The U.S. Army can expect, in the future, to fight enemies who will
know exactly how to exploit the vulnerabilities of a technologically
superior force. These adversaries will be unable to match the advanced
capabilities that the United States has in areas such as intelligence
gathering, worldwide reach and global communications. But they will
at times succeed in fooling their U.S. foes by flooding them with
information or simply by not doing a thing.
Such premises became food for thought and extensive debate during
the so-called Army Transformation War Game held in April at the
War College, in Carlisle, Penn. It presented a hypothetical 2019
scenario of multiple global crises where the Army—along with
other U.S. services and allies—was expected to quickly deploy
forces and execute directives set by the nation’s political
leaders.
“We want to address what kind of Army we need in the future,”
says Brig. Gen. (P) Michael A. Vane, deputy chief of staff for doctrine
at the Training and Doctrine Command. This was the third war game
that TRADOC organized for the Army chief of staff, to help him figure
out how the service should “transform” from a large,
monolithic entity to a more flexible, agile force that can respond
to a wide array of contingencies.
“We are looking at the implications [of this war game] for
the whole Army,” Vane says during a roundtable with reporters.
“How we fight, how we structure ourselves.”
The imaginary global scenario set in 2019 is nothing but chaos.
A U.S. peacekeeping mission in Southeast Asia (in a fictitious nation
called Sumisia) is quickly escalating into a counterinsurgency operation
against well-organized separatists. A major regional war is erupting
in the Caspian Sea area between a U.S. ally (Azerbaijan) and Anfar,
an aggressor nation (Anfar is a fictitious name), who are all fighting
for access to oil and natural gas. Meanwhile, there is concern about
potential flare-ups in Colombia, Korea (according to the scenario,
North and South Korea reunite in 2015) and the Balkans. Complicating
the situation further is a spate of attacks against the United States,
in the form of terrorist bombings and cyber-crimes that wreck the
transportation and financial systems in American cities.
In interviews during the third day of the week-long war game, several
participants shared insights on how the U.S. Army was performing
in the various hotspots and discussed what they perceived as the
vulnerabilities of a force that was technologically superior to
any of its opponents. The term “Blue force” is used
to describe U.S. and allies. “Red forces” are their
adversaries.
The contingency in Sumisia starts out as a peace enforcement mission,
but eventually evolves into full-fledged combat. In 2019, rebel
guerillas (called the Northern Independence Movement, or NIM) have
been fighting for nearly a decade to overthrow the Sumisian government.
They are successful in taking over two-thirds of the island of Sumatra.
A devastating earthquake gives the Sumisian government the perfect
excuse to summon a humanitarian U.N. mission, led by the United
States.
In addition, the U.S. plans to deploy a peace-enforcement battalion
of Marines and soldiers to keep the Sumisian government and NIM
forces separated, stabilize the area and ultimately turn over the
operation to U.N. peacekeepers.
NIM forces are unhappy about the U.S. presence. “Blue is
a speed bump in the way,” says the Red commander. His real
name is Rick Sinnreich, a military consultant and syndicated columnist.
But Red does not want to fight the United States, a militarily
superior enemy. So when the peace-enforcement mission arrives, Sumatra
immediately goes quiet. The NIM guerillas then begin attacking other
parts of Sumisia. “While the U.S. forces are distracted in
Sumatra, we will destroy the [Sumisian] government elsewhere,”
Sinnreich says.
There is yet another twist in the story. While the peace-enforcement
operation is underway, the Washington, D.C., subway is bombed in
a terrorist attack. U.S. authorities claim that the perpetrators
are associated with NIM. For U.S. forces in Sumisia, that means
they must be ready to chase, hunt and apprehend NIM leaders in their
own backyards.
The Red force shifts tactics, seeking to exploit certain vulnerabilities
that potentially could beleaguer the U.S. Army of 2019: a lack of
flexibility to quickly switch gears in order to meet an unexpected
threat and an over-reliance on automated robotic sensors to keep
track of the enemy.
“They [the U.S. Army] do peace enforcement effectively,”
Sinnreich says. But when the mission shifts from peace enforcement
to counterinsurgency, they need units that can react rapidly when
tactical mobility is required, he explains.
In the battles of 2019, U.S. forces likely will confront a wide
range of threats—from ballistic missiles and electromagnetic
pulse weapons to guerilla soldiers armed with rocket-propelled grenades.
“At short distance, a guy with an RPG is just as lethal as
any ballistic missile,” says Sinnreich. In a densely populated
area like Sumisia, “a lot of guys with RPGs means it’s
all going to look like Mogadishu,” he adds. To survive in
that environment, the Army needs to “be able to mix and match
different pieces a lot faster. ... They can’t afford to take
two weeks off to reorganize.”
Additionally, Sinnreich says, the Red force plans to exploit Blue’s
unfamiliarity with the terrain. “We think Blue has a tougher
time the more complex the terrain is.”
The Red commanders also notice that Blue’s strength—and
potential weakness—is its reliance on vast amounts of information.
Blue has so many sensors and unmanned reconnaissance aircraft that
Red knows it cannot keep Blue from seeing everything. Red attempts
to counter Blue’s “information superiority” by
giving them so much data, that they can’t decide what’s
important.
“While we can’t prevent them from seeing us, we can
prevent them from understanding what they see,” Sinnreich
says. “Instead of trying to hide, Red tries to hide in plain
sight,” he says. “For every important thing out there,
we give them nine unimportant things. For every movement that matters,
we move nine times randomly in ways that don’t matter. For
every target that hurts us, we try to give them nine targets that
don’t hurt us. We try to flood the system with information.”
Vane does not dispute the Red commander’s observations. He
says the Army’s top leaders have for years been engaged in
an “interesting discussion” about whether knowing more
necessarily is better. “If they try to flood us with information,
keep us from being able to quickly turn the information into intelligence,
that is one thing we need to look at. How can we sift and filter
information quickly, so you can understand what the enemy’s
next move will be.”
Blue Force Observations
The Blue commanders, meanwhile, are drawing some of their own lessons
from the Sumisia operation. Army Maj. Gen. Jerry Boykin is the fictitious
head of a Blue special operations task force.
Among other things, he is encouraged by how well the Army, the
Marines and other organizations are working together in this operation.
“It’s been very interesting,” he says. “We’ve
been dealing with far more than Army issues. We’ve been dealing
with joint issues.”
The only way the United States will run operations successfully,
he says, is by “integrating all the services, as well as the
other government agencies.” The Army and the Marines, particularly,
fought together under a common command-and-control structure, which
facilitated the decision-making process.
In the context of the Sumisia scenario, Boykin notes that a key
question the Army leadership must answer is whether the force will
be flexible and “multifunctional” enough to be able
to operate both in a high-intensity conflict (as in the Caspian
war) and in lower-scale contingencies such as Sumisia.
Blue commanders also emphasized the need to understand the rules
of engagement in peacekeeping operations. During the war game, Boykin
adds, “We’ve had some robust discussions” that
sought to answer questions such as, “Are we operating in support
of one side or the other? Or as a neutral force?”
The Army, Boykin stresses, is not designing forces specifically
for peacekeeping. “But we are trying to develop leaders and
doctrine and rules of engagement, so that they are able to adapt
to a peacekeeping environment.”
He asserts that the Army is moving in the right direction with
its so-called Objective Force, a modernization blueprint that makes
mobility and deployability top priorities. The war game assumes
that, in 2019, the Army is smaller in size, but much more versatile
and deployable than the current force. That is helpful in scenarios
such as Sumisia, because “regardless of what the environment
or the mission is, we can fight the same force, by adding or subtracting
pieces,” Boykin says.
In the urge to consolidate the force, however, the Army should
not rush to eliminate “legacy” components that it may
still need 20 years from now, he cautions. As the war game progresses,
Boykin says, “We are starting to question whether there are
some legacy concepts that need to be retained.” A case in
point are airborne and air-assault units. These forces will be needed,
“especially for those types of terrain that don’t lend
themselves to vehicle movements,” Boykin says. “We still
need some light infantry.”
Regardless of what the Army does with its own forces, it also must
ensure that the Air Force and the Navy can provide adequate airlift
and sealift, he says. “If we have a future requirement that
is an absolute, it’s fast sealift and long-range air transport.”
For the Sumatra operation, it took an Army division seven days to
get to the theater from Hawaii, by sea. “Unquestionably, the
Navy and the Air Force need to have the resources to move the Army,”
Boykin says.
While these events take place in the Sumisian scenario, over in
the Caspian theater, the Army is about to engage in all-out combat
against Anfar, an aggressor state that attacked neighboring Azerbaijan,
a U.S. ally. Anfar, with Iran’s support, is seeking to redress
historic grievances against the Azeri government and also wants
to gain access to the Caspian oil and natural gas pipelines. The
U.S. goal is to secure access to the energy sources for itself and
European allies, and to bring about stability in the region.
Iran provides military support to Anfar to increase pressure on
the Azeri government, but Azerbaijan refuses to cut deals with Anfar.
Anfar masses troops on the Azeri border for a possible invasion,
and the Azeri government gets the United States to come to the rescue.
Retired Marine Col. Darrell Combs is deputy commander of the fictitious
Red force in the Caspian. Unlike the NIM guerillas in Sumisia, this
force has military wherewithal, in addition to the backing from
Iran.
Anfar has no conventional air force, only helicopters and unmanned
aircraft. “We spend our money on UAVs,” Combs says.
“We bought nearly 1,000 UAVs,” to serve as bombers,
gunships and reconnaissance platforms.
The Red commander complains that the United States is overreacting
to Iran’s presence in the region. “Our Iranian bosses
sent a peacekeeping force to try to bring the fighting to a stop,”
says Combs. “Blue’s position is that only Blue can do
peacekeeping. That is ludicrous. Anybody out here can do peacekeeping.”
U.S. actions only bolster the Red force’s resolve. “We
are not going to be pushed off our home ground,” Combs says.
“We’ll fight to the end.”
Asked what he considers the weak spots of the U.S. land forces
in 2019, Combs notes that the Army is under a lot of pressure to
“finish quickly, be decisive and move back,” because
U.S. political leaders want to avoid taking too many casualties
and, further, there is not enough airlift to support an extended
operation. “As Blue has such worldwide reach, we are noticing
that less [airlift] has been allocated to this crisis,” he
adds. “The joint community is going to have to provide the
strategic lift to make the Army effective.”
The Army’s Objective Force, despite the shortfalls in airlift,
is “very rapidly deployable,” Combs says. “It
has great communications, intelligence gathering abilities.”
The Red force expects to benefit from one U.S. weakness: its fear
of taking casualties. “They are afraid of a close fight,”
says Combs. Anfar troops prepare to dig in. “We can compete
on the ground.”
Vane concedes that the airlift is a problem for the Army, even
though the war game was not specifically intended to become a gauge
for airlift requirements. “We can argue the numbers, but that’s
not the point,” Vane says. “We want to inform ourselves.”
There is growing concern in the Defense Department that sealift
and airlift are too expensive. In the war game, he adds, the Army
is trying to show how additional lift could make it more capable
and more valuable as an executor of U.S. national security goals.
In the follow-on analysis, says Vane, the question is whether airlift
is “important enough to reprioritize investments.”