ASSOCIATION OF THE UNITED STATES ARMY

Honor is the foundation of the profession of arms. It is the unbreakable thread that holds the fabric of our Army together, tightly interlacing duty and country. This core value remains at the heart of our shared professional identity as servants to the nation. Honor is the link between leadership and any organization that desires to sustain success. In the Army, no amount of ability matters without honor. Honor must come first and is the ultimate competitive advantage.

The highest military honor a nation can bestow is the 21-gun salute. The custom originates with the earliest warriors—it...

Honor is the foundation of the profession of arms. It is the unbreakable thread that holds the fabric of our Army together, tightly interlacing duty and country. This core value remains at the heart of our shared professional identity as servants to the nation. Honor is the link between leadership and any organization that desires to sustain success. In the Army, no amount of ability matters without honor. Honor must come first and is the ultimate competitive advantage.

The highest military honor a nation can bestow is the 21-gun salute. The custom originates with the earliest warriors—it...

Honor is the foundation of the profession of arms. It is the unbreakable thread that holds the fabric of our Army together, tightly interlacing duty and country. This core value remains at the heart of our shared professional identity as servants to the nation. Honor is the link between leadership and any organization that desires to sustain success. In the Army, no amount of ability matters without honor. Honor must come first and is the ultimate competitive advantage.

The highest military honor a nation can bestow is the 21-gun salute. The custom originates with the earliest warriors—it...

Tales of America’s First Armored Soldiers

Pershing’s Tankers: Personal Accounts of the AEF Tank Corps in World War I. Edited by Lawrence M. Kaplan. University Press of Kentucky (An AUSA Title). 312 pages. $50

By Edward G. Lengel

The officers and men of the U.S. Army Tank Corps knew they were making history as they deployed to the Western Front in the late summer of 1918. Although the British and French—and to a lesser extent the Germans—had been experimenting with armored vehicles in combat since 1916, Americans were new to mechanized warfare. Rather than dismiss tanks as aberrations, however...

A technology involving data transactions will fundamentally change how the U.S. military operates. It is a confusing concept, but one that should be embraced as it offers tremendous potential, specifically in logistics. It’s called blockchain technology, and it will change the way business is done across every industry—including supply chain management, agriculture, banking, transportation, education, cyber and more.

It will not only change industries, it will disrupt them. Just as businesses like Uber and Amazon disrupted markets, blockchain will disrupt markets yet again.

Imagine a military...

“The problem of military innovation is necessarily a problem of bureaucratic innovation,” Stephen Peter Rosen writes in Winning the Next War: Innovation and the Modern Military. While bureaucracies are not supposed to be good at innovation, Rosen points out, “Bureaucracies do innovate … even military ones, and the question becomes not whether but why and how they change.” He goes on to analyze military innovation in peacetime, wartime and in response to technology.

Even though today’s challenges don’t neatly fit into one of Rosen’s three categories, his book is a fascinating read for any...

U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command Pamphlet 525-3-6: The U.S. Army Functional Concept for Movement and Maneuver 2020–2040, dated February 2017, describes a lethal future battlefield. This battlefield will include fighting in multiple domains to include land, air, maritime, space and cyberspace. Robotics on the ground and in the air will be common. Use of artificial intelligence will be exploited by friendly and threat forces. Transitioning between operations against multiple threats will be common and frequent. Newer technologies, such as advanced body armor and munitions, which can...

The recruiting environment for the U.S. Army is difficult and will become even more so. The problem resides in previous “truths” of Army recruiting relying on fit, motivated high school graduates looking to fill their need for patriotic service. They no longer produce the number of recruits the Army needs.

According to the U.S. Census, over the past 10 years there has been an 8 to 9 percent increase in the number of young adults living at home following high school graduation. The U.S. unemployment rate for those 25 years and older with a high school diploma is just over 4 percent—a 10-year low...

On July 11, 2014, battalions from Ukraine’s 24th and 72nd Mechanized Brigades assembled outside of the town of Zelenopillya, located about 5 miles from the Russian border. Having achieved success against the Russian-led separatist forces in the breakaway oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk (the Donbass) over the previous two months, they were assembling before what was planned to be a final push to the border to cut off the supply lines of the paramilitary forces from their Russian sponsors.

What started as a fairly normal day soon took an unexpected turn. It started with the buzzing of Russian...

On July 11, 2014, battalions from Ukraine’s 24th and 72nd Mechanized Brigades assembled outside of the town of Zelenopillya, located about 5 miles from the Russian border. Having achieved success against the Russian-led separatist forces in the breakaway oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk (the Donbass) over the previous two months, they were assembling before what was planned to be a final push to the border to cut off the supply lines of the paramilitary forces from their Russian sponsors.

What started as a fairly normal day soon took an unexpected turn. It started with the buzzing of Russian...

Hubris Can Undermine Even Elite Forces

Day of the Rangers: The Battle of Mogadishu 25 Years On. Leigh Neville. Osprey Publishing. 352 pages. $30

By Col. Gregory Fontenot, U.S. Army retired

Leigh Neville’s Day of the Rangers: The Battle of Mogadishu 25 Years On should be read widely. Neville has made a serious contribution to our understanding of that sad day in October 1993 in Somalia. He takes his title from the way the day is recalled in Mogadishu. It is appropriate as Neville’s narrative and those who participated reveal what was good as well as what went wrong when special operators and a...

America’s Army has entered an urgent and risky period of reform that Secretary of the Army Mark T. Esper calls “Army Renaissance.”

Speaking at his first Association of the U.S. Army Annual Meeting since he became the Army’s 23rd secretary, Esper said, “Seventeen consecutive years of irregular war, extended periods of budget uncertainty and an increasingly complex security environment have eroded our competitive edge. Our adversaries meanwhile have taken advantage of this to better their positions.”

The Army has been responding, he said. It has improved readiness, is increasing lethality and has...

Greetings from the Association of the United States Army (AUSA), our Army’s and our soldiers’ professional organization.

I recently had the honor of spending time with the Kansas City Chapter of the Association of the United States Army.

Retired Maj. Emma Toops, chapter president, and the Greater Kansas City Chapter were my hosts for a fun and event-filled two days in this wonderful mid-western Missouri city with many historic sites and a forward-thinking focus on the future.

One of the unique opportunities I had during my first few hours on the ground was to visit one of the chapter’s outreach...

Arecent study identifying 16 indicators of family readiness concluded families that reach out to other military families, or participate in installation services, are overall healthier.

“The Army is working on and making good efforts in helping develop and maintain people’s social support networks,” said Dr. Stacy Hawkins, behavioral research scientist with the Research Facilitation Laboratory–Army Analytics Group.

Hawkins spoke during a Military Family Forum at the 2018 Association of the U.S. Army Annual Meeting and Exposition and defined healthy families as those whose members have better...

The Defense Department’s funding bill for fiscal 2019 was among the appropriations bills signed into law before the beginning of the fiscal year Oct. 1. However, seven spending bills remain unpassed.

On Dec. 5, the president signed a continuing resolution that will provide temporary appropriations for nine cabinet departments, including the Departments of State, Homeland Security, Commerce, Justice and Interior and numerous smaller agencies through Dec. 21.

If Congress fails to reach an agreement on the seven remaining spending bills, the government could partially shut down for the third time...