Close to six thousand people, including current military leaders and members of the defense industry, are gathered at AUSA’s 2019 Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, AL this week. The theme for this year’s three-day event is ‘Readiness for Multi-Domain Operations’ and the idea is to explore the Army’s quest to transition from an adaptive organization to one that leads with innovation by 2025 - a mission that’s called for in the latest Army Operating Concept.
The Cipher Brief’s Brad Christian (who is also an Army veteran) talked with AUSA Vice President, and Cipher Brief expert, Lieutenant General (Ret) Guy Swan, about the Army’s top challenges, and what it needs to do in order to close the capability and readiness gaps relative to emerging near peer competitors.
Christian: What does ‘Readiness for Multi-Domain Operations’ mean for the Army?
Swan: What we're hearing more about in the Department of Defense, and especially in the Army, is the notion of multi-domain operations, which is actually a relatively new concept. Back in the 1970s and '80s, we had the air/land battle concept, which speaks for itself. Air and land domains with some support from the maritime. But we were focused primarily on central Europe at the time, and the threat from the Soviet Union.
Now, we're finding that threats are emerging not only on land, air and maritime environments but increasingly in cyber and even space. And as we venture into a new, great power competition, we are being challenged in all of these domains by the Chinese, the Russians, the North Koreans and even the Iranians. So you'll be hearing more about multi-domain operations. But the overarching concept now is how to synchronize operations and more importantly, effects in those domains.
Christian: I’m reminded of what we’ve heard General Michael Hayden say many times, that the world has perhaps been more dangerous in the past, but it's never been more complicated.
Swan: That's exactly right. When I was coming up in the Army, and when you were serving, space and cyber were amorphous things to us. They were there, but we didn't understand them very well and we took it for granted, frankly that in those domains, the United States was dominant. And now we're being challenged in every one of those domains, all five of them. I think what we're discovering is that as we, the United States, and many of our allies focused on the Middle East after the fall of the Soviet Union, we had a temporary period where we could move away from the high-intensity, large-scale combat operations to counter-insurgency. But the Russians and the Chinese never did that. They continued on course. We now find ourselves in some areas, at a deficit. So, what's being discussed at this conference is how to close the gap and regain some of these advantages that we took for granted in the past. An example is the Russian’s investment in hypersonic weapons, which are a very, very difficult threat to deal with. And now, we're having to accelerate our ability to counter those capabilities. Of course, the Russians and Chinese have invested a lot in the cyber domain. And that's one of those areas, as you and the Cipher Brief audience knows, crosses over between military affairs into civilian life into commercial and business affairs, and banking and other areas. It's part of that notion of hybrid warfare that is also being discussed here this week.
Christian: Do you think that hypersonic weapons and cyber represent the Army's most complicated challenges in the near term?
Swan: They're at the top. But so are things like air and missile defense. The Russians and the Chinese and the Iranians have kept increasing their capabilities in air and missile technology, so that's another one that's moved way up on the list. But one thing, I think, of interest to your readers is that we are still depending on the same weapons systems that were developed in the 1980s. The tank, the helicopter fleet, the artillery fleet, were all built in the 1980s. They've been modernized, they're still at the top of their class in many areas, but the gap has closed. So, when you look at the challenges for the future, I would say time is one of the greatest challenges facing the Army. Do we have enough time before a potential conflict to close these gaps? Another challenge is stable funding from the congress. We are still not out of the woods on sequestration and we need a stable funding stream. So those may not be battlefield challenges, but they are challenges for what the Army's doing.
Christian: This week in Sea Island at the 2019 Annual Threat Conference, procurement innovation was mentioned numerous times. I’ll summarize the main points of those discussions here by asking, ‘Does the pace of technological innovation, and the complexity of the evolving threats facing the U.S. Military, justify a complete revamp of our current procurement system to include streamlining funding processes?’
Swan: First of all, you're exactly right, and the discussion there is right on the mark. The procurement process we have now, in large measure, is designed for those long-serving, big ticket defense items like ships and airplanes. It is not agile enough for a rapidly changing world where oftentimes, the Army finds itself on one day fighting against guerrillas or insurgents and the next day against a high-end peer competitor. The Army has an even a bigger challenge in the procurement world and a couple of things have been done, which I think will be of interest to your readers who don't follow this closely. The Army has established six modernization priorities. These priorities are based on gaps that have occurred over the last 15 to 20 years with our peer competitors, primarily the Russians and the Chinese. These priorities, the six of them, are long-range precision fires, the next generation of combat vehicle, air and missile defense, the Army network, which is the network that all of the Army’s command and control operates on, future vertical lift, that's a term for the next generation of helicopters, and then soldier lethality, and the individual soldier. So, setting those priorities right is hugely important to helping make the procurement system more agile. And remember, the procurement system is in law, and even though there is a lot of flexibility in the law, the bureaucracy has kind of overtaken things.
So, the first thing was to set those priorities and the second thing you’re going to hear more about is the newest Army command called Army Futures Command. Army Futures Command was stood up last year and it's a four-star command, primarily focused on cutting through the laborious procurement system and making it more agile. In the past, the procurement system writ large was spread out across the force. The Training and Doctrine Command had a piece of it, the Materiel Command had a piece of it, the Army staff in the Pentagon had a piece of it. What the Army has created for the first time since the early 1970’s is a command that is dedicated to making the procurement system more agile. Now, there is one four-star general, who can see across all of those priorities and he has the authority to say, "We're not moving fast enough here, or we need to divert resources over there," in a much more unified manner. Those are the main ways that the Army is trying to deal with the system that you described as being too slow and too laborious to meet the needs of a rapidly changing world.
Christian: What's the mood like there with the folks you're talking to?
Swan: I think there is a sense of excitement and cautious optimism that the Army is on the right path. And the same thing on Capitol Hill. In fact, the Army chief and the Secretary were testifying yesterday and today before the Senate. And some of the questions they were getting are; when are we going to see the output from these changes? There is a sense of urgency and I think that's driven by this sense and some facts to support it, that while we were doing other things around the world, our major adversaries were moving forward in areas that they can now challenge us in. So that has created this sense of urgency. And I will say that personally, in my 35 years of uniform, and then another seven in this job, I have not seen a more synchronized effort between defense industry leaders and their government counterparts. I would suspect it's going on in the Navy and the Air Force as well. People are taking China and Russia seriously.
“When you look at the challenges for the future, I would say time is one of the greatest challenges facing the Army. Do we have enough time before a potential conflict to close these gaps?”
