The Army is beginning wargames on determining the mix of the FCS being developed and conventional weapons for our future brigade combat teams:
“We will do work on the organizational composition of brigade combat teams [BCTs]: current BCTs, FCS BCTs,” said Rickey Smith, director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center-Forward, TRADOC. “We will give FCS spinouts to some BCTs and see how much better they become.”
Starting in early 2008 and running for several years, the simulations will be run at the Battle Lab Common Simulation Environment, White Sands Missile Range, N.M., and involve troops and gear at at least four bases around the country.
“We are working on full-spectrum operation that includes conventional attacks and irregular operations in major combat such as counterinsurgency,” Smith said. “For a given experiment, we can conduct force-on-force simulation from White Sands and have real-time connection with fires from Fort Sill, [Okla.]; maneuver from Fort Benning, [Ga.]; logistics from Fort Lee, [Va.]; and aviation from Fort Rucker, [Ala.].” The exercises will seek to determine, among other things, how FCS’ new sensors and weapons affect the amount of troops required to hold an area. “Can we cover a larger area with fewer people?” Smith said.
These will be the latest in an increasingly sophisticated set of war games intended to shape FCS doctrine and tactics. An earlier set took place in 2006, and grew out of experiences after the Iraq invasion.
From an organizational point of view, we are lucky to have had varied combat experience to match the exercises against. And fortunate to have combat veterans who will command these new units and so be better able to judge whether they are paper-cool or real world war winners.
And these units will be fielded as we retool our Army for conventional operations:
For six years, the Army has trained for and fought a counterinsurgency fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the Army’s top officer predicts that as soon as the operational tempo allows for brigades to be at home for at least 18 months, some training for conventional warfare will resume.
“I don’t think there’s any question that future conflicts are going to be exponentially different than what we’re seeing now in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey said Tuesday in remarks at the Brookings Institution, a non-partisan think tank.
Casey, who was been in the position since April 10, said the Army needs to be prepared for conventional warfare because the possibility of a return to such a conflict persists in other areas of the world.
He does not, however, believe a Cold War-style war is imminent.
“My personal view,” he said, “is that in the near term the prospect of a major state-on-state conflict is low.”
Still, he reiterated his well-worn message that the Army cannot afford to be as unbalanced in capabilities as it is in an era of globalization, the emergence of terrorist organizations that rely on high technology to recruit new members and increasing evidence of disenfranchised populations in lesser developed countries.
One key to a more broadly trained force, he said, is retaining the junior officers and mid-career noncommissioned officers with war-fighting experience over the past six years.
We had to unbalance our Army to fight and win in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army is a tool and not an end to itself. We had to risk breaking it to win the Iraq campaign. Had we lost it in a misguided attempt to preserve the Army, the defeat itself would have broken the Army. With victory, we won't have a problem repairing what has worn down and capitalizing on our advantages gained while fighting (veteran soldiers and experienc on what type of systems we need in the future to fight).
That said, it is foolish to think that all our future wars will be against insurgents and terrorists. We must regain our excellence in conventional operations that we demonstrated so convincingly in 1991 and 2003.
History restarted on September 11, 2001, and our Army must be ready for whatever else comes down the pike.
