The U.S. military should expand its thinking when it comes to anti-access/area-denial capabilities, a panel of experts said during a recent Association of the U.S. Army Hot Topic on fires.

Anti-access/area-denial, or A2/AD, refers to “actions or capabilities” that prevent adversarial forces from entering an operational theater, or that restrict their freedom of movement within a theater.

“For a long time, we thought about A2/AD as something adversaries did to us, rather than something we could do to our adversaries,” said Wes Rumbaugh, a fellow in the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in calling for an expansion of the concept in U.S. planning.

Brig. Gen. Bill Parker, director of Army Futures Command’s Air and Missile Defense Cross-Functional Team, said that when the U.S. and its allies look to “impose A2/AD on an adversary,” they must “throw up a bubble” to protect against adversarial action and enable friendly maneuver at the tactical level.

Beyond ground-based air and missile defense, the land component’s contribution to that bubble includes cyber and electronic warfare components, said retired Maj. Gen. John George, a former commander of Army Combat Capabilities Development Command who is now vice president and Army strategic account executive at Leidos.

“It’s the totality of what the Army, across many functions, can provide,” he said.

As the Army learns from the war in Ukraine, its ability to “blind, see and kill” adversarial forces will continue to grow, said retired Maj. Gen. Robert Dyess, a former acting director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center.

Dyess, now senior vice president of business development for munitions and government at Day & Zimmermann, said that had anyone told him 10 years ago that “there would be a major land war on the European continent in which artillery would be the king of battle,” he still would not have been able to convince the office of the secretary of defense to adequately support Army A2/AD programs.

That has changed. “The reason that manned air forces are not that prevalent in Ukraine right now is because of the significant air and missile defense that is on the battlefield, in both sides,” Dyess said. While these defenses have led to the proliferation of drone warfare, they are also leading to new modernization efforts.

Recalling an AUSA Coffee Series event last May with Lt. Gen. Karl Gingrich, the Army’s deputy chief of staff for programs and resources, G-8, Dyess said that of the 18 programs highlighted in that session, 16 were either “missile-related or counter-air related or long-range precision strike-related.”