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28 Sep 22. US nears releasing unclassified defence strategy. US President Joe Biden’s administration plans to publicly release an unclassified version of its new National Defense Strategy (NDS) “shortly”, a White House official said on 27 September.
The US Department of Defense (DoD) sent a classified version of the 2022 NDS to Congress in March. The DoD’s two-page “fact sheet” on the NDS describes China as “our most consequential strategic competitor and the pacing challenge for the department”.
Two other defence-related documents that the administration is drafting are unlikely to usher in significant policy changes, according to Cara Abercrombie, deputy assistant to the president and coordinator for defence policy and arms control at the White House’s National Security Council.
The Conventional Arms Transfer Policy will mainly emphasise existing arms transfer practices, such as speeding weapon system deliveries to Ukraine, Abercrombie told the Common Defense (ComDef) conference in Rosslyn, Virginia. The policy will “help clarify” the administration’s priorities but will “not effectively change” the way it conducts business.
(Source: Janes)
13 Oct 22. National Security Strategy Aims to Address New Challenges. The world is at an inflection point, and the new National Security Strategy unveiled yesterday is designed to address this new world, Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s national security advisor, said.
Sullivan, who spoke today at Georgetown University, compared the situation to the immediate post-World War II era when then-President Harry S. Truman promulgated the strategy that ultimately toppled the Soviet Union.
As Truman did before him, this new strategy is Biden’s moment to define the challenges facing the United States and detail the steps needed to steer the U. S., its allies and partners through such perilous times.
“Today, our world is once again at an inflection point,” he said. “We are in the early years a decisive decade. The terms of our competition with the People’s Republic of China will be set. The window of opportunity to deal with shared challenges like climate change will narrow drastically, even as the intensity of those challenges grows. So, we need to grasp our moment, just as Truman did his.”
The strategy is used to set budgets, encourage cooperation, advance diplomacy, steer investment, and much more. DOD’s National Defense Strategy and National Military Strategy take their cues from the National Security Strategy.
The strategy “touches on our plans and partners in every region of the world,” Sullivan said. “It details the president’s vision of a free, open, prosperous and secure international order. And it offers a road map for seizing this decisive decade to advance America’s vital interests, position America and our allies to outpace our competitors, and build broad coalitions to tackle shared challenges.”
The strategy focuses on two main strategic challenges. The first is the geopolitical competition the United States faces with China and Russia.
Sullivan said the United States “is better positioned than any other nation in the world to seize this moment — to help set the rules, shore up the norms, and advance the values that will define the world we want to live in.”
Since taking office, Biden, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, and Secretary of States Antony Blinken have repeatedly stated that China is the United States’ “pacing challenge.” They have constantly spoken about the need to reach out to allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific.
“Assertiveness at home and abroad is advancing an illiberal vision across economic, political, security and technological realms in competition with the West,” Sullivan said. “It is the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and the growing capacity to do it.”
Russia is another challenge — one that comes with its own set of risks. “Russia’s war against Ukraine builds on years of growing, regional aggression,” the national security advisor said. “Russian President Vladimir Putin is making reckless nuclear threats, willfully violating the U.N. charter, relentlessly targeting civilians, acting with a brutality that threatens to drag us all back into the dark days of Soviet expansionism.”
The second strategic challenge deals with the sheer scale and speed of transnational challenges that do not respect borders or adhere to ideologies, Sullivan said.
This challenge is exacerbated by climate change, which is already destroying lives and livelihoods in every part of the world, he said. Climate change is causing increased food and energy insecurity. Other challenges — including COVID-19 — further roil the waters.
“Our strategy proceeds from the premise that the two strategic challenges — geopolitical competition and shared transnational threats — are intertwined,” Sullivan said. “We cannot build the broad coalitions we need to out-compete our rivals, if we sideline the issues that most directly impact the lives of bns of people.”
Problems must be addressed, and — contrary to what some Americans may believe — they must be addressed globally, Sullivan said. “We are building a strategy fit for purpose for both competition we cannot ignore and global cooperation without which we cannot succeed.”
Sullivan said the timelines align. “This is a decisive decade for shaping the terms of competition, especially with the PRC ,” he said. “This is a decisive decade for getting ahead of the great global challenges — from climate to disease to emerging technology.”
The key to U.S. success in the coming years is investing ambitiously and rapidly in the sources of our national strength, Sullivan said.
The second step is to mobilize the broadest coalition of nations to enhance U.S. influence.
A third step is to work with other nations to shape the rules of the road for the 21st century economy.
“Our approach encompasses all elements of our national power — diplomacy, development cooperation, industrial strategy, economic statecraft, intelligence and defense,” Sullivan said.
On the defense element, the strategy stresses that the United States must equip the military and intelligence enterprises for strategic competition, while maintaining the capability to disrupt the terrorist threat to the U.S. homeland, he said.
“The war in Ukraine … also highlights the need for a vibrant Defense Industrial Base — one that is capable of rapid mobilization and tooled for innovation and creative adaptation,” he said. “All of these steps we take at home are force-multiplied by another core source of our American strength — our alliances.”
Sullivan said the United States has re-engaged with allies and partners around the world. The Defeat ISIS coalition and the Ukraine Defense Assistance Group are examples of this portion of the strategy. “If there’s anything that’s a true hallmark of Joe Biden’s approach to the world, it is an investment in America’s allies,” he said. “A few years ago, NATO was working overtime to justify its value proposition. Today, it is at its apex of its purpose and power.”
Spotlight: NATOIn the Indo-Pacific, the United States reaffirmed iron-clad commitments to our treaty allies. “We’ve elevated a new partnership of democracies — the Quad — to help drive our vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific,” he said. “One of the things that we are doing as we strengthen our alliances, is to drive more strategic alliance between the Atlantic and the Pacific.”
The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue — commonly called the Quad — includes four nations in the Indo-Pacific region: Australia, India, Japan, and the United States.
Within DOD, the National Defense Strategy draws from the White House document and at its heart is integrated deterrence. Secretary Austin has discussed this idea of the seamless combination of capabilities to convince potential adversaries that the costs of their hostile activities outweigh their benefits.
Integrated deterrence calls for unprecedented cooperation across all domains of warfare — land, air, maritime, cyber and space. It also calls for cooperation with non-military domains — including economic, technological and information, according to the National Security Strategy.
“… Understanding that our competitors combine expansive ambitions with growing capabilities to threaten U.S. interests in key regions and in the homeland,” the strategy states. (Source: US DoD)
13 Oct 22. For Northcom, Autonomous Systems May Be Key to Homeland Defense. U.S. Northern Command is responsible for defending the U.S. homeland against threats from adversaries—and there are many such threats, said Air Force Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, who serves as commander of both Northcom and the North American Aerospace Defense Command.
During U.S. operations in the Middle East, China and Russia watched how the U.S. operated and developed their own systems that put the U.S. at risk.
“While we were focused on violent extremists for last 20-plus years, they were developing capabilities to hold our homeland at risk,” said VanHerck, who spoke Tuesday at the Association of the United States Army’s annual meeting and exposition in Washington, D.C.
The general said that while both nations have developed systems to put the U.S. at risk, but he characterized Russia as the primary threat to the U.S. homeland right now.
“About three to four years ago, Russia fielded the first hypersonic glide vehicle sitting on top of an ICBM that’s nuclear capable,” he said. “It’s been out there for, you know, four years operational, with the United States of America and North America in its sights.”
Those missiles, he said, make the U.S. northern warning system “look like a picket fence,” the general said.
Russian submarines, he added, particularly of the Severodvinsk class are set to become a threat, as well.
“They just moved subs, their first into the Pacific,” he said. “Another is out in the Mediterranean right now and another that’s out on its way into the Atlantic. That will be a persistent, proximate threat capable of carrying a significant number of land-attack cruise missiles that can threaten our homeland.”
China isn’t far behind Russia’s ability to directly affect the U.S. homeland — about seven to 10 years, VanHerck said. But both nations are active in the Arctic, which is an easy way to attack the U.S., and he also characterized both China and Russia as peer competitors in both space and the cyber domain.
VanHerck said defending the homeland against existing threats, growing threats and future threats will mean his own command needs to do things differently. One of those changes is the speed at which sensor-to-decision maker data moves between stakeholder.
“Data and information are strategic assets that we need to take advantage of now,” he said. “Google, Amazon, others have figured out how to share data and information. What we need to be focusing on is making our data available, not in stovepipes, and being able to receive that data.”
Assignment of forces to Northcom can also be quicker and more efficient, VanHerck said.
“I think there’s things that we can do as a department, and I’m encouraged where we’re going. The Global Force Management implementation guidance will give me some additional help with having forces that are available to me in a timely manner,” he said. “What I told the secretary is one of my biggest challenges with executing my plans and plans is access to organized, trained and equipped forces in a timely manner to operate through my AOR .”
Right now, he said, more than half of the Northcom area of responsibility is in the Arctic, though forces are not organized, trained or equipped to operate there.
When Northcom requests forces through the “request for forces” process, VanHerck said, consideration is also given to the needs of other combatant commands, such as U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, U.S. European Command] and U.S. Strategic Command, for instance. There may be other needs that end up overriding what Northcom needs.
“That adds risk in the time of crisis,” he said. “I think we need forces that look vastly different than what we have today, that reduce the demand for tankers, that reduce the demand for fighters. And what I’m talking about is autonomous and unmanned systems.”
VanHerck said he envisioned a future where unmanned systems might be parked “off the coast” near some of the threats to the homeland, and that those same unmanned systems would have domain-awareness capabilities and might also be armed with both kinetic and non-kinetic weaponry.
“Think of denial and deception or high-power microwave or laser capabilities,” he said. “Now, I’m not asking for all the fighters that are competing directly with or . And I don’t need all the tankers for that, if we position those in key locations around the country. The same thing can be said for autonomous air platforms that give me domain awareness, that can loiter for 18, 24 hours and beyond, that provide domain awareness, but they also provide potentially that kinetic effect or non-kinetic effect.”
Right now, VanHerck said his vision appears to be science fiction. But he said he thinks it would become possible in less than a decade.
“Those are things that we need to be thinking about.” (Source: US DoD)
12 Oct 22. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the United States quickly undertook a massive effort to supply Kyiv with weapons and ammunition.
Now, nearly eight months into the conflict, the Pentagon has committed more than $16.8bn in aid to Ukraine. It’s allocated 38 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems and ammunition, more than 1,400 Stinger anti-aircraft missile systems and more than 8,500 Javelin anti-armor systems to the country, in some cases pulling them from U.S. Army supplies.
The service is working to restock, turning to industry to ramp up or even restart production lines. But the huge movement of weapons has created a challenge for Army budget planners, tasked with determining the service’s needs in fiscal 2024.
As they work to nail down funding plans, there’s no way of knowing how much longer Ukraine will need military aid, how much Congress will decide to send, and whether the supplies will come from Army stockpiles or hot off a defense contractor’s production line.
Concurrently, the Army is debating whether to restore its own stockpiles with more ammunition than it previously kept in reserve, and whether it will replace older supplies with upgraded ones.
Ukraine creates “a big question mark,” Mackenzie Eaglen, a defense analyst at the American Enterprise Institute think tank, told Defense News.
And that’s not the only matter in flux. In response to the war, the service has increased its troop presence in Europe. That deployment effort is taking place amid economic inflation and low Army recruiting numbers, injecting more uncertainty into its plans.
FY24 is a critical year for the Army’s modernization priorities, with roughly two dozen programs set to make it to the field, from the first battery of hypersonic weapons to the Precision Strike Missile to the Mid-Range Capability missile, designed to take out ships.
Service leaders say they won’t let the added pressures of a land war in Europe, recruiting woes and a changing economic environment derail them from ensuring the Army has the budget it needs to meet its milestones.
“One of the things that has enabled the Army to be as successful as we have been to date in making progress on our modernization portfolio has been a fairly consistent set of priorities,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told Defense News in a recent interview at the Pentagon.
“We have pretty consistently funded those modernization portfolios,” she added. “That has been a lot of what has allowed us to maintain momentum, and we are, I think, going to continue to be able to do that in FY24.”
Even so, Caral Spangler, the Army’s comptroller, told Defense News the upheaval means the modernization portfolio may see some adjustments, such as delayed schedules and reduced production rates.
Indeed, this year’s budget is one of the most challenging to pin down, according to Eaglen, as the Army “is managing meaningfully higher uncertainty this year.”
Looking to modernization
The Army has already submitted its initial FY24 funding proposal to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, kicking off the budget process. That procedure involves OSD, which is now reviewing the request, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, and Congress.
In fiscal 2023, the Army requested $178bn, accounting for 2% inflation. The budget included $13.7bn for research and development, down from $14.5bn in FY22, but the Army said it was enough to cover modernization needs.
Doug Bush, the Army’s acquisition chief, said the FY24 budget reflects the service’s improved understanding of what its new major weapon systems are going to cost.
Particularly in the five-year spending plan that accompanies the budget, he said, the Army has “programs that were started over the last four or five years that are now getting far enough along to where you have to build in the production and procurement money.”
That increased fidelity has led to key discussions, he said.
“You’re making trade-offs at that point and having really good across-the-Army conversations about: ‘We have a capability. How much of it do we need, and how much of it can we afford without trading off things we don’t want to trade off?’ ” he explained. “It’s the exact conversation you expect to have and want to have.”
A U.S. Army M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System fires as part of a Swedish Army-led exercise in September 2022. (Anders Åberg/Swedish Defence Ministry via U.S. Defense Department)
One of those programs is the Mobile Protected Firepower effort. The Army in July 2022 awarded General Dynamics Land Systems a contract to deliver 26 initial vehicles, but the deal allows the service to buy 70 more over the course of low-rate initial production for a total of $1.14 bn.
The Army’s decisions are likely to get more complicated as it gets closer to fielding these newer programs, Eaglen said.
“The Army’s not going to go 34-0 on modernization. We’re going to start to see that process beginning in the ’24 budget request,” she noted. “There will be more winners than losers … and it’s OK because it’s actually time to whittle down and get serious about what’s scalable and available.”
Wormuth said the question of trade-offs is likely to get harder, not easier, as time goes on. Beyond 2030, when all of the priority programs should be fielded, the budgeting challenge will be “fielding those new platforms in sufficient numbers to really scale them up across the Army.”
“That, obviously, is where you start getting into really big numbers in the budget,” Wormuth explained. “We have plenty of substantial bills, [but] the biggest bills are still ahead of us.”
Ukraine’s impact
Most of the cost of supplying weapons and munitions to Ukraine thus far was covered through supplemental funding from Congress, but it’s unclear what that means for the Army’s budget.
“Congress has been very good at providing what we were calling a replenishment fund so that we could buy back and restock” munitions, Spangler said. “In addition to that, they have also supported our efforts to increase production rates.”
But looking ahead, Bush said, “the unknown is future things we send — and replacing those.”
The service is still gathering information from industry on how much it can accelerate production, the acquisition boss explained. But in the meantime, the Army has found creative ways to replenish stocks, such as harvesting parts from old Stinger missiles to build 1,000 new Stingers, he noted.
One complexity is that the service doesn’t just want to replenish its older supplies; it would like to upgrade them.
Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville told Defense News last month the Army doesn’t want to replace “old stuff with new-old stuff.”
He said the service would like to see, for example, that Vietnam War-era M113 troop carriers given to Ukraine are replenished in the U.S. Army’s inventory with new Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicles. And as the service sends munitions to Ukraine for use in HIMARS launchers, some of those weapons could be replaced by Precision Strike Missiles, which are expected to begin fielding in FY23, or an extended-range version of the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System.
The big question in FY24 is “just how much [the Army] is going to be investing in missiles and ammunition that they have cut in the past years,” Stacie Pettyjohn, a defense analyst at the Center for a New American Security think tank, told Defense News.
“Are they going to signal to [the] defense industry that they want them to expand the plants? Are they going to keep buying GMLRS at the rate of 10,000 a year or 30,000 a year? That’s a big difference,” she said.
Recruitment crisis
In FY23, the Army adjusted its budget to account for substantial recruitment issues. Spangler said the new budget will once again lower end strength, meaning the total number of troops.
“A year ago, we were talking about an end strength of 485,000. And then when we submitted the budget, we realized that we were starting to experience headwinds, and so we dropped to 476,000,” Spangler said. “Then to 473,000 in ’23.”
One might assume lower numbers could result in surplus funds to direct elsewhere in the budget, but that isn’t necessarily the case, the Army comptroller added. Instead, she explained, the Army has had to turn that money over to recruitment efforts, including higher bonuses, to try to entice potential soldiers.
Lt. Gen. Paul Chamberlain, the director of the Army’s budget, said during the same interview that the service also used some of that money to pay for additional troop mobilization costs stemming from Ukraine.
Personnel has always been the largest single item in the Army’s budget; not knowing exactly how many will be in the force next year creates budget uncertainty.
Spangler and Chamberlain agreed it’s unclear how much it will cost to recruit and retain. The service has, for example, increased some bonuses, and additional costs may emerge after a recruiting task force generates new initiatives, they said.
The Army’s budgeteers are tracking recruiting progress “minute by minute,” Spangler added.
In an Oct. 3 interview with Army Times, McConville said he isn’t worried “yet” about the service’s ability to fulfill its commitments in FY23 and beyond, but did admit “we’re certainly concerned.” The general once advocated for a much larger force; that was before the recruiting crisis combined with relative budget stagnation to dash those hopes.
Buying power
Spangler said the Army used the same prices for its FY24 budget as it did for FY23 because of the deadline for its budget draft.
“The actual official inflation numbers that will be used when we send the president’s budget for ’24 over to [Capitol Hill] are not determined yet,” she told Defense News.
There will be more winners than losers … and it’s OK because it’s actually time to whittle down and get serious about what’s scalable and available.
— Mackenzie Eaglen, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute
Before the end of the year, she said, the Office of Management and Budget will determine the inflation adjustment — potentially requiring further tweaks to the Army’s budget.
Bush said the Army is using a tool called the economic price adjustment clause on new contracts to help account for inflation and set conditions with vendors on managing contracts if costs increase. For contracts already in place, the Army is open to traditional renegotiations, but it hasn’t come across a situation requiring that approach, he said.
More companies are preferring two-year renewal deals over the customary five-year deals that the Army uses to lower costs and provide budgetary stability. “They are saying: ‘We want shorter contracts because our sub-suppliers, usually the second tier and below, are understandably not wanting to sign up for a five-year thing when they are not sure about inflation projections,’” Bush said.
He also said it is taking longer to negotiate contracts.
The Army, for example, is entering a prototype competition for the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle program, through which contractors will begin to build vehicles in FY24.
The service intends to put an economic price adjustment clause into the future contracts to build OMFV prototypes, according to Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean, the Army’s program executive officer for ground combat systems.
He acknowledged that having to spend more on individual systems could take a toll on the program.
“Every little nibble that bites away at our buying power does result ultimately in us buying fewer systems and taking longer to deliver,” Dean said. (Source: Defense News)
09 Oct 22. Task force seeks lighter Javelin missiles, robot dogs for infantry. A task force focused on soldier lethality is adding new initiatives to its portfolio, including a lighter Javelin missile, identifying how artificial intelligence can help squads, and looking into robot dogs as infantry battle buddies. The Close Combat Lethality Task Force, established in 2018 under then-Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, pushed for the Next Generation Squad Weapon, a 6.8mm intermediate-caliber replacement for the M4 for close combat troops, which was selected this year and begins fielding to troops in 2023.
It also lobbied for additional funding and prioritization for the Integrated Visual Augmentation System, a $22 bn program for a mixed-reality goggle aimed to put fighter pilot situational awareness tools in the view of squad-level soldiers.
On the human side, the task force supported efforts to revitalize infantry and close-combat training, increase unit cohesion by keeping infantry troops in the field longer, and reduce training tasks not related to combat.
But the task force has mostly remained in the shadows and sought a home since Mattis left office in 2019.
In a September briefing at the Maneuver Warfighter Conference at Fort Benning, Georgia, task force Director Army Col. Shannon Nielsen said the group pulls a variety of ideas and programs into view for senior leadership. “A lot of what we do is really champion all of the great ideas coming out of the field and out of the services,” Nielsen told the audience.
Under former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, the task force in 2020 moved from a Defense Department-level reporting authority to the Department of the Army. While that keeps it close to most ground combat troops and saw it physically move from Washington, D.C., to Fort Benning, the entity may not be far from the flagpole for long. That is because the most recent budget proposal directed the Pentagon to move the task force back to a position in which it directly reports to the defense secretary.
“We’ve gotten smaller and leaner since we arrived in Fort Benning,” Ed Agee, a principal program analyst with the task force, told C4ISRNET, an Army Times sister publication.
To be sure, the Army has cross-functional teams dedicated to several focus areas, including soldier lethality. But Nielsen said work to fill lethality gaps and maintain close-combat advantages is an enduring mission. In that context, the task force maintains five major areas of focus: manpower policy; training; human performance; warfighter equipment and weapons systems; and science and technology as well as research and development efforts.
Those are fairly broad, but Nielsen shared a handful of current initiatives and some long-term efforts the task force is shepherding:
- 3D audio for dismounted operators, which provides realistic audio, especially in simulated training scenarios.
- A Javelin lightweight command launch unit. The current Javelin system weighs about 52 pounds. The current controller weighs 15 pounds and can strike targets at 1.5 miles. The lightweight version is one-third smaller, half the weight and increases the battery life by 50%, according to Javelin Joint Venture, and can engage targets at up to 2.5 miles.
- The V60 quadrupedal unmanned ground vehicle, an all-terrain, legged robot made by Ghost Robotics that would give users off-road options with these uncrewed platforms.
- Detailed information for two other current initiatives — a hyper-enabled stealth operator kit and an infantry battalion mortar system — was unavailable.
- In the longer term, the task force is working on a home-station counter-drone training policy after learning that much of the current rules governing such training constrain troops trying to practice those skills.
- The task force is also looking for ground organic precision strike systems, ways to optimize the human weapons system, advanced recharging capabilities and artificial intelligence for small unit maneuver. C4ISRNET reported on some AI developments with the task force in August.
“We are transforming the joint force by integrating next-generation technologies and war-fighting concepts,” Nielsen said in a statement. “[This] enhances our ability to compete globally, deter adversaries, and win on all-domain battlefields at the small-unit level.” (Source: Defense News Early Bird/Defense News)
10 Oct 22. US Army on track to field 24 systems in FY23 in bid for a modern force. The U.S. Army is set to deliver hypersonic weapons, missiles capable of reaching 500 kilometers and a cannon that will reach double its current range as part of a group of two dozen systems it plans to field during the next year. The 24 key systems slated for fielding in fiscal 2023 are part of a total group of 35 the Army wants to get to troops by 2030, when it then would declare the service a fully modernized force.
Leading the charge for the Army is Austin, Texas-based Army Futures Command.
“Progress generally is going very well,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told Defense News in a recent interview at the Pentagon. “Given that we have 24 systems in one year that we’re either trying to start fielding or we’re trying to get prototypes in the hands of soldiers, we may hit some bumps in the road along the way. I think that is to be expected.”
The rapid schedule has required the Army to move more quickly through the development process, which Gen. James McConville, Army chief of staff, acknowledged to Defense News is a risk.
But the service is continuously getting prototypes in the hands of soldiers along the way, which the Army calls “touch points,” in an effort to allow for quick adaptations and honest assessments of progress.
“What is really important is getting to the Alpha model,” McConville said. “If you get the capability, get it in the hands of soldiers, then we’ll incrementally improve it.”
Army officials said the lessons learned from the war in Ukraine thus far don’t dictate changes to its modernization plans.
“We’ve got it pretty right,” McConville said. The war is showing, for example, that the Army’s No. 1 priority, Long-Range Precision Fires, and capabilities within that portfolio like hypersonic weapons with ranges of 1,700 kilometers, a Precision Strike Missile capable of firing out to 500 kilometers and a ship-killing mid-range capable missile, would all be needed against near-peer adversaries like Russia and China.
Coming soon
The Long-Range Precision Fires equipment is expected to hit several key milestones in FY23. Hypersonic missiles will be fielded to the first unit at the very end of the fiscal year after two major flight tests using the Army’s ground-based launch capability.
The Army also plans to deliver the very first increment of its Precision Strike Missile, which can reach 500 kilometers in range. It will later be upgraded with a ship-killing capability and increased range and lethality.
The Mid-Range Capability missile, meant to pursue moving maritime targets, will also be fielded this fiscal year, just two years after the Army said it would seek the capability. In November 2020, the Army chose Lockheed Martin to integrate the Navy’s SM-6 and Tomahawk missiles with a launcher and battery operations center to create an MRC prototype.
The guided-missile cruiser Philippine Sea launches a Tomahawk
The Army is also building Extended Range Cannon Artillery systems that will increase cannon reach to 70 kilometers. The service is building 18 prototypes; the first battalion consisting of those prototypes will be delivered in FY23.
The Next-Generation Combat Vehicle portfolio has already managed to achieve first contact with soldiers. The Armored Multipurpose Vehicle, set to replace M113s, completed an operational test earlier this year and is slated for a full-rate production decision this fiscal year.
The Army this summer chose General Dynamics Land Systems to build its Mobile Protected Firepower system, while a unit at Fort Hood, Texas, earlier this year helped evaluate light robotic combat vehicle prototypes.
While manned Future Vertical Lift capabilities will come later, the service plans to field AeroVironment’s Arcturus Jump 20 unmanned aircraft system, meant to fill an urgent need for a Future Tactical UAS to replace the Shadow UAS, this fiscal year. The Army will also hold a competitive evaluation of systems for a second increment.
A directed-energy Short-Range Air Defense capability is due to be fielded to an Army unit potentially during the first quarter of FY23.
The Army’s Integrated Battle Command System, intended to link sensors and shooters on the battlefield, is in the midst of an initial operational test and evaluation ahead of a full-rate production decision this fiscal year.
The Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor will serve as the radar in the Army’s future Integrated Air and Missile Defense system. Congress has mandated that the Army field an LTAMDS battalion of four sensors by December 2023, but the Army wants to do so by the end of September 2023.
Program officials have had to adjust the LTAMDS schedule to address system integration challenges and supply chain issues caused by COVID-19, the program officer told Defense News earlier this year.
The Army is also building a robust Synthetic Training Environment and plans to deliver to soldiers in FY23 the Reconfigurable Virtual Collective Trainer, IVAS Squad Immersive Virtual Trainer and One World Terrain, training management tools and training simulation software.
New leadership
On Oct. 4, acting Army Futures Command chief Lt. Gen. James Richardson handed over the reins to Gen. James Rainey.
Wormuth said Rainey’s top priority will be making “sure that we are able to deliver, of course working with the [acquisition] team, the 24 systems in ‘23.”
After 40 years in the service, Richardson marveled over the technology revolution that has occurred over the last four years at Army Futures Command and told an audience in Austin at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library that “it’s not a stretch to say that the outcome of the future war could turn on something Army Futures Command does or fails to do.”
“If you’re a part of AFC, military or civilian, the future is now,” he added. (Source: Defense News Early Bird/Defense News)
10 Oct 22. An end strength crisis is here for the Army. There’s no sugarcoating it: all three components of the Army missed their required end strength for fiscal 2022, leaving boots unfilled after missing recruiting goals by around 15,000 trainees.
Senior leaders across the Army have gradually acknowledged the grim reality: the service is tens of thousands of troops short from where it was funded to be in fiscal 2022 — and the impact could soon be felt across the force.
Army Times spoke with senior officials and experts in the weeks preceding the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference to discuss the potential impact of the numbers shortfall and what’s being done to mitigate it.
In a phone interview with Army Times, Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville explained that the exact number of troops the Army ended September with isn’t yet finalized, but the service landed close to an estimate it provided to a panel of lawmakers in July.
“If we round…it’s 465,600,” the general said, “right around where we said [to Congress] we [were] going to land,” which was 466,000. The Army typically releases final end strength numbers in mid-to-late October to allow human resources officials time to track separations, medical retirements and other fluctuations in personnel.
The service also told lawmakers that the Army’s goal of having 473,000 troops at the end of fiscal 2023 likely isn’t doable either — the service is probably going to shrink to between 445,000 and 452,000 soldiers over the next twelve months.
The service’s top personnel officer, Lt. Gen. Douglas Stitt, told Army Times in an interview that human resources officials and Army senior leaders are aware that the “Army of 2023 looks a lot different than the Army of 2022 in terms of overall numbers,” but he declined to elaborate on his remarks.
Army Recruiting Command was unable to make a representative available for interview, with an official blaming a pending change of command for the incoming leader, Maj. Gen. Johnny Davis.
Davis will inherit one of the most challenging recruiting outlooks since the draft ended in 1973. How exactly the Army plans to deal with these unparalleled problems remains unstated. Officials have shied away from directly describing how they’ll mitigate the shortfall and fix accessions beyond a handful of headline initiatives that don’t yet have the capacity to meaningfully reduce the recruiting deficit.
Burning the candle from both ends
Meanwhile, the service is left trying to fulfill its increasing responsibilities with fewer troops.
Expert Katherine Kuzminski, who leads the Military, Veterans & Society team at the Center for a New American Security think tank, is worried the strain on the force could look “like [Obama-era budget] sequestration, where we’re asking a smaller number of people to still carry out the constant number of missions.”
But this time, the driver is a lack of willing recruits rather than a lack of funds.
“End strength is supposed to be tied to requirements,” explained Kuzminski. “And so the question becomes: if the end strength is reduced, are the requirements reduced?”
Unfortunately, the Army’s mission requirements appear to be increasing in spite of the empty boots.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February sparked the rapid deployment of three extra brigade combat teams, a division headquarters and a corps headquarters to central and eastern Europe.
While that increased presence started to draw down in June when a tank brigade was sent home, the Defense Department announced that one of the additional brigades, when replaced, would transition to a new permanent rotational brigade requirement based in Romania. The additional “crisis-surge” troops — the division and corps headquarters, plus the second brigade — remain in theater, and the Pentagon has not indicated when the Army won’t need to fill that requirement.
McConville said the Army doesn’t think the shortfall will affect those and other operations “yet.”
“But we’re certainly concerned,” he added.
Kuzminski explained that the service has a few options for mitigating the personnel shortfall internally while maintaining its operational commitments.
Army Human Resources Command issues guidance annually on how full certain types of units should be, and when times are lean, deploying units and high-readiness units like the 82nd Airborne Division typically have priority for keeping their ranks full. Army officials reached for this story declined to reveal how the fiscal 2023 manning guidance will be affected by the end strength shortfall.
The Army’s top general, Gen. James McConville, suggested in July that the service could restructure its brigade combat teams to reduce personnel whose roles may be redundant. It’s not clear whether any such move has occurred.
Force structure expert and retired Marine Col. Mark Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told Army Times then that even modest restucturing of BCTs is unlikely to “amount to much,” unless the service takes the dramatic step of eliminating the third maneuver battalion that each brigade received as part of a 2013 restructuring.
Kuzminski said the Army can also fill in some gaps by increasing the number of individual reserve component troops on temporary active duty tours or leaning more heavily on mobilizations of entire reserve component units for such missions.
DoD officials are reportedly weighing making the Ukraine support mission a named operation, too, which could grease the bureaucratic wheels for the Pentagon to mobilize National Guard and Army Reserve units to fill troop requirements in Eastern Europe.
That could provide some help for the active duty force. But the Guard and Reserve have already been stretched thin over the past few years — or perhaps the past few decades — first by repeated deployments for the Global War on Terror and more recently by a massive surge in domestic response missions in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Reserve and Guard not exempt, either
Kuzminski noted that the Reserve and Guard are facing recruiting and end strength crises of their own that could diminish their ability to help the Regular Army fill its requirements. She is scheduled to speak at an AUSA panel on the Reserve’s capabilities.
The Army Reserve has not met its end-of-year strength goals since fiscal 2016, according to a review of budget documents by Army Times. They will miss again in fiscal 2022.
In the fiscal 2020 budget request produced in March 2019, Reserve officials blamed a “challenging recruiting and retention environment” for the component’s end strength shortcomings.
Foreshadowing the recruiting crisis that today afflicts their active duty peers, the March 2019 Reserve budget documents blamed a “number of external factors…to include a strong economy, low unemployment, only one in four 17-24 year olds eligible to serve, only one in eight with the propensity to enlist, and decreasing familiarity with military service.”
The situation hasn’t improved since.
National Guard Bureau officials recently admitted that they won’t meet their end strength goals either, blaming the COVID-19 vaccine mandate among other factors. Despite record-high utilization during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Guard managed to continue meeting its end strength goals amid the storm thanks to strong retention.
Now that’s changing.
“On the Army Guard, we’re about 6,000 short…of our authorized end strength of 336,000,” said National Guard Bureau Chief Gen. Daniel Hokanson at a Sept. 20 press conference.
Adding to the Guard’s manning troubles, approximately 9,000 troops have refused the COVID-19 vaccine in the Guard, too, and face discharge.
Hokanson suggested that the recruiting issues could be mitigated by increasing benefits for Guard personnel — such as by establishing no-cost healthcare for Guard troops even when in their part-time status.
Another option could involve bringing back successful, though controversial, recruiting referral bonus programs. Those programs helped buoy end strength numbers during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the programs were also the subject of a sweeping investigation into charges of mismanagement and fraud, some of which later inquiries found to be exaggerated.
Addressing the issue
Beyond the usual tools like increased bonuses and enticing contract options, experts highlighted other programs the Army has implemented in an effort to buoy its recruiting numbers.
The service’s Future Soldier Preparatory Course at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, is offering a pre-basic training course to prepare prospective soldiers who don’t meet body fat standards or whose test scores are too low. Army Times covered the prep course for its September print edition cover story.
Trainees must meet Army standards within 90 days after arrival to the course, or else they are sent home. Those who make the cut, are able to renegotiate their enlistment contracts and move on to basic combat training.
Kuzminski lauded the prep course as “the most innovative [initiative] of the services when it comes to addressing new recruits in that they’re not lowering standards…while also pursuing a way to get those who are interested [in enlisting] prepared to meet those standards.” (Source: Army Times)
10 Oct 22. Firepower & people: Army chief on keys to future war.
The Ukraine war proves the US Army is right to focus on high-tech long-range weapons and old-school high-intensity training, Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville tells Breaking Defense.
As Ukraine’s underdog army pushes back the Russian invaders, what lessons should the American military take to heart?
The US Army’s top officer doesn’t hesitate: “We’re seeing the impact of long-range precision fires,” Gen. James McConville said at once. “The HIMARS has been a game changer for the Ukrainians.”
“The battle has shifted,” said McConville, the Army Chief of Staff, in a late September interview with Breaking Defense.
The first phase of the fight, a desperate defense against onrushing Russian armor, put a premium on man-portable anti-tank missiles like the US Javelin and British NLAW. The defenders also needed shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, like the venerable Stinger, to take out Russian helicopters and ground-attack aircraft.
But as Ukraine stabilized the front and then went on the offensive, both sides shifted emphasis to artillery, seeking to disrupt enemy advances and soften up sectors for attack. Ukrainian forces urgently needed the ability to strike deeply and accurately at Russian supply depots, transport hubs, and other critical targets far behind the front lines. So the West began supplying long-range artillery systems, like the American HIMARS missile launcher.
“The Ukrainians initially had a lot of success with what I would call short-range weapons systems, like the Javelin, like the Stinger,” McConville said. But over time, “they found that having artillery – [like] the triple-7s [i.e. the M777 155 mm howitzer] — gave them much more capability. And now with HIMARS, [they have] the ability to engage across the depth of the battlefield.”
Long-Range, High-Tech, High Lethality
Such “Long-Range Precision Fires” – from GPS-guided howitzer shells to hypersonic missiles – have been the US Army’s No. 1 priority for research, development, and acquisition since 2017.
That’s when then-Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Mark Milley, now chairman of the Joint Chiefs, used the annual Association of the US Army conference as a platform to set the service on a bold new course, refocusing from grueling guerilla warfare in the Middle East to high-tech conflict with China and Russia. McConville, who was Milley’s deputy, succeeded him as chief in 2019 and is now shepherding several programs the two men started into production.
“Those capabilities will be coming into the force starting next year,” McConville said. “That will fundamentally change how we do business.”
In 2023, the Army will get its first combat-ready prototypes for three new Long-Range Precision Fires systems:
- the hypersonic Dark Eagle missile, whose classified range is estimated at over 1,700 miles;
- the Mid-Range Capability (MRC), aka Typhon, which repurposes Navy SM-6s and Tomahawks for strikes at ranges of about 1,000 miles; and
- the Precision Strike Missile (PrSM), an all-new weapon designed to fit in existing HIMARS launchers and hit targets over 300 miles away.
By comparison, the farthest-striking missile currently available to the Army is the HIMARS-launched ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System), with a maximum range of under 200 miles. And the US hasn’t actually given any ATACMS to Ukraine, just the 40-mile GMRLS rockets. That range is adequate for most targets in eastern Ukraine, but not for the vast distances of the western Pacific.
“We are developing systems that help us deal with the ranges and the speeds that are required in an environment that is much larger,” McConville said.
What’s more, the Army aims to upgrade these new weapons with sophisticated seekers that let them strike moving targets, including ships at sea. That makes them much more useful in the Pacific, historically a Navy-dominated theater, where the Army seeks a new role supporting the fleet with land-based anti-ship strikes.
“Long range precision fires gives you the ability to penetrate integrated air and missile defenses,” McConville said. “It gives you the ability to sink ships – which, again, can be very helpful if someone’s considering some type of amphibious operation.” (While McConville doesn’t offer examples, the most-discussed amphibious scenario is a Chinese attempt to land troops on Taiwan).
Of course, the US isn’t the only one developing such long-range precision-guided weapons. So is Russia – although it has resorted increasingly to indiscriminate strikes against civilians in Ukraine – and China. That puts a premium on missile defenses, McConville said, another of the Army’s six modernization priorities. But it also requires US forces to stay on the move and spread out, so they don’t provide big, static targets, like the Russian ammo dumps and air bases repeatedly ravaged by Ukrainian strikes.
Dispersion and mobility are tactics the Army must relearn after a generation in Afghanistan and Iraq, where US forces built up an extensive, static infrastructure of big bases, supply dumps, and well-appointed command posts.
“Commanders… will no longer be able to have the large command posts that they had in Afghanistan or Iraq… with stadium-type seats and a lot of big screens,” McConville said. “In the future, the battlefield will be so lethal, and there’ll be the ability to gather [targeting] information on where our command posts are, so we’re going to have to move them very, very quickly, and they’ll have to be dispersed and smaller.”
The new approach will require a change in mindset and doctrine – which leads to what McConville considers the most crucial weapons system: the human brain.
The Human Factor: Training & Doctrine
Western weapons have made a major difference in Ukraine, McConville told Breaking Defense. But weapons are nothing without soldiers to wield them. So, he said, what’s most important in this war – and every war – is the human factor: the Ukrainian soldiers’ will and skill.
Both have grown with eight years of combat experience and Western training since Russia’s initial, more limited invasion in 2014, when Ukraine ceded Crimea without a shot and then suffered heavy losses in the Donbas.
“This is not the Ukrainian army of 2014,” McConville emphasized. Today, he said, “the Ukrainian army is very competent and very committed. With the training that’s going on, that NATO is conducting for the Ukrainians, they pick up these [new] capabilities very quickly.”
Admittedly, much of Ukraine’s success is due to Russian incompetence. But McConville warns against understating either the Russian threat or the Ukrainian accomplishment in repelling it.
“We should not underestimate what the Ukrainians are doing,” he said. “They’ve done a lot of training, they have learned, they’re a learning organization, and they are performing very, very well on the battlefield.”
The US, likewise, has changed its training in recent years to emphasize high-intensity combat against a well-armed nation-state.
“If you go out to our national training centers, now, it’s large scale combat operations, where, over the last 20 years, we’d been focused on counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, irregular warfare,” McConville said. “If you have command posts, you have to move them often, or they’re going to be targeted…. Your command posts are going to be jammed, your computers are going to be taken away from you.”
That’s down to what the Army calls “long-range effects.” Those include not only Long-Range Precision Firepower, like HIMARS and hypersonics, but non-lethal tools like hacking and radio jamming to disable the command, control, and communications systems on which all modern militaries depend. The Army’s new Multi-Domain Task Forces are meant to combine firepower, electronic attack, and cyber warfare to cripple an enemy military’s digital nervous system — and potential enemies aim to do the same to US units.
That means commanders can’t count on live drone feeds from the battlespace or constant communications with frontline forces. It means junior officers must learn to fight in the dark, without detailed intelligence or instructions from higher headquarters.
“You will have to develop organizations that are trained, disciplined and fit,” McConvile said, “to the level that they can operate off of truly off mission command.”
That’s the doctrine whereby commanders tell subordinates what they must accomplish – “commander’s intent” – without micromanaging how they accomplish those missions. Planning, coordination, and orders still matter, but the emphasis is increasingly on adaptability, improvisation, and initiative.
“How we do command and control will change,” McConville said. “It’ll be much more focused on mission command. You’ll give orders that are more based on the commander’s intent, because you may not have the ability, in this very lethal and complex environment, to continue to give orders to your subordinate units. They may be dispersed, they may have to operate on intent, you may not be able to contact them.”
In such chaotic high-tech conflicts, drones, robots, and networks all play a useful role, McConville said, but such AI systems are also vulnerable to disruption and deception. Just as armies have long used camouflage to trick the human eye, he said, today they’re finding ways to “confuse the algorithm.” So while artificial intelligence can support human soldiers, McConville believes that it can’t replace them.
“You’re going to see our ground forces enabled by robotic combat vehicles and unmanned aerial systems,” he said. “We’re going to have autonomous vehicles, we’re going to have autonomous aircraft — but at the end of the day, I still think there’s a place for soldiers in the decision making loop, and you want them in a position where they can see the battlefield, because when you’re looking through cameras and drones, you can’t get the full picture.”
“At the end of the day, people are your greatest strength,” McConville emphasized. “They’re the most important weapons system.”
“We equip our soldiers with the best gear, but having soldiers that are willing to fight and defend their country in a very lethal battlefield is extremely important,” he said. “That’s what we’re seeing in Ukraine.”
“What makes the difference is the will to fight. All conflicts are a battle of wills.” (Source: Breaking Defense.com)
10 Oct 22. US Army adopts new multidomain operations doctrine. The U.S. Army, recognizing it will operate not just on land but also across air, sea, space and cyberspace, is releasing its first new doctrine in 40 years.
The 280-page doctrine for multidomain operations, titled “Field Manual 3-0,″ will make its debut at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference, which runs Oct. 10-12.
Army leaders said it will be a key guide for the force, but stressed the service will continue to evolve the doctrine as it moves forward with its biggest weapon system modernization push since the 1980s. The service hopes to have a fully modernized force by 2030.
“There is not a time in recent history that is so potentially dangerous,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville writes in the manual’s foreword. “Russia, our acute threat, is conducting an unprovoked war on the sovereign country of Ukraine. Our pacing challenge, China, with an economy nearly equal in size to ours, is building a world-class military to challenge us and threatening its neighbors, including Taiwan.”
Meanwhile, McConville adds, “we cannot take our eyes off our persistent threats: North Korea, Iran, and violent extremists.”
The new manual “demonstrates the first principles of speed, range, and convergence of the cutting-edge technologies needed to achieve future decision dominance and overmatch against our adversaries,” he writes.
McConville notes how potential opponents could increasingly challenge the Army. He writes that while Army forces have used space and cyberspace capabilities for more than two decades, they have never employed them in combat against capable opponents. Likewise, “Air and Maritime capabilities have long enabled successful operations on land, but it has been decades since air-ground integration and close cooperation between land and naval forces have been effectively challenged by a threat.”
The Army last issued a new doctrine, dubbed AirLand Battle, in 1982. This manual focused on close coordination between land and air forces, and it stemmed from lessons learned from the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. It provided a basis for how the U.S. Army could fight and win against the Soviet Union.
The Army’s new manual reflects nearly five years spent by the service first developing multidomain operations as a warfighting concept and later as a doctrine.
The service released several versions of the multidomain operations concept beginning in 2018 and has refined it through evaluations, exercises, war games and its first multidomain task force. The task forces, established to test the concept, will now serve as operational units around the globe. There will be five tailored to operate in specific theaters, from Indo-Pacific Command to European Command.
Three key phases
The doctrine lays out three phases of multidomain operations: competition, crisis and armed conflict. It addresses the challenge of peer competitors using layered capabilities at standoff range to deter, requiring the U.S. as well as its partners and allies to use redundant, land-based capabilities to destroy or degrade threat-networked intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities as well as long-range fires, the field manual explains.
China and Russia are positioned to “win without fighting” when it can control the narrative and facts on the ground, so the Army must establish a truthful narrative to contest that approach during both competition and crisis phases of operation, it adds.
What is multidomain battle?
The eight-chapter document, emphasizes the Army must assume it is always visible to the enemy. And for the first time the Army included a chapter on its operations in largely maritime environments, Richard Creed, director of the service’s Combined Arms Doctrine Directorate, told Defense News in a recent interview.
“When you think about the importance of INDOPACOM and the dynamics based on the geography of a theater like that, you understand [that] land forces, the Army in particular, have huge contributions to make in any campaign in that type of environment,” he said.
‘We’re at an inflection point’
The Army doesn’t yet have much of the modernized equipment meant to enable multidomain operations, but McConville told Defense News in a recent interview it still makes sense to move forward with the doctrine.
“We’re at an inflection point,” McConville said.
Indeed, the Army initially expected to release the doctrine over the summer.
While the extra time provided the service an opportunity to observe and learn from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the major ideas in the doctrine did not change, according to Creed.
Polish and American troops take part in tactical and fire training on April 8, 2022, in Nowa Deba, Poland. (Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images)
“What we did do, however, in light of our continuous observations of what’s been going on in the Russia-Ukraine war, is to make sure that we’re looking at those events through a lens that didn’t appeal to our preconceived notions,” he explained.
Creed said it was important to move quickly with the new document because “doctrine drives culture … and it certainly drives the readiness culture in terms of what you’re training against, what kinds of military problems you’re trying to solve. And cultural shifts take a long time.”
The next step, Creed said, is to help soldiers internalize the doctrine.
“We’re going to have to train our people to execute it,” he said. “We’re going to have to develop leaders who understand it, and we have to play around with it during the execution of training and operations to foster what people like to call ‘a campaign of learning.’ ”
In the late 1990s, the Army updated its 1982 doctrine to adjust to what it termed “full-spectrum operations.” Similarly, Creed said, he expects the multidomain operations doctrine to require an update in the 2030 time frame.
“We will have an army that looks very different than the army now in terms of the equipment and the organizations that it fields and is trained to execute multidomain operations,” he said. “Between then and now, we’re going to do the best we can with the force that we have.
“The force that we have is capable of executing what we’re putting into doctrine just fine.”
The new doctrine also triggers an update to 368 other doctrinal publications, he added, which will take place over the next several years. (Source: Defense News)
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