ASSOCIATION OF THE UNITED STATES ARMY

On the front lines in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine—an area known as the Joint Forces Operation, formerly the Anti-Terrorist Operation zone—ground combat operations are evolving and incorporating new features.

Previous installments of this column have examined information operations and electronic warfare in this context. But increasingly, cyber is also playing an impactful role, presenting a potential vision of future cyber-enabled conflict.

The use of cyber by Russian Spetsnaz (special forces) and their proxies in the Donbas may not be sexy. Bits and bytes still cannot take and hold...

The first time I heard the expression “Leaders should love their soldiers,” I dismissed it as corny, soft and unrealistic. Over the course of my Army career, however, my understanding of what it means to love soldiers grew steadily. I now believe military leadership entails a moral obligation to genuinely love soldiers in ways that are appropriate for senior-subordinate relationships.

I initially made sense of the dictum to love my soldiers by interpreting it strictly in military terms. I embraced the famous adage by German Gen. Erwin Rommel that “the best form of welfare for the troops is...

Hybrid methods of warfare including deception, media manipulation, sabotage and other nonmilitary tactics, while not new, are increasingly hard to counter given their speed, scale and intensity, which are facilitated by rapid technological change and global interconnectivity. These hybrid threats can be ambiguous, hard to attribute, episodic and deniable and pose a challenge to NATO’s purpose to safeguard the freedom and security of its members by political and military means. Collective defense, the heart of the alliance’s spirit of solidarity and cohesion, means more than the internal...

The U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command’s Multi-Domain Operations website in July republished an article from Business Insider titled in part, “Watch the US … blow the hell out of a warship in a clear message to China.” While the capability to sink a ship with shore-based missiles is notable, one can hope that the potential enemy does not interpret this as: “Look at us sink an obsolete, immobile, undefended ship, not firing back, in daylight.” What if they do fire back?

The U.S. Army Futures Command can fight above its weight. But Futures Command is just part of the larger system behind the...

Enthralling Boots-on-the-Ground View of War

The Fighters: Americans in Combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. C.J. Chivers. Simon & Schuster. 400 pages. $28

By Capt. Garrison Haning

So much attention is paid to the large troop movements of war. History dwells on the events that set the military-industrial complex to work, churning out combat power. But the true price of battle is not paid by institutions, squadrons or brigades. It is paid by the people in those formations. The Fighters is written for the reader who wants to stand in the formation.

The quotes author C.J. Chivers opens the book with...

The Army’s Military Decision Making Process has remained relatively unchanged, at least from the time that I first studied it in the early 1980s. Is it time for a major update?

At its heart, the Military Decision Making Process is a process that blends activity of the seven battle operating systems into a coherent plan that has a good probability of success. The systems, however, have shifted at least twice in the past 25 years. Perhaps more importantly, a third change, one likely to alter the MDMP dramatically, is happening.

The first shift occurred when the Army introduced, then gained...

As the great and quoteworthy New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra would probably say of today’s Army, “It’s déjà vu all over again.”

As it did in the 1970s following the Vietnam War, the Army is emerging from a long counterinsurgency campaign and is renewing its emphasis on mechanized warfare through changes in its doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership, personnel and facilities (DOTMLPF). The latest version of Field Manual 3-0: Operations has filled in some doctrinal gaps that opened in the time since we stopped maneuvering brigades, divisions and corps, and has set the stage...

Every winter after the first snow, backs everywhere are sore, just as they were the year before. Those snow-shoveling muscles get a workout in a way they just don’t get in the gym or on a run. In much the same way, the publication of Multi-Domain Battle in October 2017 challenged the Army modeling and simulation community in a way that it hasn’t been since the publication of Field Manual 100-5: Operations in 1982.

Multi-Domain Operations is the new lens through which the Army will assess gaps, develop requirements and compare alternative solutions. No longer will unified land operations suffice...

Third Army’s post-World War I occupation of the German Rhineland revealed numerous shortfalls in its military government experience, leading to development of civil affairs doctrine, specialized personnel and units, and professional training and education. Col. Irwin L. Hunt’s 1920 report, “American Military Government of Occupied Germany, 1918–1920” heralded the beginning of modern Army civil affairs, which is celebrating its centennial the last week of October at Fort Bragg, N.C. Along with civil affairs’ enduring value, many current issues in maintaining this unique and vital strategic land...

When Sgt. 1st Class Victor Medina received groundbreaking therapy in 2012 involving virtual reality and computer-generated puzzles to help recover from a brain injury sustained in Iraq, he wasn’t thinking about the future of the Army. As one of the first patients at the National Intrepid Center of Excellence in Bethesda, Md., Medina needed help to improve cognitive function, including memory, focus, reaction time and speech.

At the time, such problem-solving and stimulation therapy was used to treat injuries, learning disabilities and behavioral disorders and was considered a possible treatment...

Military modernization is commonly associated with replacing an existing platform or weapon system. While the new items inevitably have higher unit procurement prices than those they replace, the costs associated with modernization are justified in terms of improved combat effectiveness and operating efficiency.

Among the Army’s six canonical modernization programs are several involving new vehicles and mobile weapon systems. The most obvious of these is the priority of producing a Next-Generation Combat Vehicle. The Army has an expansive vision of this vehicle. It will be a family of vehicles...

“The day has come when we all acknowledge that words, cameras, photographs, the internet, and information in general have become another branch of weaponry, another branch of the armed forces.”

That’s how Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu characterized the global information environment—and his country’s military role in it—in 2015. Two years later, he acknowledged Russia had created “information operations” troops. The information war, of course, has long been a feature of Moscow’s relationship with its adversaries in the West. The Cold War was very much a war of ideas, with the U.S. and...

The operational environment has changed in such a manner that requires commanders to be free to act, based on the higher commander’s intent, with flexible thought and application of combat power. Commanders must do this in concert with other commanders to create synergy with capabilities in all domains to seize fleeting opportunities to overmatch opponents—and it won’t come without risk.

In 2012, the U.S. Joint Staff Force Development office produced a planner’s guide entitled “Cross-Domain Synergy in Joint Operations.”  The document describes cross-domain synergy and further provides...

The operational environment has changed in such a manner that requires commanders to be free to act, based on the higher commander’s intent, with flexible thought and application of combat power. Commanders must do this in concert with other commanders to create synergy with capabilities in all domains to seize fleeting opportunities to overmatch opponents—and it won’t come without risk.

In 2012, the U.S. Joint Staff Force Development office produced a planner’s guide entitled “Cross-Domain Synergy in Joint Operations.”  The document describes cross-domain synergy and further provides...

In the long and storied 243-year history of the U.S. Army, the exploits of Sgt. Alvin C. York on Oct. 8, 1918, in the Argonne Forest in World War I stand as one of the all-time greatest individual feats of an American soldier. In battle that day, then-Cpl. York killed 25 Germans, captured 132 and knocked out 35 machine guns.

After the war, York excelled as a contributing citizen to his community and nation. He worked to improve the lives of the children in his rural Tennessee community, especially in the area of education, and helped promote the homefront war effort during World War II. His...