The U.S. Army recently released "Serving a Nation at War—A Campaign Quality Army with Joint and Expeditionary Capabilities." This white paper—posted on our Web site—outlines the Army's vision for the future. In a two-part series of special reviews, five experts appraise this vision for the Army.
Lieutenant Colonel Frank G. Hoffman, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve (Retired)
"Serving a Nation at War" is the first effort by the current Army Chief of Staff, General Pete Schoomaker, to craft a formal statement for the Army he envisions as best supporting the nation. Visions should be clear and compelling, but in the business world most look as if they were written by committee and framed by the lowest common denominator. The worst are compilations of bumper sticker slogans, cliches, and exhortations. "Serving a Nation at War" does not fall into that camp. It is lucid and well written, dramatically and accurately casts today's strategic context, and obviously reflects the personal direction of our senior soldier.
As indicated by its somewhat choppy title, the new Army vision calls for a "campaign quality Army" that incorporates joint and expeditionary capabilities. Such an Army includes not only the capacity to conduct decisive combat operations, but also the ability to sustain its operations indefinitely, as well as the capacity to adapt to the unexpected and unpredictable. "The Army's preeminent challenge," according to the vision, "is to reconcile expeditionary agility and responsiveness with the staying power, durability, and adaptability to carry a conflict to a victorious conclusion no matter what form it eventually takes."
Today's strategic and operational context is cast in a dark but convincing manner. A few strategic threats such as North Korea still exist, but "Serving a Nation at War" emphasizes the asymmetric adversaries targeted in the global war on terrorism. General Schoomaker focuses on the undeterrable and "morally unconstrained" adversaries who are opposed to our way of life. This enemy is described as "highly adaptive," "self-organizing," and networked, while "exposing very little of targetable value." Conflict is presented as a clash of irreconcilable ideas between the United States and a disparate pool of adaptive combatants who seek our destruction by any means possible. Similar to the Marine Corps' "Operational Maneuver from the Sea," the Army's vision recognizes that future enemies will seek asymmetric approaches that provide shelter in those environments and methods for which we are least prepared.
The changes required to overcome these adversaries include the need to adopt an expeditionary and a joint mind-set. The vision acknowledges that the Army needs to expand its conception of what "expeditionary" means in terms very familiar to Marine readers. Instead of defining it in terms of a deployment to an overseas contingency, or a short-duration operation, General Schoomaker urges a dramatically different mind-set that embraces uncertainty about threats and locations of missions, the high probability of an austere environment, and the need to fight immediately on arrival. This mind-set also moves the Army from a predisposition for predictable and set-piece enemies, toward an understanding that tomorrow's more elusive foes will be engaged in the far corners of the world. "Serving a Nation at War" also urges a greater degree of jointness, including the capacity to interact with the other services down to the tactical level.
The Chief of Staff appropriately begins with the soldier as the ultimate platform and the centerpiece for transformation. Described as "the ultimate combination of sensor and shooter," the individual soldier's warrior ethos, training, and education are given primacy in the Army's pending transformation. Soldiers are defined as "warriors first, specialists sec ond," which recognizes lessons from the early stages of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Likewise, future training programs will place greater stress on soldiers, a prerequisite for learning and preparation for the rigors of combat. Education programs also will focus on teaching soldiers how to think rather than what to think. Defeating adaptive enemies requires the Army to outthink opponents to outfight them. Instead of expecting certainty or perfect knowledge, Army officers and leaders are urged to meet the "irreducible uncertainties of war" through professional education (including joint education).
In terms of organizing the Army for future conflicts, the vision aptly notes the need for greater agility and versatility, which will be gained by stressing modularity at the brigade level and placing a greater premium on combined arms at lower levels. Likewise, doctrine is to be revamped to stress the reality of an adaptive, thinking adversary.
"Serving a Nation at War" is an invaluable statement about a future Army, but it is less than complete. Writing in a recent report titled "Transforming the Legions," published by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Dr. Andrew Krepinevich notes the need for a balance between four Army types: the constabulary Army, poised to stabilize failing states preemptively or to assist in the reconstruction of states such as Afghanistan and Iraq; the frontier Army, forward deployed, like our Cold War Army or Rome's legions, to distant garrisons to keep the barbarians outside the gates of civilization; the territorial Army, prepared to assist in the defense of the United States proper and contribute to homeland security; and the expeditionary Army, ready to project decisive power from the continental United States to distant shores.
The new Army vision is a detailed description for the latter Army, an expeditionary force prepared to contribute to a joint force in a decisive campaign. It has much less to say about how the Army should prepare for potential contingencies at home or abroad that might require those unique skill sets of the constabulary or territorial Army. This emphasis is understandable to those familiar with Army culture. Given the relentless and ruthless nature of tomorrow's enemies, however, it is not entirely clear nor comforting that the Army should narrow its future contribution to the traditional, and eschew the unconventional range of military operations we have seen since 11 September 2001.
Colonel Hoffman works for EDO Professional Services in the Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities at Quantico, Virginia,
Major General Robert Scales, U.S. Army (Retired)
In war, words matter. From Achilles to Dwight D. Eisenhower, great leaders have used words to inspire, instruct, and imbed their intended purposes. Good pronouncements reflect the personality of the leader, and the Army's "Serving a Nation at War" clearly bears the marks of General Peter Schoomaker, the Army's Chief of Staff.
The white paper reflects General Schoomaker's no-nonsense approach focused on winning today's conflicts. His views are refreshingly clear and the paper is well written. Those of us who are veterans of the concept wars appreciate that, thanks to General Schoomaker, many of our ideas have survived the birthing pains of the 1990s to appear today as part of the Army's current programs. Strategic speed (an expeditionary force), operational maneuver using air-transportable armored vehicles (Future Combat System), a brigade-centered Army, and interdependence (now termed "joint interdependence") have joined the ranks of accepted programs and doctrine and are being supported both intellectually and fiscally by the Chief of Staff's new wave of actionoriented concept and materiel developers.
General Schoomaker's rightful obsession with the eternal verities of war and the need to return to practical soldiering are reflected in the paper. he is clearly concerned with building on the warrior ethos and wants to drive home to his soldiers the reality that the Army is changing as it fights. he reassures them that the institutional Army will assist field units as they transition to this new force. Soldiers and their families will be stabilized. Soldiers will be well trained at combat training centers and home stations. The Army will not neglect their education and leader development opportunities. These are all things professional soldiers need to hear.
The paper confirms the commit- ment of the Army to joint interdepen- dence and declares that "the air-, sea-, or landpower de- bates are over," but it then seemingly reignites the debate subtly by declaring (rightfully in my opinion) that "no concept of interdependence will suffice that does not enable the frontline Soldier and Marine." Such a statement viewed in the context of today's land-centered wars might not be accepted fully by the Air Force in particular.
Connecting soldiers and Marines is probably the most intriguing and captivating aspect of the piece. The juxtaposition is not accidental and reflects the realization that the war in Iraq is one in which the Army and Marine Corps are at war together, share virtually all the heavy lifting, and suffer virtually all the tragic losses. Calls for reduction in land power, so prevalent during the Clinton administration and the early years of this administration, are now forgotten. What has not been forgotten is the remarkable convergence of the nation's two ground forces. At no time in our history have the Army and Marine Corps fought so closely and so similarly. General Schoomaker's call for a more expeditionary Army is paralleled by the Marine Corps' demonstrated capability to conduct operational maneuver on a large scale. These have become two primal equities now shared by both services in relatively equal proportion. The portent of this fact for the future should not be lost.
My only serious concern with the paper is its business-as-usual treatment of the human dimensions of war at a time when the greatest shortcomings in Afghanistan and Iraq have been human and not structural, technological, or doctrinal. These are out there for all to see: intelligence, information operations, civil affairs, language, cultural awareness, nation building, public affairs, and soldier conduct-and the list continues.
The Army and Marine Corps can gain another meter of precision or megabit of bandwidth, but the greatest source of potential increase in fighting ability rests with the ability of ground combat forces to select, harden, acculturate, train, educate, socially tune, and professionalize soldiers and leaders. The paper devotes space to these subjects, but it offers no new ideas or potential solutions, nor does it call for fresh approaches to a problem that has proved to be the most serious and intransigent in Iraq.
Perhaps a white paper will appear soon that unambiguously commits the Army to a cultural as well as a technological and structural transformation.
General Scales is a former commandant of the U.S. Army War College and coauthor of The Iraq War: A Military History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
Dov S. Zakheim
The Army's new white paper is breathtaking in its scope and ambitions. Reflecting to a large extent the special forces background of its Chief of Staff, General Peter Schoomaker, the Army proposes a radical reorganization of its maneuver units against an international background that it defines as being one of permanent war. In the process, the Army borrows heavily (and without attribution) from Marine Corps doctrines of expeditionary warfare, and from Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor's proposals for a brigade-based network-centric Army.
The white paper recognizes rightly that the Army must prepare for two simultaneous but very different types of conflicts. One type is the conventional war for which it has prepared, trained, and equipped itself since World War II. The white paper does not indicate the degree to which it might have to fight more than one of these wars simultaneously, but it is clear both from many other Department of Defense pronouncements and from current deployments that such a likelihood cannot be ruled out.
At the same time, the Army must organize, train, and equip for the war on terrorism. This war, in its various manifestations, is the one the Army is currently prosecuting, and for which no immediate end is in sight. It is an asymmetric war, not only in terms of how the enemy fights, but also with respect to who the enemy is, his thoughts, and his motivations. As the white paper puts it, "to better understand such a war we must examine the broader context of conflict, the competition of ideas," For this reason, and "above all, because at least some current adversaries consider peaceful co-existence with the United States unacceptable, we must either alter the conditions and convictions prompting their hostility-or destroy them outright by war."
The Army recognizes that military capability is but one of many tools the United States must bring to bear to prevail in such a conflict. Moreover, even within the context of military operations, "jointness" is a necessary condition for success. Beyond jointness, however, the Army also seeks to endow itself with an expeditionary capability. What the Army means by the term "expeditionary" is not entirely clear. The white paper asserts that the term connotes more than merely shortduration operations or speed of response, yet it does not clearly define any additional characteristics inherent to the concept. In addition, despite its stress on jointness, the white paper does not specify how Army and Marine Corps forces might enhance each other's capabilities as expeditionary units, though the Marines have long been organized in an expeditionary fashion. Indeed, the Marine Corps is barely mentioned throughout the paper.
At the heart of the white paper are a number of radical proposals. The Army plans to reorganize itself around brigades as its critical modular tactical organization and to provide them with headquarters formations previously reserved for higher-level units. It proposes to abandon tiered unit readiness and to synchronize soldiers' tours with rotation cycles. It proposes significant changes to Army training and especially professional military education. Finally, it will adjust the active/reserve mix so that key specialties, such as military police and civil affairs, are not monopolized by the reserves. Each of these initiatives involves a major cultural change in the Army that is nothing short of cataclysmic. General Schoomaker appears to have concluded he might as well implement all simultaneously. It is an ambitious, and necessary, agenda.
There can be little doubt the Army's recent experiences in Iraq have been the catalyst for changes that many observers consider long overdue. Equally certain is that these changes will not be easy to implement. In particular, not everyone in the Army is ready to jettison the division-based maneuver force, which has been the model for most conventional military forces since Napoleonic times. In addition, congressional pressure to increase active end strength continues unabated; yet, any such increase might make the need to rebalance the active/reserve mix appear less urgent.
Nevertheless, the white paper lays out a vision for the Army that is very much in tune with the changing times in which we live, and that reflects the thinking not only of secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, but also of all who have argued since the end of the Cold War that the Army needs to refocus its sense of mission within an increasingly joint, network-centric military. It was actually the previous Army Chief of Staff, General Eric Shinseki, who coined the term "transformation" in the late 1990s. The current chief clearly intends to move a very long way toward ensuring that the term will be something more than a buzzword over the next several decades.
Mr. Zakheim is a former Under secretary of Defense (Complroller) and Chief Financial Officer.
EDITOR'S NOTE: "Serving a Nation at War" is online in its entirety at www.usni.org/proceedings/Articles04/PR OC06ArmyServiceNation.html. Other reviews will be published in next month's Proceedings.