Is the Army dissipating its focus to the point that it won't be able to successfully carry out its core competencies of large-scale conventional warfare and wide-areas security missions in the land domain?
The Army has announced where it will base new multi-domain units:
The Army plans to establish five Multi-Doman Task Force units, with two aligned to the Indo-Pacific, one in Europe, one in the Arctic and the fifth “aligned for global response,” according to a May 31 report by the Congressional Research Service.
Siting the units is key to the Army’s modernization strategy announced in 2019 under which it intends to transform into a multidomain force by 2035.
The Army “needs to transform from its current state into a multi-domain force that can project power across all domains of warfare (land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace) throughout the world,” the environmental assessment states.
What exactly will these units be?
The Multi-Domain Task Force unit is a reorganized field artillery brigade but with beefed-up capabilities for long-range weapons fire and air-missile defense, the assessment states.
It combines intelligence, information, cyber, electronic warfare and space capabilities into a single battalion, the assessment states.
The Army is needs to control the land. I worry the Army is forgetting to focus on winning in its own land domain, as I focused on in this Military Review article.
Russia is flailing in their invasion of Ukraine. But could the United States conduct a large-scale combat operation better?
[Consider that] the current Army has no experience conducting live LSCO above the brigade level since the invasion of Iraq nineteen years ago. There is virtually no one in the United States Army below the ranks of colonel and command sergeant major who has ever experienced an operation larger than that of a brigade. Moreover, those colonels and command sergeants major were young officers and noncommissioned officers during the invasion of Iraq and saw only their small slices of the operation, probably at company level or below. The US Army simply has insufficient experience in LSCO over time and distance to be able to expect to perform considerably better than the Russians have in Ukraine.
Do Multi-Domain Task Forces address this core competency issue?
If each service focuses on its own domain, the synergy helps all services win their own domain. I used the Guadalcanal campaign in this Land Warfare Paper to illustrate that.
It isn't bad if the Army can assist other services win their domains. But if the Army doesn't master LSCO, where does it leave land warfare?
NOTE: My latest war coverage is here.
