The year 1973 was crucial for the US military. That force left Vietnam battered and destroyed. In January, the Secretary of Defense announced the end of the draft; Two months later, the last combat soldiers were leaving Vietnam. However, the Arab-Israeli war that broke out on Yom Kippur in October planted the seeds of renewal. The lessons of that war, assimilated by American officers sent to Israel, helped reshape the American military into the modern, professional force that would prevail in Iraq in 1991.
Today's generals, who came of age during that transformation, are well aware of the resonance. “There is a vague analogy between the early 1970s and the Army of Desert Storm,” says Gen. James Rainey, who heads the U.S. Army Futures Command; “and between the army that invaded Iraq in the early 2000s and where we need to be in 2040.” Two decades of war in Afghanistan and Iraq wore down soldiers, equipment and ideas. The recruiting shortage remains unresolved. Now, the rise of China and the lessons of the Ukraine war have prompted introspection, renewal and reform.
There are three major pending issues raised among the civilian and military officials of the army, according to sources familiar with these debates. One is whether profound changes in the character of warfare (some of which are evident in Ukraine) may cause ground forces to become less important, or even irrelevant.
The second is how to balance resources between Asia and Europe (where Asia is the Pentagon's priority and Europe where Russia is hastily rearming). The military can prepare for conflicts in both places, but in practice it cannot fight both wars at the same time; and is no longer asked to do so. The 2018 National Defense Strategy ended the “two wars” rule, a change embraced by the Biden administration.
That brings us to the third question, the most existential for the army. What would be, beyond logistics and air defense facilitation, the role of a ground force in a future war in the Pacific?
When General Randy George, the Army Chief of Staff, was asked not long ago to recommend a book, he cited The Arms of Future by Jack Watling, a young British analyst. The book tells that in the latest rounds of Warfighter, a large annual exercise led by the United States, combat brigades facing increasingly better sensors and munitions with greater range and lethality have suffered enormous losses, ending up with 20% of combat capability. Artillery annihilates infantry and armor long before they can get into enemy sight.
The war in Ukraine has reinforced these conclusions. Some maintain that the US army, better trained and armed than the Ukrainian one, and also having air cover, would fare better. However, General Rainey assumes the worst. “We are going to fight under constant observation, and in permanent contact in some way. There is no pause. There is no shelter.” He adds that American "lessons learned" teams were on site three days before the invasion to collect observations. They will have had some unpleasant surprises: at first, American-made GPS-guided projectiles and rockets worked well; more recently, they have had difficulties in the face of Russian interference operations.
The military recognizes that, where it once could patiently gather its forces and then launch a full-scale offensive (as it did against Iraq in 1991 and 2003), it now has to prioritize dispersion, mobility and concealment. The drone strike that killed three soldiers in Jordan on Jan. 28 was the first successful airstrike against U.S. troops since the Korean War. Katie Crombe, an Army officer, and John Nagl, a professor at the United States Army War College in Pennsylvania, point out in a recent article that the command posts of the Ukrainian battalions are made up of seven soldiers who hide underground and They move twice a day. “That standard,” they warn, referring to the deep-rooted habits of hardened command positions, “will be difficult to achieve in the case of the US Army.”
The leaders of the battalions (about 1,000 soldiers) and brigades (a few thousand), the central combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq, would be consumed by these intense combats in a way that was not the case during counterinsurgency missions. So the military is being reorganized so that more of the burden of planning, logistics, command and control, and long-range firepower falls on divisions, larger formations typically led by two-star generals. who are further from the front lines and have more time and space to organize the frenetic battles of the future.
What remains unresolved, says Billy Fabian, a former infantry officer and Pentagon planner, is the specific way the Army's combat forces should be organized for future wars: the balance between, on the one hand, firepower , dominant in Ukraine, and, on the other, the so-called maneuver elements, such as infantry and armor. “Fighting ground wars is the military's raison d'être,” he says, “and Ukraine raises difficult questions that challenge deep-rooted elements that are fundamental to the military's self-conception.”
Looming over those reforms is the broader question of where the military will be asked to fight. National defense strategies released by the Trump and Biden administrations task the Pentagon with focusing on China. The US military actually increased its presence in Europe after the first Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014. And since then, it has reinforced the continent with a corps and division headquarters, an armored and infantry brigade, a battalion of rocket artillery and numerous other support forces. In contrast, relatively few new forces have arrived in Asia.
For many years, the US military's primary role in the Pacific has been to guard bases, provide air defense and handle logistics. To the extent that it was a “maneuver” force, in military jargon, it was focused on North Korea. Other services have looked down on him. “The Navy has a stranglehold on the direction of Indo-Pacific Command,” says Stacie Pettyjohn of the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank. “They consider that the army only has a supporting role in a maritime theater.”
General Charles Flynn, head of the US military in the Pacific, strongly refutes such ideas in conversation with The Economist at his headquarters in Hawaii. “Human beings have the unique tendency to live on land,” he says. “Ultimately, decisions are going to be made with the pointy end of a gun.” Land primacy is as true in Asia as in Europe, he maintains; among other things, because the largest countries in the region, such as India and Indonesia, have militaries dominated by armies. The idea is that by strengthening ties with them in peacetime, the army can position itself to project military power westward.
The increasing pace of maneuvers (more than 40 are carried out a year) is an essential part of this process. General Flynn points to the examples of Talisman Saber in Australia and Garuda Shield in Indonesia. Both were once relatively modest exercises between one army and another. They have grown and now have the participation of the navy and air forces. Both have also involved the Army's Pacific Joint Multinational Readiness Center, essentially a physical and virtual training team capable of deploying throughout the region to do things that could only be done at a large base in Louisiana. These exercises are becoming a nearly permanent presence: the army remains in the region for eight months a year.
Along with this there is a reformulation of the army's way of fighting. The premise is that China has optimized its forces to attack American satellites, ships and air bases. “What it is not designed to do,” says General Bernard Harrington, “is to find, fix and destroy distributed, mobile and networked land formations.” That has prompted the creation of three experimental “multi-domain task forces,” the first of which is focused on Asia and commanded by General Harrington.
Each force has four battalions capable of deploying small units along the first island chain from Japan to the Philippines. The idea is that they can fight not only on land (soldier against soldier, tank against tank) but across domains. Let's imagine that the United States needs to attack a Chinese ship. The multi-domain task force's “effects” battalion will attempt to jam its radar and penetrate its networks; If this does not neutralize the ship, it will at least increase the probability that the anti-ship missiles launched by a “fires” battalion will be able to reach it. The force's long-range hypersonic missiles, deployed last year, have a range of just under 3,000 kilometers, enough to go from Japan to Taiwan or from the Philippines to the South China Sea.
Early experiments with multi-domain task forces have shown promise, although some are skeptical that this high-tech vision of warfare will survive contact with reality. On the other hand, they have also provided useful lessons. General Harrington says an exercise in the Philippines last year served as a reminder that HIMAR rocket launchers and intelligence equipment, with many delicate electronic components, perform worse in the heat and humidity of tropical Asia than in the field. test center where they were initially tested. Currently, there are two multi-domain task forces dedicated to Asia, and a third for Europe. The original plan called for a total of five, with an additional one in the Arctic and another for global tasks.
All of this seems to offer a definitive answer to the army's identity crisis: Asia first. However, within the Department of the Army, which is located in the Pentagon, some doubts persist in this regard. One of them is whether their plans agree with those of the armed forces as a whole. “The military still feels marginalized in the Pacific,” says Pettyjohn. Another question is whether the army itself has pivoted forcefully enough. For example, its fleet of boats has been drastically reduced in recent years. “The ships are an absolute indicator of true commitment to the Pacific,” says J. P. Clark, another Army War College professor. “They are quite expensive, really useful only in that theater of operations and absolutely essential.”
Multi-domain task forces themselves remain “niche” formations, Fabian maintains. The largest formation assigned to the region is the 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii, he notes, a light infantry division. “It seems that the Army tries to have it all,” Fabian argues. “It talks about fires and air defense for the Pacific, but it is still a combined arms force organized for close range combat as it always has been.” The military hedges its bets, says one well-informed source, because it rarely fights the war it expects.
Trade-offs abound. Short-range artillery is vital for Europe; not so much in Asia. “What are you going to shoot 155 projectiles at in the Pacific if not into the water,” a senior Pentagon official joked not long ago. The military will have to make firm decisions within a year or two, officials say. In part, because they are creating more units than they can reliably handle. The army estimated that it would end the year with a shortage of 10,000 recruits, a 15% deficit and the second consecutive year of insufficient enlistment. Much of this is due to the rigidity of the American labor market, but it is also a reflection of declining enthusiasm for military service, and for combat weapons in particular.
The drop in the size of the “individual prepared reserve” (reservists not assigned to a specific unit) from a contingent of 450,000 in 1994 to 76,000 in 2018 exacerbates the problem. Ukraine shows how intense wars tend to crush regular armies and demand an injection of citizens with military experience. The current shortage of combat soldiers is the future shortage of reservists. Crombe and Nagl are among supporters of the notion of “partial recruitment,” an idea supported by only 20% of Americans. Now, as in the crucial moments of the mid-1970s, the military finds itself grappling with profound questions about its size, shape, and purpose—questions that will ultimately affect, as they did then, its relationship with American society.
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Translation: Juan Gabriel López Guix
