Update your terminology, we're up to All-Domain Operations:
So when [Air Force General John Hyten, the Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs] told me that All-Domain Operations is “the biggest key to the future of the entire budget,” I had to ask him to repeat what he said. He explained its importance this way.
“Because if we figure that out, we’ll have a significant advantage over everybody in the world for a long time, because it’s the ability to integrate and effectively command and control all domains in a conflict or in a crisis seamlessly — and we don’t know how to do that,” Hyten told me. “Nobody knows how to do that.”
All-Domain Operations, he went on, combines “space, cyber, deterrent, transportation, electromagnetic spectrum operations, missile defense — all of these global capabilities together … to compete with a global competitor and at all levels of conflict.”
Armies control land--but they can shoot at planes and ships or just operate in those domains for recon purposes, and can even cross the littorals.
Marines cross the littorals--but once ashore they can control land and can shoot at planes and ships or conduct recon in those domains.
Air forces can control the skies--but they can (and are supposed to) support ground forces with bombs, recon, and transport; bombard enemies not in contact with our ground forces; and can shoot at ships and submarines.
Navies can control the seas, but they can land ground forces and can shoot at planes and ground forces or conduct recon over the land.
I don't want to sound all stodgy, old, and stuck in tradition. But while using all elements of power is necessary, this is not new. It is combined arms on a grander scale. Bigger, yes. But nothing new.
What is also not new is the bureaucratic urge to expand your capabilities at the expense of your rivals. The military services are not exempt from that feature of bureaucracies.
And I worry that the concept of All-Domain Operations (so we forget Multi-Domain Operations which replaced Multi-Domain Battle?) is simply about air power advocates or sea-power advocates essentially trying to get the Army to be their auxiliaries for achieving their primary missions.
In a Land Warfare Paper on the Guadalcanal Campaign, I argued that the synergy of each service achieving its core competency in its own domain led to multi-domain (or all-domain, if you insist now) dominance and that the Army must be allowed to contribute its core competency in INDOPACOM (then PACOM, or USPACOM):
A true joint force in USPACOM requires land forces to carry out their core competencies. Marines bring sea-based early-entry capabilities. The army is the principal land force for “sustained campaign-level ground combat” which, among other things, can “preserve joint force freedom of action.”
The Army accepts that it is part of a joint, interagency and frequently multinational effort that includes nongovernmental entities. The army’s multidomain operating concept states that the various domains in which the military operates are interconnected. The Guadalcanal campaign of World War II amply demonstrates this multidomain synergy and demonstrates the centrality of the land and the importance of landpower in creating this effect.
Effective ground forces that are part of a joint force can compel enemy ground forces, if the enemy wishes to possess key terrain, to expose themselves to joint fires rather than remain dispersed and hidden. If they do not engage in ground combat they may lose that terrain. This capability for sustained operations is unique and distinct from the ability to punish with fires. Its presence in USPACOM will reassure allies and partners of American commitment by demonstrating the capacity to aid them in war. ...
The Army must be included in American defense strategy in USPACOM planning in ways that allow it to bring its core competency—winning large-scale land campaigns—to the joint multidomain effort as the core force for dominating the land domain in support of a campaign to operate freely in the global commons. The Army must promote and defend its role as a pillar of operations in the Asia–Pacific region, founded on the solid example of what joint forces achieved in the hard-fought Guadalcanal campaign 75 years ago.
I expanded on the Army role in INDOPACOM in Military Review not long after.
There is naturally "leakage" of any service being directly useful to other services in their primary domains, as I listed above. But this doesn't mean that any service should cripple their ability to achieve their primary competencies in their own domain in order to help other services achieve their core competencies.
We have separate services for a reason--specific domains require specific skill sets with specific weapons. Don't screw that up by letting bureaucracy empire building twist that reason for self-serving (and likely subconscious) purposes.
Integrate all the domains into one effort, but don't go overboard.
