The Army would do well to double down on its close combat forces despite its cancellation of several modernization programs and its reduction in force structure, according to a new paper published by the Association of the U.S. Army.

“Army modernization, according to an array of reporting, had a rough 2024,” retired Lt. Col. Amos Fox writes in his paper. “Constriction is the exact wrong thing that the Army should be doing, considering the wide array of threats, theaters and challenges that the U.S. military must address, or might have to address, in relative short order.”

In “An Army Modernization Update,” Fox, a professor of practice in Arizona State University’s School of Politics and Global Studies and a lecturer in the University of Houston’s department of politics, writes that the Army must maintain its identity as a land warfare-centric force.

The service’s force structure modernization efforts prioritize long-range fires, drones and battlefield surveillance over close combat capabilities, Fox writes.

“The Army has sacrificed forward-positioned close combat (and combat-enabling) capability for a rear-focused, defensive, fires-centric strategy,” he writes. “Put another way, the Army’s force structure changes—which have hit the close combat forces quite hard—demonstrate a preference for defensive, attritional warfare.”

The Army’s cancellation of the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft program, for example, “suggest[s] that the Army intends to shift its focus from manned aerial reconnaissance systems to UAS,” according to Fox. The program is among others, including the Extended-Range Cannon Artillery program, that have been cancelled. Despite the growing use of modern capabilities by U.S. adversaries, the Army’s most important defense is still its ability to maintain control of land, he writes.

“Armies exist to fight other military forces (state and nonstate) for control of territory. Control requires land forces on the ground that can not only go toe-to-toe in direct close combat with a hostile force, but that, in doing so, can seal tactical and operational victories,” Fox writes. 

This year “has been a challenging” one “for Army modernization,” he writes.

“A land force can only be stretched in so many directions before it runs out of blood and money,” Fox writes. “Thus, if the Army is to accomplish its own mission, plus serve as the joint force’s key enabling service, it must not reduce its close combat forces, but rather must see them increased. The control of territory exists in an adversarial context; thus, the Army must have bigger—not smaller—close combat forces.”

Read the full paper here.