The Army must invest now to provide the future force required under the new Strategic Guidance, but that investment is about more than money, a Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) official said.
“It’s about readiness,” said Lt. Gen. Keith Walker, deputy commanding general-Futures and director of Army Capabilities Integration Center at TRADOC. “It’s about taking our new environment into account and improving the way we invest what we have. It’s investment in our soldiers and recognizing it’s about more than…equipment.”
The Strategic Guidance from the president sets the priorities for a 21st century defense that maintains U.S. global leadership. The Strategic Direction, from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff tightens the focus to key areas such as developing a joint force for 2020, and recommitting to the profession of arms. From these documents the Army determines how it will fight and the capabilities it needs.
The Joint Staff is revising the Capstone Concept for Joint Operations, something TRADOC was involved in. The command also will take part in a war game examining the concept.
Walker looks for gaps, sets priorities and examines risk in a holistic approach that takes into account declining budgets. “I think it is a reality of life in an environment of reduced resources, [that] we have to take the fact of a decreasing pool of resources in which we rack and stack our priorities.”
Among the tools Walker uses to examine the service is a year-long Campaign of Learning, “a rolling assessment that helps us look at ourselves,” in seminars, workshops and other events, he told an audience at a conference in Washington the week before.
Those events lead to a war game called Unified Quest that Walker calls a “greenhouse for ideas,” asking and working out key questions that then inform concept work, and help Army leaders make decisions about future investment.
Modernization also means looking at everything they do with regard to doctrine, organizations, training, leader development, materiel, personnel and facilities, which the Army shortens to the acronym DOTLM PF, Walker said at an AUSA Winter Symposium roundtable in Fla.
For example, the Doctrine 2015 effort is consolidating and streamlining the various documents concerning how the Army fights. This is being led at TRADOC’s Combined Arms Center, Ft. Leavenworth, Kan.
Modernization includes assessing organizations, force design, force mix and the balanced mix needed after 10 years of war, and to counter future threats.
Training, having concentrating counterinsurgency for the conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, now will move to training at home station and using immersive environment to maintain and improve force readiness. It will also examine scenarios from high-end war to counter insurgency.
If the service needs to expand, something that the Defense Secretary has called “expansibility,” then the service has to have “midgrade leaders, around which we can grow,” Walker said. That means reviewing manning policies, leader development, and finding ways to keep mid-grade leaders, perhaps as instructors.
Overall, modernization must take advantage of and implement lessons learned.
“One of the biggest lessons we learned is that we’re pretty much guaranteed to predict the future wrong,” Walker said. Thus the emphasis is on training for many potential futures, from counterinsurgency to combined arms maneuver to wide area security and humanitarian efforts.
Considering the future, Walker told an Aviation Week conference, “It’s vital not to get it wrong.”
And unlike the post-Vietnam period, the Army has not turned away counterinsurgency. The body of knowledge about it is being captured in doctrine, in professional military education and leader development.
From one seminar in the Campaign of Learning came the idea that the future would be dominated by economics, urbanization, the cyber threat, the possibility of rapid intervention, and the potential for new partners and allies, he said. TRADOC is constantly assessing the operating environment, which feeds into ARCIC’s work, among others
With some idea of possible future trends, the next step is to figure out what the Army must do.
The answer to that will be found in a revised Capstone Concept coming this spring. The concept is reviewed every two years, and Walker said what was feasible and useful in 2009 is being reworked to make sense now. The Army’s revised Operating Concept will come this summer.
The point of all the work is to be able to provide the Joint Force Commander a broader range of options to accomplish his missions.