New tech will make tomorrow’s wars more dangerous to troops, Army says

The Army may need to rethink its traditional emphasis on maneuver warfare in the face of new weapons and other technology that will make tomorrow’s wars “increasingly lethal,” the service’s Training and Doctrine Command says in a new report.

The report specifically focuses on “large-scale combat operations,” a term of art used to refer to combat similar to that seen in World War II, rather than the insurgencies the Army has fought in recent decades.  

Part of the shift is due to the increasing importance of fires, a term most frequently associated with the use of indirect fire like artillery, rockets, and missiles, but which may also refer to drones and other assets. These weapons will “be the center of gravity, making protection a priority and maneuver difficult,” according to the report. 

These changes to the battlefield “may require a reassessment of our approach to maneuver, fires, and protection,” the report added. 

The Army has long emphasized maneuver warfare, in which lightning attacks are used to disorient and ultimately shatter enemy formations. Maneuver warfare stands in contrast to positional warfare, where artillery and other forms of fires are used to push an enemy out.  

The report echoes comments made by Army Futures Command chief Gen. James Rainey. 

“When you are maneuvering, it's going to be to emplace fires,” Rainey told reporters in May. “If it’s an Army formation, their big advantage is going to be fires: rockets, cannons, joint fires, attack helicopters.” 

The change is driven in part by the ubiquity of drones and other forms of sensors, which mean that enemies can find and hit U.S. troops with artillery, rockets, and missiles with greater precision than before. Drones are “transforming target acquisition and engagement,” according to the report, with long-range fires more lethal as a result. 

Deep sensing and strike means logistics nodes and command posts are also increasingly under threat, the report adds. As a consequence, command posts and sustainment depots will likely need to be placed further back, which in turn will affect communications and logistics. 

Ukrainian forces report a battlefield where any forces in the open are regularly hit, with troops often suffering the most as they leave cover to rotate away from the front line. In July, the Washington Post reported that Ukraine’s missiles had forced Russian units to stop massing, and its sensors had turned a movement of just a few miles into a risky, days-long affair. 

Such wars are also likely to go on for lengthy periods of time, the report adds. “Quick annihilation in the initial phases of a war is unlikely in a [large scale] conflict with a near-peer adversary operating on their periphery.”  

As a consequence, the U.S. will need to embrace a World War I-type ability to churn out munitions and soldiers. 

Large-scale combat operations will “require firing and sustaining massive amounts of munitions,” thereby “challenging the Army’s magazine depth and range” even as U.S. units must travel long distances to resupply, the report says. 

A protracted war will also require training new soldiers to replace those lost and to provide the larger forces needed to prevail. “Even if industry can keep pace, the Army will probably have to contend with the training requirements for new soldiers and leaders to learn these systems in combat,” the report says. 

The report also portrays a Russia that is bloodied but not defeated. 

“Russia is gaining combat lessons and proving that simply outlasting an enemy is a potentially valid military option,” according to the report. “They've essentially been able to replace an army on the fly,” said Ian Sullivan, TRADOC’s top intelligence officer, in an interview with Defense One. “They’re going nowhere as a threat.” 

China is also taking lessons from the war, according to the report, which states that China is likely to develop more short range air defense to defend against drones and improve tactical medical care. China has also noted Russia’s struggle with establishing effective command. 

“They've seen difficulties that the Russians have had in terms of leadership at the mid-grade and junior-grade levels,” Sullivan said. 

The report is likely the first operational environment update from TRADOC’s intelligence section to address large-scale combat, said Sullivan. 

The work is in part the result of weekly meetings, prompted by Russia’s war in Ukraine, in which TRADOC analysts compared their expectations about adversary behavior to what they were seeing on the battlefield. 

“We would do these series of internal scrums,” Sullivan said. “We did this, really, for every week of the war — we had a database of thousands of observations of things that we’ve noticed that interested us as we looked at the operational environment.” 

How these lessons filter down to Army units is ultimately for the service’s doctrine-writers, equippers, trainers, and others to decide; the TRADOC report is an intelligence product, and does not directly prescribe how the U.S. should react. 

The Army writ large appears to be thinking similarly, though. 

Chief of Staff General Randy George has spoken regularly about the impact of constant surveillance, munitions depth, and other topics listed in the TRADOC report. The Army’s top training centers, meanwhile, are being adjusted to adapt to lessons learned from Ukraine and elsewhere.  

The Army has a “real sense of urgency” when it comes to re-learning how to fight against enemies who can easily track U.S. movements, George said in a January interview.