HUNTSVILLE, Ala.–The Army over the next year will solidify its concept of “multi-domain battle,” the concept where land units have weapons and capabilities that allow it to fight against air and sea threats without direct reliance on other services.
Gen. David Perkins, chief of Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), and the leading force behind the doctrinal concept, described it as similar to the Normandy invasion on June 6, 1944. During the D-Day landings, the Army used paratrooper drops, air bombardment and amphibious assault to “create multiple problems” for the German enemy.
“In modern warfare, no one domain cam dominate,” Perkins said on Monday at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Ala.
Commander Army Training and Doctrine Command
Photo: TRADOC
Perkin’s description of multi-domain battle is riddled with jargon. He said the Army’s ace in the hole is its ability to “empower maneuver” for its forces on the ground. In a war where all domains are equally contested, the Army must be able to “create windows of superiority” that can be “maneuvered around the battlefield,” he said.
Simply put, the Army needs the appropriate weapons to address the multiple threats a near-peer competitor is likely to use in modern warfare, from small, cheap quadcopters to tanks and anti-tank missiles.
The problem now is the Army lacks weapons to address certain threats, Perkins said. He described a “very close ally” that fired a Patriot missile at an enemy unmanned quadcopter.
“They got it,” he said to laughs. The Patriot was effective in terms of “kinetic exchange,” but was obviously overkill against a $200 unmanned aircraft. That use of air defense is self-defeating in terms of “economic exchange,” Perkins said. A crafty enemy could buy several hundred or a thousand quadcopters and expend the Army’s air defense capability.
The solution is “cross-domain fires,” that would allow Army units to use existing weaponry against threats like unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). Artillery cannons designed to fire on land targets could be loaded with air-burst munitions that could take out incoming quadcopters, for instance.
“What we are looking at is the ability to develop cross-domain fires,” Perkins said. “That we don’t just have a land-based … artillery shell that starts off and goes and engages another land-based target. We’ll have those and that’s what we have now, but there’s nothing to say you can’t have a land-based Army fires capability that can have anti-ship capability or an anti-UAS capability.”
Commanders within both Pacific Command (PACOM) and European Command (EUCOM) are interested in having land-based units that have defensive and offensive capabilities against air and sea targets, he said.
TRADOC already is proposing new requirements that outline new uses for legacy weapons like air-burst artillery shells. Perkins also has mentioned using the Army Tactical Missile System, known as ATACMS, as a land-based anti-ship missile. Those near-term cross-domain solutions could be achieved with relatively little investment, he said.
“When you think about it, sometimes it’s not that dramatic a change in the capability that is inherent already among our weapon systems,” Perkins said. “We have systems that engage land-to-land but if you’re going to engage land-to-maritime or land-to-sea, most of the physics are pretty much the same.”