Can the Army strike deep on a battlefield?
That's what the Army wants to demonstrate:
The Army will host an interservice aviation exercise in May to prove its Chief of Staff’s recent claim that the service can bring “speed and range” to future battlefields. Known as EDGE21 — Experimentation Demonstration Gateway Event 2021 – and held at Dugway Proving Ground, the experimental wargame will be the Army’s latest bid to prove it plays a vital role in far-ranging and fast-paced All Domain Operations.
The article summary states:
New drones – launched by helicopters in flight and built by the Pentagon's Strategic Capabilities Office – will reach out “hundreds of kilometers.” Marine F-35s, 82nd Airborne troops, and Special Ops will also participate in exercise EDGE21.
In some ways this is the Army reacting to the lack of Air Force interest in prioritizing close air support for the Army. This especially applies to long-range artillery.
And if the Army can reach hundreds of kilometers behind enemy lines it will help the Army. If the Army can take out enemy air defenses and air bases, that will enable Air Force ground support.
But I worry that the job of paving the way for helicopter deep strikes behind enemy lines is too difficult. In that post I note a very old pre-Blogger TDR post (scroll down to "Deep Strike" on January 30, 2004):
During the Iraq War, the Army launched a deep strike ahead of 3rd ID to attack Republican Guard elements guarding the approaches to Baghdad . The attack was repelled by intense ground fire and we lost an Apache. The crew survived and was freed late in the war.
Many said this showed that deep strike was flawed. And this seemed like a real lesson of the war since we really anticipated our attack helicopters would be used behind our front lines to strike advancing Soviet armor in the Fulda Gap. We changed that after the Cold War was won. This battle seemed to show that the concept is flawed.
Yet I was puzzled. Deep strike certainly worked in Desert Storm. The Iraq War answers this. According to the authors, the attack was smaller than first planned and delayed by hours; failed to attack from a better direction; lacked good intel on the target; and squandered an artillery strike mission that occurred hours earlier, when the helicopters were supposed to attack. Instead of suppressing the Iraqis as the helicopters attacked, the artillery mission just warned the Iraqis that we were up to something.
So I'll suspend my judgment on deep strike by our helicopters.
Using drones to go deep may be the key rather than helicopters. They'd spot for fires units.
So for now I'm more interested in the deep strike artillery the Army is developing to pick up the slack until the Air Force can intervene directly in the ground battle.
But I'll wait to see how this deep strike works out before judging. The Army has had a lot of time to work on this.
