QandO

June 14, 2004

The Army Reorients itself
Posted by McQ

The US Army has identified some "capability gaps" since it has been in Iraq. Most of these will come as no surprise. We're in a new sort of fighting environmnet, one that hasn't been stressed or for which we've trained since before the Cold War. The top 10 gaps as identified internally by the Army in our current forces include::

* Networked battle command
* Protecting soldiers against insurgents
* Protecting a force against insurgents
* Logistics for unpredictable operations
* Improved training
* Networked precision fires
* Ability to conduct joint urban operations
* Special and conventional force integration
* Joint interoperability
* Timely analysis

Now that's the top 10 of 25. The Army has also identified 90 gaps in the Army's future plans. These have all been identified and prioritized to help target development and funding priorities.

This is something the Army (and for that matter, all services) do well. They pretty dispasionately do fair and detailed after-action reviews which lead to good self-assessments in which they break down various tasks and goals as "we suck" at that or "we're good" at that. They then take the "we suck" pile and unlike many organizations, do something about it.

There's a plainly selfish reason they do that ... to ignore the 'we suck' pile means people die. And that's not what the US Army is about ... well, its not about its people dying.

The task force which looked into the gaps and prioritized them had a pretty typical and blunt Army conclusion: the “world is going to be an ugly place and we’re in a growth industry.”

Networking problems both with data and among the services remains a problem. Its is light years better than it was, for instance, when we went into Grenada. But it still has light years to go before it'll move out of the 'we suck' pile. They'll eventually get there, but its an uphill sled.

After that, of course is soldier and force protection problems. An insurgent war is a completely different war than a normal force on force military confrontation. At present, 'we suck', but we're getting better at it all the time. And that will help solve some of those problems. So will new and better training focused on an insurgent war, including military operations in urban terrain (MOUT). Brig. Gen. David Fastabend characterized the threat as "terrorist and other organizations that are hyper-adaptive, self-organizing, mostly on the basis of ideas alone, no infrastructure to target."

Tough to find and target.

However, there also remains hardware problems, mostly armor, which needs to be improved. Already being developed is individual armor that covers the shoulders and sides as well as improved vehicle armor. In the future the Army is hoping to develop advanced unmanned reconnaissance air vehicles, hybrid power systems, and systems that can generate water on the battlefield. Also on the "wish list" are technologies to locate mines — including the Ground and Airborne Standoff Mine Detection Systems to locate weapons caches, mines and IEDs.

As for those convoy ambushes?

Other recommendations for the near term include unmanned vehicles that can be used in convoys to replace trucks, which have logged several million miles in Iraq since last March, officials said here. The robots would follow one manned truck in a convoy, substantially cutting the amount of manpower needed for logistics.

Heh ... That's one solution.

For the future the Army sees the following 10 gaps as their priority, given the battles they feel they'll fight in that future:

* Improved soldier protection
* Flexible battle command and control
* Better vehicle protection
* Dynamic command, control, communications and computer architecture
* Modular, brigade-based forces
* Lethal overmatch
* Training tied to operations
* Improved intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance
* Detection and identification of all battlefield obstacles
* Force sustainment

Again, no real surprises, just a reprioritization. And knowing the Army as I do, I know that this will eventually all go from the 'we suck' pile to the "we're good" pile or they'll go down trying.

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