US armed forces find coalition warfare more and more difficult and decreasingly helpful. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan accelerated the transformation of US operations; the missions are now too wired, too widely dispersed, too precise, and happen too quickly for other allies to keep up. In the old days, the allies used to carve out battlefields in distinct ‘areas of responsibility’. But because US forces are now able to respond quickly across long distances, they see less and less value in segregating the battlefield by time, location, or mission. As a result, they find it more difficult to give less capable militaries meaningful assignments.
So I thought I'd write a post about how we could leverage bits of European capabilities to reinforce our existing divisions and brigades by plugging European brigades or battalions into our units. Heck, maybe we could design some cadre brigades designed for European battalions (or even companies?) plus our own Army National Guard units.
Then I noticed that I wrote that post a month ago.
Well, then. More coffee would be in order.
We've spend 50 years urging our European allies to spend more on defense. We won't suddenly become more successful. I'd rather adapt so that willing partners can contribute usefully at whatever level. I will say that this would involve either making sure our allies have the command-and-control equipment that allows these brigades and battalions to plug into our headquarters. We'd either need to convince them to buy them, provide them outright, or create command-and-control headquarters assets that could be attached to the allied brigade or battalion to bridge the gap that would exist as information is passed from our higher headquarters to allied units. Allied brigade or battalion headquarters could obviously communicate down easily enough with their organic equipment. But they might not be able to fully communicate up to our controlling headquarters. So we'd have to spend money on making sure enough information can be passed. If it leverages allied help, it would be worth spending.
Actually, our Army National Guard might be useful to study in this regard given that Guard divisions and even brigades are made up from units scattered across a state or even multiple states to form the larger units.
