The ability to rapidly make decisions on the battlefield will be critical to advancing lethality and overmatch against a fast-moving enemy, a senior Army leader said.

To give commanders the speed they need to effectively shape the battlefield to their advantage, the Army is investing in next-generation command-and-control capabilities, Lt. Gen. Joe Ryan, deputy Army chief of staff for operations, G-3, said June 3 during a session on Army transformation hosted by the Center for a New American Security.

“Perhaps our greatest lethality advancement today, the most important line of effort we’re pursuing, is what we would call decision dominance, and that’s within our next-generation command-and-control investment,” Ryan said.

Achieving a position of advantage over an adversary requires providing commanders the ability to assess the battlefield, make decisions and apply “lethal capabilities, their kinetic and non-kinetic capabilities that deliver effects,” Ryan said, adding that “they need to do it quicker than the enemy can do it.”

By providing decision dominance, commanders can move capabilities, forces and effects and then assess the effects of those movements against the adversary’s movements before making the next decision, he said.

“Being able to execute that loop faster than the adversary is perhaps the most important thing at a tactical, operational and, I would argue, even strategic level that we can do to put our warfighters in a position of advantage over the adversary,” Ryan said.

Lethality can also be leveraged in other ways such as precision effects at range. The Army is focused on long-range precision fires and providing a shared investment in land- or ship-based capabilities with the Army’s sister services, Ryan said.

Another measure of lethality is protection as a warfighting function, such as counter-unmanned aerial systems, Ryan said. “The entirety of the integrated air and missile defense suite of capabilities, being able to protect our forces against adversary capabilities, is certainly a measure of lethality,” Ryan said, pointing also to the cost of investing in these capabilities and the need for investments to be economically and programmatically sustainable.

“Winning the lethality battle within the cost curve here is super important,” he said. “Fighting against an adversary who can employ thousand-dollar capabilities against our million-dollar capabilities is not a war-winning strategy, not in the American way of war, and not in anybody’s war, because the budgetary constraints and the programming constraints are real.”

Ryan pointed also to the Army’s pre-positioned stocks as an area that needs transformation, because commanders are relying on “a suite of capabilities … that we can’t fully sustain.”

“We’ve made the decision that we have to make some changes, and as we develop the new suite of capabilities that we’re going to provide in pre-positioned stocks forward in theaters, it needs to be both operationally relevant and a fiscally sustainable strategy,” Ryan said, adding that “neither is more important than the other."