As the Army transforms for the future fight, its air defense formations are being reintroduced, and as critical capabilities of combined arms maneuver, tanks “are going to be around for a little while,” Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Mingus said.

In remarks July 2 during a Strategic Landpower Dialogue event co-hosted by the Association of the U.S. Army and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Mingus said the Army is going to begin to rapidly field what will be called the M1E3 tank, a next-generation main battle tank intended to replace the M1A2 SEPv3, which is “currently the most modern tank we have in our formations.”

Mingus pointed out that warfighting platforms such as tanks were not designed to operate independently. Rather, the “power of engineers, infantry, armor, artillery combined together is still the future of warfare for the land force,” Mingus said.

“A [U.S. Navy aircraft] carrier never sails by itself, it typically has at least three to five destroyers or cruisers that accompany that carrier,” he said. “A tank is not designed to operate by itself.”

In Ukraine, Mingus said, the M1 Abrams tanks provided to Ukrainian forces by the U.S. Army have been destroyed by inexpensive unmanned aerial vehicles.

“At the highest level in our capstone doctrine, we say that unified land operations is how we do it, which is the ability to execute offense, defense and stability operations simultaneously,” he said. “Combined arms maneuver is the combination of all the warfighting functions put together in a meaningful way, synchronized over time.”

As the Army continues to rapidly transform for large-scale combat operations, Mingus added, air defense capabilities that became “bill payers” during counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan where there were no aerial threats are being rebuilt.

“We are reintroducing that structure from the tactical level all the way up to theater level,” he said, explaining that air defense formations will be in the form of battalions focused on Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense, or M-SHORAD, Indirect Fire Protection Capability, or IFPC, and Patriot systems.

The air defense community will be rebuilt, he said, “with the vision, still, of how do you converge offensive and defensive fires into a singular function.”

While air defense is being reintroduced, Mingus cautioned that maneuver formations that don’t have an air defense role will still need to perform those functions on one-way attack drones and other things that could come at them.

He added that the air defense platforms themselves will have to transform as technologies advance. “Just because we started with this platform doesn’t mean that we’re stuck with that platform for the next 20 years, because the rate in which things are changing, that M-SHORAD capability we have today is going to have to be something different in four or five years from now,” Mingus said.