In future wars, the Army will focus less on capturing ground objectives and more on working from the land to wage all-out, multi-domain warfare in all domains at once, a group of “mad scientists” advising the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) says.
Traditionally, the Army gained and held ground against the enemy with the aid of air and sea power. A perfect example is the Gulf War, where the military used air power to knock out Iraqi communications capabilities and aircraft to “set conditions” for land operations, TRADOC G-2 Tom Greco said during a call with reporters on Tuesday.
“We’re going to have to think about simultaneously creating conditions across all the domains as opposed to sequentially creating conditions,” Greco said during the call that focused on the findings at a recent TRADOC Mad Scientist conference held in Washington, D.C.
“The Army has a role in facilitating and creating opportunities for the Navy and for the Air Force. We would have to use land power to create windows of opportunity for the Navy to move through maritime choke points or for the Air Force to take advantage of air avenues of approach. We would have to set the conditions for them.”
Mad Scientists focuses on the strategic and operational problems the Army likely will face in 2025-2050 and beyond. A core consensus at the recent meeting was the Army, as part of any U.S. joint force, will be contested in all war fighting domains in future conflicts, Greco said.
“We will be contested in each of the domains, whether it be on land, in the air, on the sea, under the sea, space or cyberspace,” he said. “We have not had to deal with contests in each of the domains but we expect to see that in the next war.”
Rather than try to bring naval, air, space and cyberspace capabilities in house, the Army will draw on other services for those capabilities while launching weapons into all those domains from the land, he said.
“We’re not going to duplicate capabilities of other services,” Greco said. “What we want to do is enable the other services.”
Russian separatists demonstrated a similar approach in Ukraine, where they have established an air-defense umbrella that effectively creates air dominance from the ground. This is what the Army calls “cross-domain fires,” the ability to shoot from ground to air or sea.
Cross-domain fires is one of its top six modernization priorities, dubbed the Army’s Big 6+1, long with robotics, future vertical lift technologies, advanced protection, combat vehicles, expeditionary mission command/electromagnetic spectrum dominance. The “Plus 1” is improved soldier performance and training.
The U.S. military remains more skilled at joint operations than any other, but the Russians have shown a growing acumen in joint operations in Syria, Greco said.
The U.S. military is looking at using Army missiles to attack adversary surface naval ships and Army land-based capabilities to attack enemy aircraft, he said.
“We no longer can think solely in the land domain,” he said. “We have to think, all the services together simultaneously, jointly, it’s going to take a greater synchronization of all the services with the joint umbrella.”