The Army is set to reorganize the way it fights around a new concept where it will shoot down aircraft and sink ships at sea in addition to performing offensive and defensive ground warfare.
“We are going to sink ships,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said Tuesday during his keynote address to the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual exposition in Washington, D.C.
Milley laid out a vision for the future of the Army in which large, relatively independent units operate in dispersed formations in environments where communication networks are jammed or disabled. Such a war against a near-peer competitor will be “extremely lethal,” he said.
As the Army did when it withdrew from Vietnam and began to focus on meeting the Soviet Union in a pitched open-field battle in Central Europe, the Army now is preparing to fight a multi-domain war in which China or Russia will contest the U.S. military on land, at sea, in the air and space and cyberspace.
“We must work now to anticipate the broad nature of the challenges we face, the threats we will confront and the options we will need to present to our leadership,” Milley said. “Over the past year … we have designated significant time and resources to thinking about the future operational environment, how warfare is changing and how we must adapt our doctrine our organizations, equipment, training and leader development.”
The concept of operations that emerged during the late Cold War was air-land battle and dealt with mechanized units maneuvering over open terrain in conjunction with air cover. Multi-domain battle envisions a battlefield where the Army will perform “cross-domain fires” that can attack enemy ships at sea and establish air superiority with land-based capabilities.
Implementing the concept and turning it into a doctrine falls to Training and Doctrine Command Chief Gen. David Perkins. While multi-domain battle sound like it comes with an extensive shopping list for new vehicles and weapons, Perkins said cross-domain effects likely can be achieved with existing systems.
“If we have HIMARS or some type of missile system that goes from land to land, which is what we focus on now as an Army … we probably ought to think about can we use land-based missile systems to not only do that but then put an adversarial navy at risk so now you have land-to-ship missile systems,” Perkins said. “Quite honestly, the physics are not that much different.”
A high-mobility artillery rocket system (HIMARS) can technically be modified from land-to-land targeting to land-to-sea targeting with little engineering and at slight cost compared to buying a brand-new land-based anti-ship missile, he said.
“A big part of it is, it’s really not that much technically different for the missile system,” Perkins said. “Where we really have to start thinking is what is your doctrine, organization, training and leader development.”
The Army already has personnel who coordinate missile-defense and artillery fire with the Air Force, but no such organization exists to coordinate land-to-sea fire with the Navy. The main challenge of adopting new operational concepts is building the force structure and delegating responsibility for new capabilities, Perkins said.
“We have no organization like that, really, coordinating fires in the maritime domain,” Perkins said. “In the Army we don’t even have, really, what I would call situational awareness of the maritime domain. We don’t have a common operating picture. … It’s not really about expanding the size of [the Army]. It is about taking some of the technology that we have now and adapting it. … Then you have to reorganize yourself.”
“The sea part is not so much a technical challenge as it is an organizational and a doctrinal one,” he added.