By Ann Roosevelt
The Army is working to make its institutional side as adaptive and versatile as the operational force, which also means changing to more effectively influence current and future budgets and programs, a senior officer said.
Adversaries now and into the uncertain future have a new dynamic, Lt. Gen. Michael Vane, director Army Capabilities Integration Center (ARCIC), Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), said in an interview. “They’re very adaptive, they’re very dynamic, they’re very driven philosophically but not necessarily so doctrinaire that they can’t change and change rapidly.”
The Army, too, must change and change rapidly he said.
“Wouldn’t it make a lot of sense to change ourselves and align ourselves to the government’s, Congress’ and Defense Department’s budgetary and force structure decision making process? So that’s what we’re doing,” Vane said.
This is of particular value when hard budget choices must be made as defense budgets are expected to shrink after close to a decade of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan and Defense Secretary Robert Gates aims to squeeze out unneeded overhead, find $100 million in savings, and ratcheting down the acquisition process, mandating cost as a built-in program requirement.
Adaptability and versatility are now the watchwords of key Army documents.
The central idea of the Army’s 2009 Capstone Concept–the first over arching change since 2005–is operational adaptability, reflecting what the service has learned in current operations.
The Capstone Concept broadly defines future armed conflict 2016-28 and how the Army would function in a complex and mostly veiled future expected to consist of persistent conflict.
Additionally, the newly published Army Operating Concept discusses how future Army forces operate in that uncertain world to conduct successful missions over adaptive and versatile adversaries.
“Of course the operating force we’ve seen in the last few years in Iraq and Afghanistan have just been magnificent, changing in the face in the face of an enemy demonstrating versatility and adaptability,” he said. “Now how do we get the institution and what we call the generating force to also be as adaptive.”
The Cold War years didn’t see much change as both sides knew each other’s leaders, doctrine and training, he said. Most of the changes were in technology, “a kind of co- evolution.”
“Now that you have an enemy that’s really not necessarily part of an organized group, although Lebanon and Hizbollah certainly demonstrated a non-nation state entity that looks, acts, and feels almost like a force-on-force, or enemy state army,” he said. This describes what the service is calling a hybrid threat.
Until recently, the Army changed doctrine and concepts almost on a timeline, Vane said. It was not an event-driven activity.
“We would review the doctrine every five years,” he said. “We would review the concepts every five years. Then we would change them and it would take us two to three years to write them and change them, and we would complete that activity and go on to the next phase of where the concept goes next–to a war game, it goes to experimentation, it goes to requirements writing…and that would all be heel-to-toe and would take us anywhere from eight to 10 years to change. In fact, modularity, by the time we got it fully funded in the POM from the time the decision was made to go to modularity in 2003, we won’t fully fund, or get to some 85 percent level of funding all the changes driven into our units until 2017.”
That’s an example of taking even more than 10 years to change the whole Army, something that had to change and become a more agile process to reflect what was going on in the world, and in the operating force.
“What we’re trying to move to is this two-year cycle of reviewing ourselves with a baseline. So that’s a big new idea, baselining each of our warfighting functions,” Vane said.
This means looking at such things as what capabililties are described by doctrine, what are the formations of Army organizations, how many people are in them, how are they trained, how are they led, equipped and how much does it all cost.
“That becomes the baseline and the Army writes the concept that shows adjustments to that baseline and gives us a kind of running estimate,” he said. “Instead, then, of trying to change the whole Army every two years, we change that part of the Army that’s in demand.”
Changes, or modernization, are to meet the needs of Army Force Generation (ARFORGEN) that are driven by the combatant commanders, secretary of defense and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and the president.
By Fiscal Year 2021-2022, the Army thinks it can have one Corps, five Divisions, 20 Brigades and about 90,000 enablers once soldiers are able to spend two years at home for every year deployed, he said.
“Instead of trying to modernize the whole Army every time we make some adjustments in training, leader development and equipment, we make sure we’re changing that part of the Army that’s rolling out the gate first, and then in the next two years update the next group and continually allow ourselves to accept new technology, new ideas and put them into those units as they are rolling out in their deployments.”