Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley is putting together an experimental multi-domain battle unit to solidify the operational requirements of a land force that also fights in air, sea, space and cyberspace.
The so-called multi-domain battle task force will hone the concept of operations and determine the capabilities an operational unit will need, Milley said March 21 at the Future of War Conference hosted by the New America Foundation.
“Right now we’re playing with what organizations could execute and implement that multi-domain battle concept,” he said.
For lack of a better name, Milley has chosen to call the unit a “task force” but may change the designation as the concept solidifies. Eventually, it will be brigadier general-commanded organization, but it will be “relatively small,” Milley said. It won’t reach the size of a brigade combat team, which is about 4,500-5,000 personnel.
“You want it to be rapidly deployable, very expeditionary, and you want it to be agile and nimble on the battlefield,” he said. “Smaller is better when it comes to those kinds of attributes.”
Milley said the units will end up being between 1,500 and 2,000 soldiers.
“We’re going to experiment with that over the next couple of years to see exactly what it should look like, the internals, how much of certain capabilities,” he said. “The idea would be that it could strike at great distances and close distances and be able to operate in all the domains and leverage the capabilities in space, air, maritime and land.”
Over the next 24 months, the task force will serve as a kind of incubator for multi-domain battle capabilities.
Put simply, the Army needs the appropriate weapons to address the multiple threats a near-peer competitor is likely to use in modern warfare, from small, cheap unmanned quadcopters to tanks and anti-tank missiles to cyber and space-based threats.
Milley said he and Gen. David Perkins, chief of Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) have been working on the operational concept for about two years. While Perkins at TRADOC works on the concept and requirements, the task force is the first step to operationalize multi-domain battle.
Milley listed the basic capabilities the multi-domain unit eventually will have, beginning with a command-and-control element led by a colonel that will resemble a brigade-level headquarters.
There likely will be a detachment of infantry mounted on Stryker-like highly mobile combat vehicles, he said. It would carry organic offensive weapons to include multi-role long-range precision fire capability that could take the form of the Army Tactical Missile System reconfigured to shoot targets on land and at sea. Another possibility is artillery with air-burst capability that can take out low-end airborne threats like small drones.
Cyber teams capable of offensive and defensive missions likely will be embedded within the unit along with soldiers that can bring space-based capabilities to bear, Milley said.
The organization might have its own aviation element made up of Apache gunships or the next-generation rotorcraft resulting from the Future Vertical Lift program, he added.
“We’ll go with legacy vehicles for now, but we will modify those as we do vehicle development.”
Initially the multi-domain-optimized unit will be a subset of the Army writ large, but the service can count on its combat units becoming smaller and more independently capable as it prepares for future war, Milley said.
As the world populations increasingly moves to urban areas, Milley foresees future wars taking place in complex, dense mega-cities. The Army is not and has never been optimized for such combat and will have to deploy smaller, networked combat units that can act both independently and as part of the joint force.
The Army has been optimized since its inception for fighting in open, rolling terrain in large, massed units, Milley said. It is sub-optimized for other forms of combat like jungle, mountain and desert warfare. At best, the Army is sub-optimized for urban combat based on lessons learned in battles like Fallujah, Mosul and Hue and watching others fight in Aleppo and Mosul. Hue was fought by U.S. forces in Vietnam in 1968.
“We’re going to have to, as we move forward within the next 10 years, optimize the Army for urban warfare,” Milley said. “That is a general statement that has all kinds of implications.”
Urban combat in mega cities, of which there are currently about 12 and could be as many as 50 within a decade, will dictate the width and weight of combat vehicles and the circumference of aircraft rotors, he said.
The Army’s organization will undergo a significant change, he said. Urban combat necessitates small, dispersed, compartmentalized units that are networked.
“The Army will definitely have to organize differently,” he said. “We’ll have to have what, I think, are a lot of relatively small formations that are networked and can leverage Air Force or naval-delivered joint fires.”
Just how small those “operational” or “fighting” units need to be is under debate. Milley said they likely will be similar in size to existing companies up to battalions. He said the way Special Operations Forces operate today “may be a preview of how larger armies operate in the future.”