Continuar haciendo hincapi\u00e9 en la modernizaci\u00f3n y la investigaci\u00f3n de nuevos equipos y sistemas de armas, con prioridad en alcances, artiller\u00eda, UAV, UGB, exoesqueletos, \u00f3pticas. Mantener las capacidades esenciales, hay cosas que el Ej\u00e9rcito puede hacer r\u00e1pidamente en una crisis (nuevos soldados rasos) y cosas que el Ej\u00e9rcito no puede hacer r\u00e1pidamente en una crisis (l\u00edderes de rango medio y superior). Una reserva con retirados conectada y comprometida brindan soluciones rentables para mantener esta experiencia accesible a la Autoridad de Comando Nacional para usarla como base sobre la cual construir un gran Ej\u00e9rcito. Colocar gran parte de sus tareas de apoyo de combate en la Reserva del Ej\u00e9rcito y mantener el poder de combate en el componente activo.<\/p>\n
In an abandoned coal mine in Norway\u2019s Svalbard archipelago, the Global Seed Vault<\/a> stores duplicate examples of the seeds that make up the world\u2019s agricultural heritage. With a relatively small staff<\/a> the Crop Trust that operates the vault safeguards this essential biodiversity against a future calamity. It\u2019s not sexy, it\u2019s not profitable, but it is important work focused on avoiding a future apocalypse.<\/p>\n What if the work needed to adequately protect the Nation against the threat of future conflict required similarly unsexy work? What if those efforts were actually counterproductive to a service\u2019s near-term funding goals? Who will do the important but unglamorous military work needed to succeed against the challenges of tomorrow?<\/p>\n It has been argued elsewhere, convincingly<\/a>, that the Navy\/Marine Corps team is best suited to safeguarding America\u2019s interests and global stability in times of peace (reflected in the now-discarded \u201cGlobal Force for Good<\/a>\u201d tagline). The Air Force has always sold itself\u2014grotesquely<\/a>, in some cases\u2014as the post-WWII guarantors of strategic stability. The Space Force is now out there trying to figure out what to wear, trying to dominate high orbit, and competing for funding with its parent service<\/a>, the past master of the budget wars up until this point.<\/p>\n What does that leave for the Army? In an era of low-level conflicts or protracted near-wars the Army currently advocates for itself a role as an embedded expeditionary force<\/a> with persistent involvement in all theaters of U.S. military operations. This is the \u201ctick\u201d theory of forward deployment, which provides<\/a> that \u201cground forces can defeat sophisticated adversary defensive schemes from inside positions\u201d\u2014a concept which at first glance appears to leave Army forces vulnerable<\/a>, unable to maneuver, and liable to be bypassed. In so doing, the Army is both trying to give the National Command Authority the flexibility it wants in the early days of a developing<\/a> national strategy and making the standard intra-Pentagon play for funding and continued relevance in an era between major wars.<\/p>\n What is the Army really for? Thomas Barnett\u2019s wartime \u201cLeviathan force<\/a>\u201d designed to fight and decisively win the nation\u2019s wars on land comes closest. In the same document<\/a> where the Army Chief of Staff argues for the embedded, expeditionary model to demonstrate relevance in the INDOPACOM area of operations, he acknowledges that \u201c[t]he Army\u2019s most foundational strategic role is the capability and capacity to prevail in large-scale combat.\u201d The Army is the big hammer by which the Nation leverages its economic power and its sizeable population to rain comprehensive defeat upon its wartime enemies. The Army is supposed<\/em> to be for WWIII\u2026or something like it.<\/p>\n The gap between the Army that can compete for scarce defense dollars in today\u2019s budget environment (\u201cthe Army of today\u201d) and the Army the United States will need to win World War III (what I will call \u201cthe Army of tomorrow\u201d) grows wider every day. The reasons are, on the one hand, political, and, on the other, a function of institutional biases inside the Army itself. The Nation has no stomach for long-term planning<\/a> and the institutional Army, although usefully acknowledging<\/a> a need for a longer-term plan and focusing on the future fight, is at the same time conditioned to a budget cycle-by-budget cycle internecine war for self-preservation.<\/p>\n Because of the Army\u2019s role in the joint force, the important planning horizon for the Army is the distant one (\u201c[f]ocus on the right planning horizon\u201d<\/a>). Anything that detracts from that future mission needs to be jettisoned by the wayside or handed over to the other services. We must be prepared to sacrifice the unneeded but job-providing Army of today in favor of the existentially necessary but less popular Army of tomorrow. Adopting the right planning horizon also makes a host of other decisions easy and obvious (e.g. <\/em>does the \u201cattrition tool\u201d that is the ACFT<\/a> make sense for a large, conscript Army of tomorrow?). A distant planning horizon would allow the Army, not to be a successful jobs program in the context of today\u2019s budget priorities, but to be positioned to be successful in the context of tomorrow\u2019s national priorities, when war is looming, budgets are irrelevant, and the nation looks to the Army as the backbone of its defense. If the Army, as an institution, is too afraid to let active component end-strength shrink in relation to the other services out of fear that it will never regain its primacy as the decisive arm of the U.S. military, then the institution\u2019s concern isn\u2019t the Nation\u2019s defense, but the Army\u2019s.<\/p>\n Strategy defines structure<\/a>. What does success for tomorrow\u2019s Army entail? What structure is needed to implement this strategic vision of the Army as tomorrow\u2019s<\/em> pre-eminent fighting force in large-scale combat? This involves identifying future bottlenecks in the rapid construction and fielding of the Army of tomorrow and cost-effective present-day mechanisms for overcoming them.<\/p>\n A Way Forward<\/strong><\/p>\n Maintain essential capabilities. These are capabilities that cannot quickly or easily be rebuilt, involving skills that perish once the institutional underpinnings of their maintenance are removed. Examples that come to mind are the Army\u2019s underwater combat engineers<\/a>, Ranger regiments, electronic warfare personnel, and Apache pilots. The armed forces made that mistake when it came to equestrian skills<\/a> and pack animals<\/a> and later attempted to rebuild that capability, awkwardly, and in a hurry. The modern cavalry\u2019s attempt to preserve maneuver reconnaissance and infantry-smashing tactics on the battlefield in the face of a hostile institutional Army is another example of how quick the organization is to jettison skill sets that have no other institutional home.<\/p>\n Ask any recruiter: there are things the Army can make quickly in a crisis (new privates) and things that the Army cannot make quickly in a crisis (mid-range and senior leaders).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Maintain the training base and force mobilization structure. The art and science of creating new Soldiers is obviously crucial to a scalable Army of tomorrow. So are the mobilization platforms<\/a> needed to send those formations out into the world.<\/p>\n Husband experience. Ask any recruiter: there are things the Army can make quickly in a crisis (new privates) and things that the Army cannot make quickly in a crisis (mid-range and senior leaders). War bestows greater responsibility on everyone (Eisenhower was, famously, a lieutenant colonel<\/a> at the outset of the second world war\u2014seven years later he was a four-star general), but a basic skill set of military competence\u2014such as possessed by non-commissioned officers and field grade officers who are staff college graduates\u2014 is infinitely easier to \u201ckeep warm\u201d than to bake from scratch. An expanded selected reserve, a functional Individual Ready Reserve<\/a>, and a connected and engaged Retired Reserve provide cost-effective solutions to keeping this experience accessible to the National Command Authority for use as a base upon which to build a large, wartime, conscript<\/a> Army.<\/p>\n Stop fighting for active component end strength. The Army is people and people are expensive. Grow the (inexpensive) reserve components in relation to the (expensive) active component. The Army has pursued a strategy of placing much of its combat support tasks in the Army Reserve and maintaining combat power in the Active Component, while at the same time limiting the Selected Reserve\u2019s size<\/a> to a set fraction of the Active Component\u2019s size. The Army National Guard\u2014which already houses 50% of the Army\u2019s combat forces\u2014provides a ready solution whereby the \u201cmeat\u201d of combat forces can be much more economically maintained within the Reserve Component until needed for large scale operations.<\/p>\n Invest in capabilities that allow rapid scalability and rehearse<\/u> them. This involves personnel and training solutions (a credible implementation of the now dysfunctional draft, reserve component call-up, and a plan to stand up more basic training and officer candidate slots) as well as a plan to leverage the Defense Production Act<\/em> into the production of military hardware. A credible plan for total mobilization is the ultimate form of \u201cholding adversary assets at risk\u201d; it means the Nation is serious about using the big hammer that is a wartime Army if and when required. The political toxicity of the draft has meant that little effort or attention has been placed on enabling or rehearsing this capability; the All-Volunteer Force has become a political article of faith<\/a> even though it must be discarded to build a fighting force to win WWIII.\u00a0 The current discussion<\/a> about the gender of draftees<\/a> operates as a distraction to the larger problem: the draft is almost completely broken. The current selective service system isn\u2019t designed to actually work and no one is interested in fixing it. Truth time: a Nation that is unwilling to mobilize its youth in its defense cannot long continue to exist, and America should come to terms with this reality<\/a> sooner rather than later.<\/p>\n Have a plan<\/a> to employ the 5-million-person Army. In the author\u2019s modest experience, even apart from the politically fraught question of how to man a future war, even the more essentially martial question of how<\/em> to fight a future war also receives scant attention. Contingency war planning itself is remarkably under-developed and such plans that exist do not carry the organization through more than the preliminary steps<\/a> of any future conflict. There is no real reason for this: planning is cheap and planners<\/a> are easy<\/a> to come by.<\/p>\n Continue emphasis on modernization and research<\/a> into new equipment<\/a> and systems. Artillery<\/a> imbalance with Russian systems is a long-standing area where solutions are needed and in development. Unmanned systems are also a developing new frontier on land<\/a>, as well as in the air and at sea. The development of new optics<\/a>, exoskeletons<\/a>, and weapons systems<\/a> seem ready to contribute to U.S. overmatch on the modern battlefield.<\/p>\n Mass forces. Don\u2019t try to be the Marine Corps (or, for that matter, the Air Force<\/a>, which they apparently resent<\/a>). The Marine Corps has already moved away from overlap with the Army when it ditched<\/a> its armor force. The USMC Commandant might have been on to something when he said, in 2020: \u201cArmy is huge\u2026We need a big Army. They win our wars. The Marine Corps doesn\u2019t win the wars. We win the battles.\u201d The Army agrees<\/a>: (\u201cSoldiers aren\u2019t fighting Marines for a job in the Indo-Pacific\u201d). That said, a plan<\/a> to use the Army to \u201ccreate overmatch for the Joint Force Commander of the future by executing and enabling nonlinear operations\u201d might not be as effective as one which is designed to enable victory by creating overmatch within<\/em> linear operations<\/a>.<\/p>\n Today\u2019s Army seeks to maintain active component force structure<\/a> and forward-deployed overseas missions. Because that is how it stays relevant. And relevance leads to funding. And funding leads to force structure. And force structure leads to jobs. This short-term approach will not<\/a> serve the Nation well.<\/p>\n Tomorrow\u2019s Army must be focused on creating a scalable platform that gets the maximum number of America\u2019s sons and daughters into uniform, in turn generating the force needed to win a big future land war. Because that\u2019s what the Nation needs. Or at least that is what the Nation will<\/em> need. Ultimately, the Nation will either invest prudently in the Army\u2019s essential war fighting and war winning capabilities, or it will allow the individual services to try and divvy up such near-term military tasks as show promise in attracting funding. The choice is a stark one. The decisions will have future consequences.<\/p>\n