Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley is satisfied with the service’s current balance of rebuilding readiness for a near-term war but worries that it is inadequately trained and equipped to fight a major conflict against a peer nation like Iran, China or Russia.
Readiness has been Milley’s top priority since he took office and he now says that he is comfortable with the Army’s prospects for preparing to fight a near-term conflict.
“I am comfortable with the direction we are in and the budget as it current exists,” he said Thursday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. “There is always tension between the future and the current force. You don’t want to be imbalanced either way. I am confident we have the right way ahead on readiness.”
Preparing for a future in which the Army might have to take on adversaries as capable and varied as Iran, China and Russia, is a different story, he said. The Army must continue the current fight against terrorism in all its forms – ISIS, al Qaeda, the Taliban – while attempting to ready itself for potential future fights that will call for a completely different set of skills and equipment, Milley said.
Milley has tasked subordinates with drawing up predictions for what the world might look like – and where and why the Army might be called to fight – between 2025 and 2050 “before we make investments in organization and equipment.”
Several technologies are emerging that will “fundamentally change the character of war” in the manor that rifled barrels, the introduction of the tank or the transition from horse to mechanized vehicles altered the way battle is conducted.
“My professional opinion is that we are on the cusp of a fundamental change in the character of ground warfare,” he said. “We have probably less than 10 years to understand it …Armies will look fundamentally different.”
Not all of the technologies that will have influential military applications are known or understood, but Milley has directed investment and research into a few. They include robotics and autonomy, alternative fuels and communications technology.
The Army also must take advantage of new weapon technologies that do not rely on gunpowder like electromagnetic railguns and lasers, he said. Nanotechnology also likely will find military applications but they are not yet fully understood, Milley said.
“The question is what will the ground applications be for these technologies,” he said.
Another question is what the Army is restoring its readiness for. It has been laser-focused for 15 years on fighting specific wars in a specific geographic location and has adapted its entire training and equipping structure to that fight, Milley said. A potential large-scale combined-arms maneuver war against Russia or China could catch the service without the proper training or gear, he said.
“The Army has been fighting a single typology of war for the past 15 years,” Milley said. “We have geared our training and tactics, techniques and procedures to that fight and we had to adapt. Now we have an Army that has a lot of institutional skills and experience in fighting terrorists and insurgencies, for the most part in southwest Asia.”
Put on the back burner was most training of large units for combined-arms maneuver warfare, such that a major in today’s Army has only experience fighting from small, fixed positions against irregular infantry in a permission air environment, Milley said.
Artillery battalions that would have held live-fire drills at least twice a year before 9/11 now fire virtually no live rounds before a deployment, he said. Likewise, a master gunner in a tank battalion 15 years ago would have had 10-15 live-fire exercises worth of experience to earn that distinction. Master tank gunners today have only two or three firings under their belts. Some AH-64 Apache helicopter units, Milley said, have never flown a battalion-level attack like would be necessary in a full-scale conflict but have practiced flying only with one or two gunships at a time.
Milley warned against the myth that ground forces could rapidly be raised and trained from raw recruits into soldiers prepared for the modern battlefield. As the Army draws down to 980,000 total soldiers – which Milley admitted was not small at nearly 1 million troops – it needs to establish procedures to surge forces in emergencies.
To that end, Milley has established a train-advise-assist brigade pilot program. The brigade will have all of the officers and command structure of a combat unit but not the enlisted ranks. Officers on their second command assignments will join the brigade and deploy to perform training missions with allies and partner nations. If a crisis arose, enlisted troops would be rapidly trained up and “married to” the existing brigade command structure and serve as a surge force, Milley said.
“That way the time to form a cohesive unit is shortened,” he said.
The first train-advise-assist brigade should be formed within the next five years. If the pilot program goes as planned, plans are to create five of them – one for each geographic combatant command, Milley said.
“In today’s world…the idea that you can raise land forces that can deliver the effects you desire on the ground quickly, that is a myth,” he said. “This is not pancake mix where you add water, shake it, throw it on the grill and you have a pancake.”