By Ann Roosevelt
CARLISLE, Pa.–The Army is looking at how it is postured to face the future in its organizations, such as battalion, brigade, division, and the numbers and kind of officers associated with them, a top service official said.
“We are looking at it, is the short answer,” Gen. Martin Dempsey, commander of Training and Doctrine Command, said here during a media visit to a Unified Quest 2010 event.
“My instinct tells me, though, that echelons all have a valid role not only in terms of mission set but also in terms of developmental role,” he said.
Unified Quest is an Army Chief of Staff Title 10 event that examines questions posed about how the service faces the future.
Dempsey’s remarks came just a few days before Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that all the services needed to re-look their “overhead,” and the numbers of officers and at what level.
“I would tell you there is a certain enduring nature of war, and we can’t look at it just through the lens of counterinsurgency,” Dempsey said. It’s important to look at organizations in the sense of maneuvering against near peer competitors and non-state actors, and those non-state actors with state-like capabilities.
There is an enduring principle of span of control, Dempsey said, and the need for leaders, the senior, more mature and experienced officers to have the time to go out and interact with subordinates.
“Now that doesn’t necessarily mean we have to organize a corps like [today’s] corps but the three star has a role. At division level, the two star has a role, and so forth,” he said.
It’s also a question of balance, said TRADOC Deputy Commanding General and Director of the Capability Integration Center Lt. Gen. Michael Vane.
In 2003, he said, modularity work was the effort to get as many of the capabilities the Army thought commanders would logically need to operate with full spectrum warfare.
“Now after eight years, we are deep in looking at: do we have that balance right and are we giving the right kinds of capabilities to commanders and leaders at each level so that they can complete the mission they’ve been given,” Vane said.
Such things as military intelligence, signals, engineers, are being examined to see if they should be put into brigade combat team formations as well as some additional capabilities at different levels based on what the service has learned over the past decade.
Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, TRADOC deputy commanding general, Initial Military Training, said echelons are needed. “Absolutely, not only because of span of control issues, but there is a company fight, a battalion commander’s fight and brigade and division commander’s fight. If it’s anything, it’s who do you engage with and who do you gain resources from and the distribution of resources,” Hertling said. Beforethis posting, he commanded 1st Armored Division, for the majority of the time in Northern Iraq.
“People were saying with a brigade-centric Army you really don’t need divisions and more, but whew…we had more work than we knew what to do with so I was operating at the strategic level all the way down to the tactical level as divisions.”
Dempsey said the point is that the differences between levels of war–strategic-operational and tactical–have blurred and they have been pushed downward, but it still means that “the leaders at echelon need to understand and help manage that kind of uncertainty for their subordinates.”
“Fundamentally, what each level does is help manage the uncertainty that they pass beneath them,” he said.
Lt. Gen. Robert Caslen, Commander, Combined Arms Command and Fort Leavenworth, said there really are a delineation of missions. If everyone is trying to do the same thing, not a lot gets accomplished, but “the different missions all contribute to one another.”
Dempsey said TRADOC is looking at the various mission requirements and force design.
“Not to be predisposed to what we come up with but I think we’re going to see the requirement–because of the span of control, resource allocation, leadership, mentoring, leader development, all the things that are associated with a large organization will probably not change significantly,” he said.
“We’ve got to make ourselves more like a network to fight a network,” Vane said. However, a network is not just a decentralized smart small unit fighting three guys in a network that is connected to another network which is part of yet another network.
“We find ourselves at echelon, also having to fight the networks at the level at which we’re engaged,” he said. “Some of these, of course, go beyond local areas connected to multiple regional areas, and unfortunately, as we’ve seen, they’re global.”
For example, Hertling said, one of his fights was going after networks with guns and explosives. But at the same time, “I was going after the money, going after the telecommunications, going after the organizational structure, and the command and control of the higher network folks at the same time,” plus working on the political side to help the population.
The Army will be standing up a Mission Command Center of Excellence for command and control, Caslen said.
Dempsey feels there should be such a center for, arguably, one of the most important warfighting functions and to integrate the efforts of other warfighters. The center would look at the art and science of all levels of command and be responsible for the other TRADOC focus areas–doctrine, organization training, leadership and education, materiel, personnel and facilities (DOTLM PF).
While the Army is looking at the organizations of the commands and the relationships between them, what do the organizations look like and should they be changed, Caslen looks at the leadership and how to develop leaders for all those levels of command.
That will be one of the responsibilities of the Mission Command Center of Excellence because they’ll look at DOTLM PF for mission command, the command and control of organizations at all levels of command and the DOTLM PF across command and control.
“We think mission command is a better articulation of what we are about today in terms of command and control because it implies several things,” Dempsey said. “It implies empowering at increasingly lower tactical echelons, mission type orders, the [commander’s] intent…we now conduct missions that are not just kinetic, but offense, defense and stability operations.