The Army’s 101st Airborne Division just completed the first exercise with the service’s new Mobile Brigade Combat prototype concept, which features the GM Defense [GM]-built Infantry Squad Vehicle (ISV) as a key focus capability.
Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia, 101st Airborne Division commander, told reporters on Thursday the work with the Mobile BCT was part of a larger event supporting the Army’s new “Transformation in Contact” initiative where select formations will train on new concepts and capabilities to inform how the service will operate as it brings systems such as counter-drone platforms, one-way attack systems and advanced networking tools.
“Our division has embarked on a multi-year campaign to build a unique capability for combatant commanders and the United States Army,” Sylvia said during a media briefing. “What you can do now with a Mobile Brigade Combat Team is that they don’t have to land in a single consolidated location. You can disperse them amongst many helicopter landing zones and then rapidly reaggregate in a place in which you would want them to. It provides this ability to rapidly move combat power in a way that you could not before. Before, I could move 2.5 kilometers an hour when I’m under load. Now, [with the Mobile BCT], I can go 200 kilometers in an ISV and I have the ability to carry more.”
The 101st Airborne Division’s 2nd Brigade, which has been designed as the first Mobile BCT, completed the first comprehensive field assessment of the new structure concept last week as part of the Operation Lethal Eagle exercise at Fort Campbell in Kentucky, which Sylvia said included conducting a large-scale, long-range air assault with the entire division that put “all of our systems at-scale and under load.”
“During this operation, we moved a battalion task force about 140 nautical miles on 77 aircraft in one period of darkness so that Mobile Brigade Combat Team could fight against a near-peer opposing force,” Sylvia said. “This long-range, large-scale air assault not only provided another repetition for us to improve our execution of a unique joint forcible entry capability, it also provided us a venue to test new Army technologies, prototype reorganized force structures, employ multi-domain fires and experiment with creative sustainment solutions to be able to mass combat power at-scale at the time and place of our choosing.”
Sylvia said the Army’s new ISV serves as the “centerpiece” of the Mobile BCT concept, providing an “ability to move every infantry squad much faster and much lighter.”
“We had just shy of 200 Infantry Squad Vehicles that allow us, to use a Napoleonic term, to steal a march. We, as an air assault division, land as a cohesive element. So [the ISVs] allow us to land as a cohesive element and move rapidly in order to be able to rapidly seize key terrain so that we can continue to keep the air assault mission moving and on the march,” Sylvia said.
The Army a year ago approved the ISV program for full-rate production, as the service looks to continue moving out on the platform based on the ZR2 variants of GM’s Chevrolet Colorado midsize truck (Defense Daily, April 5 2023).
“[ISV has] a lower fuel consumption. It’s very light. It’s strictly for carrying infantry soldiers. It’s not a fighting platform. We’re not mounting weapons on it or any of that kind of stuff. It’s just to move them to steal that march. It’s easily sling-loaded. We can put a couple of them inside of a CH-47. So that [ISV] is the signature item that makes a difference,” Sylvia said.
In August, Sylvia said the 101st Airborne Division and its 2nd Brigade will do further prototype work with the Mobile BCT concept at the Joint Readiness Training Center in Louisiana to help inform the Army on the next steps for the new structure.
“We’ll fight it again. And then the idea is to continue to fight it in future iterations or whatever it is that the Army wants next out of our 2nd Brigade. And clearly [we’re] informing the Army after this next iteration in August in terms of how much the Army wants to spread that Mobile BCT to other formations,” Sylvia said.
Gen. Randy George has spearheaded the Army’s new “Transformation in Contact” since taking over as the service’s chief of staff last fall, citing the initiative as a way to rapidly work with new technologies and concepts to help inform force design priorities for “the Army of 2030.”
“As the nature of warfare changes, it’s clear that we have to focus on large-scale combat operations today. The Army recognizes that it must transform to address both current and future threats. So, in doing that, the division has reemerged as a key warfighting formation. So we recognize that brigades must be enabled to fight the close fight, but that means that the division and the corps and theater armies, we have to fight deeper,” Sylvia told reporters, noting the 101st Airborne Division is one of two Army divisions tapped to test and prototype as part of the “Transformation in Contact” initiative.
Sylvia said the recent event included working on how his division would operate with capabilities it doesn’t necessarily have yet, to include a command post event where soldiers simulated managing future capabilities like Launched Effects, Spike NLOS missiles and the Future Long Range Assault Aircraft and how those would be integrated into a large-scale, long-range air assault.
“So while we did not have those things organic to us, we did work through in simulation how we, as a division and in shaping the area of operations, would integrate those capabilities, what would be required in terms of how we organize our staff to be able to employ those and how would we adjust our targeting process in order to be able to get after that,” Sylvia said.
The Mobile BCT concept also included a Multifunctional Reconnaissance Company, Sylvia noted, where they could work through utilizing new drone capabilities those soldiers would likely operate one day.
“While it doesn’t have all of the future capabilities in it, it has created a landing spot for some of those systems. We’ve taken things like a commercial off-the-shelf drone and we put a small placard on it that says ‘one-way attack system.’ It gives our soldiers the ability to figure out how they are going to use it. It gives our leaders the ability to figure out they’re going to employ it. And it gives feedback to the Army in terms of how do we need to adjust the training and the doctrine and what would some of that resupply look like,” Sylvia said.
Sylvia said the exercise focused on how command posts can be “smaller, more mobile, more agile” and also included a multi-domain, live fire exercise focused on penetrating an adversary’s air defenses, to include using electronic warfare capabilities.
“We used HIMARS. We used Apache helicopters. We used close air support. And we also integrated both ground-based and air-based electronic warfare in order to be able to either destroy the enemy’s air defense or to suppress that enemy air defense so that we can open up that corridor for that large helicopter force in order to be able to penetrate in and insert that ground force,” Sylvia said.
The exercise also included taking new Integrated Tactical Network capabilities across the 101st Airborne Division, with Sylvia noting the event had soldiers testing equipment “alongside developers and coders.”
“[We did that] to be able to figure out does it stretch to be able to meet the needs of an entire division and do we have things like air-ground integration sorted out. Can we figure out the digital fires pieces associated with that? Some of it worked. Some of it didn’t necessarily stretch,” Sylvia said. “We had those developers and teams that were with us in order to help us figure out how do we build these systems together. I would also tell you, these capabilities are fantastic.They’re tremendous. I feel like this is the best communication gear I’ve gotten in decades. And we’re a better warfighting formation today than we were 30 days ago even with some of the issues and gaps that we’re still sorting through.”