operational side driving these changes, the greatest being the requirement for jointness of the three arms working together to achieve excellence. We must accelerate this process of jointness and change particularly if we are to achieve the operational effectiveness of Future Combat System in 290122.
“The new conflict is more tribal-based and information dominated. Our actual force of numbers has driven our adversaries into unconventional warfare techniques and to manipulate information on a very localized scale. We have now built a network of caves and villages at the National training Center that enables our forces to hit the ground running when they enter the new theaters of conflict, they are now familiar with these surrounding as part of their training. We have to insert the force into a white space without the need for proper airports and ports, thus our forces must be C-130-centerted enabling all vehicles specifications to be built on this model. The journey from Kuwait to Baghdad was equivalent to that from Normandy to the Rhine, hence the need for increased logistic excellence and speed of maneuver. To enable this we must modernize our existing force, not wait fort the new force. FCS and its sister programs have taken a lot of the budget from the existing force so we must use all the money available to update our existing forces to meet these new threats. Connectivity between forces is essential, some Marine forces found themselves 150kmn apart and the deployment of the new FBCB2 BFT enabled the existing line-of-sight systems such as EPLRS to be connected by satellite nodes giving a huge coverage from logistic location to the front line.
“To achieve this full force, we must have a Battalion dedicated to the full experimentation and testing of FCS by 2006 to enable deployment by 2012, with the first Battalion in place by 2010.