The Army is working with the other services to build a military that’s ready for tomorrow’s battlefield, Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville said.
“We all want to win,” McConville said. “We all bring different perspectives. Your view of the future fight may be different … but what we look at is we’re trying to provide options to combatant commanders, things that they can use.”
The Army is teaming up with the other services as it gears up for Project Convergence 21, the next big event in its ongoing effort to test new and developing technologies.
Led by Army Futures Command and announced in 2020, Project Convergence is a series of demonstrations and experiments that Gen. Mike Murray, commander of Futures Command, has called the Army’s “campaign of learning.”
The first event took place last fall at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona.
The 5th Security Force Assistance Brigade is going to be “pretty busy” this year as the unit continues to develop partnering relationships with countries in the Indo-Pacific region, the brigade commander said.
Headquartered at Joint Base Lewis McChord, Washington, the 5th SFAB is aligned with the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command under the Army’s planned alignment of its six SFABs with combatant commands based on their geographic locations.
Combining two key Army commands serves as a “win” for the U.S. and its allies ahead of a major multinational exercise in Africa later this year, a senior Army leader said.
“We’re very excited about the merger,” Gen. Christopher Cavoli, commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, said Feb. 23 during a press call.
He added that “the consolidation of our two commands is a win for Africa and a win for the United States Army.”
The French army will test its new warfighting doctrine this spring in a major exercise with U.S. and British forces as it prepares to face a future fight against a state adversary.
Much like the U.S. Army’s Multi-Domain Operations concept, which assumes strategic challenges from a near-peer adversary on land, air, sea, cyber and space, the “Strategic Vision of the Chief of Staff of the French Army: 2030 Operational Superiority” addresses the need for shared vision and interoperability among its Allies and partners.
The Heritage Foundation’s “2021 Index of U.S. Military Strength” gives the U.S. Army high marks for improved readiness but once again scores the service as “marginal” because those readiness gains continue to be offset by ongoing struggles to modernize and grow the force.
The Army isn’t alone. The report also rates the Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and U.S. nuclear capabilities as marginal. The new U.S. Space Force was not assessed in the 2021 report.
The Army must build a unified network capable of supporting troops anywhere around the world as the force prepares for the future battlefield, said the new deputy Army chief of staff, G-6.
“This unified network is going to be operationally imperative to support multidomain operations,” said Lt. Gen. John Morrison.
The goal is to “make it easy for formations that are in the [continental U.S.] to rapidly deploy to any area of operations and immediately plug in and start conducting operations,” he said.
Communication and exercises helped prepare the Army for an unprecedented “whole of nation” response to the COVID-19 pandemic, DoD and Army leaders said.
“COVID-19 required an unprecedented response,” Lt. Gen. Laura Richardson, commanding general of Army North said Oct. 14 during AUSA Now, the Association of the U.S. Army’s virtual 2020 annual meeting.
“We have only trained for something like this in an exercise,” she said, adding that 10 FEMA regions were activated in response to the pandemic.
European allies remain vital to U.S. national security, but the U.S. military’s current posture in the region is “too small and without depth,” a former commander of U.S. Army Europe testified before Congress.
In testimony during a House Armed Services Committee hearing on the role of allies and partners in U.S. military strategy and operations, retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges reiterated his stance that the decision announced by DoD on July 29 to draw down 12,000 troops from Europe “is a mistake in my view.”
Winning on the future battlefield, where all domains will be at stake, will require more than just cooperation between the services, according to the general in charge of the Army’s modernization efforts.
“We’ve never done it alone in the past, [and] we’re never going to do it alone in the future,” said Gen. John Murray, commander of Army Futures Command.
“We have to build joint synergy,” he said Sept. 10 during a virtual conference hosted by Defense News, stressing that cooperation alone between the services isn’t enough.
