The Army and the Air Force are crafting a new combined air-ground combat attack strategy to improve warfare networks, perform long-range sensing of targets, strike enemies more effectively and strengthen defenses across multiple domains in real-time.
The Army-Air Force collaboration, called "Multi-Domain Operations," has included in-depth joint-service wargames; it is ultimately aimed at developing new doctrine, service leaders explained.
A new Army-Air Force collaborative war strategy is, broadly speaking, discussed in terms of being a modern, or new iteration of the Cold War-era "AirLand Battle" strategy.
Eventually the Marines and Navy need to be brought in.
And while I like this, is this objective of the MDO exercises new thinking?
[Enabling the capability of] firing ground weapons to attack enemy air defenses and leveraging the altitude and range of surveillance aircraft to pinpoint targets for land-based attacks.
I ask because I thought the Israelis did that in 1982 using drones to spot for artillery in order to clear the skies for their aircraft over Lebanon.
And I know I thought of this in the 1970s in a wargame when I noticed my aircraft were too at risk to air defense fire, and I notice my long-range artillery could hit the air defense systems. That cleared the way for my air power to hit ground targets without high casualties. Still, this is good to do.
In my ideal world, fire support is a black box where a call to destroy or suppress a target automatically calls in the appropriate weapon capable of taking out the target in a timely manner without the soldier making the support request even knowing what asset provided the support.
It could be a plane or space system out of sight, an attack helicopter, a ship or submarine offshore, a distant ground force missile or artillery asset, or even an 81mm mortar back at the company level.
If cyber weapons can suppress the target or add to the fires mission success--perhaps by negating point defenses against fires missions or information operations highlighting a path of retreat open to the enemy before the rounds hit to get them to retreat, for example--it is automatically plugged in to the mission.
Indeed, if the target is close to civilians, perhaps the call for fire support triggers automatic telephone warnings to civilian numbers near the target if there is time before the rounds need to hit.
And if there is automatic deconfliction between aerial assets and artillery to avoid the former being hit by the latter by being in the same air space, that would be great, too.
UPDATE: I see I already made this point while citing my wargame experience.
