Advancements in technology are changing the future battlefield, but one fundamental reality remains for the U.S. Army.

The nine-soldier infantry squad is a decisive edge in ground combat—these soldiers are still the ones who will close with the enemy in such proximity that they can smell the enemy, feel their breath and look into their eyes.

It’s a historical reality that Brig. Gen. Phillip Kiniery thinks about a lot. As commandant of the U.S. Army Infantry School and director of the Soldier Lethality Cross-Functional Team, it is up to Kiniery to ensure that the Army’s infantry squads achieve decisive overmatch at the tactical edge because the fight “is going to be violent,” he said.

“[It could be] a bayonet in someone’s chest or a shot out to 600 meters at night because we can, but everything happens within that 300 meters,” Kiniery said in May. “It is the truest form of the ethical application of violence anywhere. We are asking young soldiers to kill someone. That’s winning for us.”

Those plausible combat scenarios have Kiniery and Army senior leaders concerned, not over the grit required of U.S. infantry soldiers, but over how they’re being equipped for such a fight.

Mismatched Gear

While there’s no military unit more lethal than an American infantry rifle squad, its combat capabilities have been assembled piecemeal over many years, compromising a squad’s ability to fight as a formation and achieve the overmatch necessary to prevail and survive in combat.

Soldiers are wearing mismatched helmets, pouches and vests, training with different rifles and carrying the weight of gear procured over time “in a vacuum” without any consideration of central integration, Kiniery said.

“We’ve been focusing our efforts on the individual soldier for so long, we’ve burdened them with redundant capabilities developed in a stovepipe and added extra weight,” Kiniery said in March during a panel discussion at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Global Force Symposium and Exposition in Huntsville, Alabama.

“Reducing the soldier’s load is not a new idea, nor is it novel,” he said, as it is something “we’ve been talking about for generations.” What also is not novel is the idea that a squad is a close-combat formation that leverages soldiers’ skills and capabilities, not a group of individually equipped soldiers.

Working Together

Kiniery is determined to replace the generational discussion with an executable plan he has named the “Squad as a System,” an effort that centers on the understanding that soldiers serve in different roles within the squad, and “they work together as one system,” he said.

By going into battle with the same set of equipment, a squad is interoperable, there are no gaps in capability because everyone’s gear is the same size, shape and weight, and the fight becomes the focus. “It’s funny how hard this problem is that we haven’t solved it, but I don’t believe that our senior leaders, or anyone in my position, would ever stop, because I think we’re derelict if we do,” Kiniery said.

The importance of boosting the lethality of the infantry squad and preparing its soldiers for close combat is what prompted then-Defense Secretary James Mattis in 2018 to create the Close Combat Lethality Task Force.

In creating the task force, Mattis, who sought to overcome “an erosion in close-combat capability relative to the pacing threats identified in the National Defense Strategy,” pointed out that close-combat formations in the total force have “historically accounted for almost 90% of our casualties.”

Retired Col. Daniel Roper, AUSA’s National Security Studies director, analyzed the newly formed task force in a 2018 AUSA paper, “Regaining Tactical Overmatch: The Close Combat Lethality Task Force.”

The Army and DoD “are long overdue in addressing a significant capability and survivability shortcoming in its most fundamental formation—the infantry squad,” the paper said. The shortcoming, Roper wrote, is a political, strategic and moral issue, and to prevail against near-peer threats in the “increasingly lethal 21st century security environment,” the U.S. must have a force with a dominant close-combat fighting capability.

Writing of the danger and sacrifices faced by the infantry squad, Roper urged the U.S. to “do everything feasible to minimize the blood spilled by its front-line warriors fulfilling their indispensable role in defense of the nation.”

“The Army and DoD should approach close combat as an excepted function, not just a branch of service, but as a distinct band of warriors whose mission is to fight and win against an enemy they must kill face-to-face,” Roper wrote, advocating for the prioritization of more immersive virtual training and specialized equipping of infantry squads.

Citing Roper’s paper, Kiniery said because “fallen U.S. troops present the greatest vulnerability to U.S. employment of military power,” his imperative to build lethal squads is a moral and strategic obligation.

As part of the Squad as a System effort, Kiniery in January will roll out two new training courses at Fort Benning, Georgia—the Rifle Squad Weapons Master Trainer Course and the Rifle Platoon Weapons Master Trainer Course.

The goal of the courses is to keep squad training tight without having soldiers leave for remote training every time a new piece of equipment comes through.

The courses for leaders last four weeks. “They take it back to the squad and they train it,” he said. “That’s everything from the quadcopter to the rifle. It’s a graduate-level course.”

Outfitting Troops

While the Squad as a System effort has been an imperative for a couple of decades, the challenge has been sifting through hundreds of lines of items that go into equipping an infantry soldier and making the kinds of changes that would yield a uniform architecture unique to the fighting needs of an infantry squad, Kiniery said.

That means equipping the Total Army’s more than 3,800 infantry rifle squads, not as individual soldiers with disparate pieces of gear, but as formations that fight tightly and lethally as a system with a uniform set of packaged capabilities, he said.

“There are like 400 [soldier equipment] programs, all the way down from the top they wear to the helmet they have. You can walk around, and some of them have different helmets on; some of them have different night-vision goggles,” Kiniery said. “It’s a crime, because we’re fielding the soldier.”

Add to that the “confederation of tribes,” as Kiniery described the different types of infantry squads that will be touched by this initiative, such as airborne, mechanized, Ranger and Arctic formations, each with its own infantry culture and equipment.

Starting Point

While those formations may have some specialized requirements, Kiniery and the Soldier Lethality Cross-Functional Team have developed a baseline list of equipment for each infantry squad that will become a starting point.

For example, every infantry rifle squad soldier will wear the Integrated Head Protection System, the Army’s newest combat helmet, and the Modular Scalable Vest, and they will have a modernized night-vision device and thermal weapon sight. Seven of a squad’s nine soldiers will carry the new M7 rifle, while the squad’s automatic riflemen will carry the M250 automatic rifle. The squad leader and each fire team leader will carry the M17 service pistol and a command and control device, and the grenadiers will carry the M320A1 grenade launcher.

There may be some tweaks to the baseline before it is adopted and fielded, but the addition of more equipment will continue to be evaluated based on the squad, not the individual soldier. “If I tell industry everything’s going to be a USB input, it’s USB. You can’t push out this many megahertz or gigahertz of power, or anything inside the helmet can’t weigh more than 0.6 ounces,” Kiniery said, using hypothetical items as examples. “If I put out a standard, industry will build to that.”

A test is being developed at U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command to evaluate a squad’s shoot, move and communicate functions and come up with metrics that can apply across the infantry, Kiniery said.

“So, if industry comes back with a piece of equipment and says, ‘Hey, this is more lethal, this will make a squad more lethal,’ instead of us just jumping into it, we’re like, ‘OK, well, let’s test it against our system,’ ” Kiniery said.

Moving Fast

Feeling the weight of his responsibility to shape the Army’s infantry squads for decisive overmatch against an ever-evolving enemy, Kiniery said speed is important. “If we don’t work fast on Squad as a System and don’t fully appreciate it, we will only slow down transformation and modernization, and we won’t be able to keep up,” he said.

He recalled his early days as commandant of the Infantry School and director of the Soldier Lethality Cross-Functional Team, the part of his job that falls under U.S. Army Futures Command.

In a one-on-one with Gen. James Rainey, commanding general of Futures Command, Kiniery said, “Rainey said to me, ‘The squad is a system, Phil. You own this. You’re the infantry commandant.’ Then I literally started thinking, I’d always had the problem of not every squad looks equal, equipped equal. Why can’t we ever get this right?”

Using an Abrams tank as an example of why he can’t produce squads in an assembly line, Kiniery pointed out that tanks are all created to the same standard, down to the tiniest lug nut, while soldiers are humans and can only be alike in certain ways.

“It’s the tank that’s equipped, not the soldier inside. On a squad, all nine soldiers have to work together, so now, we have to enable them as a system to be able to do that,” Kiniery said. “As soon as we equip them differently, they won’t be able to.”

Optimistic that the new Army Transformation Initiative announced May 1 by Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George will help accelerate his work to give Army infantry squads the overmatch they need, Kiniery said, “The position I’m in is the position to push this.”