7 Issues the Future of the Army Commission Should Have Spent More Time On
War on the Rocks has already had much astute commentary about the content of the final report from the National Commission on the Future of the Army. I would first like to echo the praise from those who have emphasized how much work went into producing the report. It is obvious that the members took their duties seriously and applied themselves diligently. With that said, I’d like to provide my observations about some issues that could have benefitted from more analysis.
1) Once cut, the Army is not easily expansible
The myth of expansibility, that ground forces are especially easy and quick to reconstitute after significant reductions, is an enduring one, which ignores the inherent difficulties in growing the force in the current environment. One of the big things the commission got right, as Maj. Gen. Bob Scales has already pointed out, is the focus on better integration of the reserve components. The large section dealing with Apache helicopter transfers reflects a sincere effort to balance active and reserve equities in a Solomon-like effort to split that baby. The report correctly emphasizes the importance of Total Force policies while hinting at the immense obstacles against expanding the active force any other way. I would like to have seen a more thorough analysis of cost and benefits of a draft, especially after the bleak discussion of the diminishing pool of eligible recruits available for service, and some thoughts about including women in a future draft.
Even though a draft is unlikely, the expenses involved in manning an all-volunteer force are only going to increase, and having an objective evaluation of the comparative costs and capabilities of a draftee force would verify or discount its utility as a viable alternative. The report mentions a shortage of mobilization facilities; I think that analysis could also be expanded to include training capacity and the industrial base. It also discusses the paradoxical requirements for an increased institutional base to support expansion, at the cost of standing forces. The nation just does not have the capacity anymore to expand the force in a crisis as it did for previous major wars. We are going to have to fight with the personnel and equipment in the force already in being, active and reserve.
2) Deeper analysis on options to better integrate the active and reserve components
The report advocates for the creation of a personnel system supporting rotating assignments between the components. That seems like a good idea, but it remains to be seen how active-component promotion boards would view reserve-component assignments. The commission also pushes for more multi-component units, while acknowledging that past experience with them has produced mixed results. This is a subject that deserves much further study. I am especially leery of mixed headquarters. On that subject, I was pleased to see that the commission recognized the negative impact of arbitrary Army headquarters reductions in its acknowledgement of the inadequacies of current Army service component commands and associated headquarters.
3) A more thorough discussion of deficiencies in force structure and capabilities
Complying with the ban on cluster munitions has reduced an important fire-support capability at the same time the Russians have demonstrated how they have increased theirs. In one of the many tradeoffs necessitated by the Long War, the Army has allowed its transportation assets to atrophy during the last decade, and the commission recognizes the necessity to reverse that trend. The lack of adequate short-range air defense is a longstanding problem that has the potential for dire consequences on future battlefields. The commission should also have addressed the growing requirements for more theater air defense assets as enemies begin to challenge our assumptions about continuing air supremacy.
4) Expanded discussion of stability operations and counterinsurgency
The report’s lack of discussion of this crucial issue, as discussed by Andrew Hill and Nadia Schadlow, is in keeping with the current defense planning guidance, but in my opinion violates the mission of the commission to consider “current and anticipated mission requirements for the Army.” We did not enter Afghanistan or Iraq intending to fight insurgencies for more than a decade, but evolving national objectives necessitated such commitment. In fact, history shows that in any significant American military intervention, long-term ground presence is almost always required to achieve national goals. The report assumes a situation where forces are engaged simultaneously with a large-scale homeland defense response, a large-scale conventional conflict, and a limited-duration deterrence operation, without considering any other distractions or even residual requirements from those missions. Inevitably, that conventional operation would have a significant stability component that would begin before the end of major combat and endure long afterwards.
5) Explicit analysis of force size and structure recommendations
The commission recommends retaining at least the current planned force of 980,000, but gives little guidance on how it might configure or grow to fix noted deficiencies. It does recommend cutting two infantry brigade combat teams to provide some room for restructuring, but those might indeed be necessary in an alternate future combating more irregular threats or conducting stability operations.
6) A real discussion of risk
The Army has always been poor at clearly defining risk, and this report does no better. It describes emerging challenges thoroughly, but does not come to grips with how future force size will affect the ability to deal with them, or what the resulting risks to national policies might be. It is vague on both operational and strategic risk. The Army tends to be much better on the former than the latter, much to its detriment in force-structure discussions with civilian policy makers.
7) Contractors on the battlefield
We all know how the Army has tried to shift a multitude of support requirements to civilian contractors to save uniformed positions for other tasks. How would their presence impact the conventional operation considered in conducting this study? Would that case reveal even more shortfalls in support requirements for conventional operations, especially in very austere or dangerous environments? How do contractors fit into Total Force policies in general? I think there is much room for further analysis of that issue, including cost/benefit calculations.
Conrad C. Crane is chief of historical services for the Army Heritage and Education Center at Carlisle Barracks and a former director of the U.S. Army Military History Institute.
Dr Crane makes trenchant and discrete remarks about NCFA. I agree with all of them, but would go further and be more direct.
First, NCFA postulates a future in which Major Combat Operations abound. That will not likely be the case. Rather, hybrid or complex operations will likely prevail, especially the kind that require significantly different skill sets than the line combat arms soldier and his/her comrades in arms. These operations are likely to have the long temporal tails to which Dr. Crane alludes. They are going to require significant interpersonal skills, the likes of which combat soldiers do not train for – how to effectively engage indigenous populations, for one; how to effectively engage an ever present and international media for another. Nothing in the technology repertoire is going to substitute for these soft skills. And the repository for them in the Army is concentrated in Civil Affairs and PSYOP, continually considered step children to the main thrusts of Army change initiatives.
In short, NCFA plans for an already obsolescent future, and if it is fully implemented, the service will pay with blood and treasure for its narrow focus.
Second, having had some experience with experiments with so-called integrated component units, I wish to strongly echo Dr Crane’s hesitance about engaging in such experimentation. However, I would recommend differentiating between line units and headquarters. Integrating headquarters with representative staffs from all components should be encouraged because it provides the venue for effective communication. Each component has its own distinct brand or culture, particularly the Guard; to work effectively in the field, all components need to at least have situational awareness, if not understanding, of the cultural aspects of the other. In my experience – 14 years in and around the Pentagon within Army and National Guard headquarters – the most effective staffs were those that took the time to learn and respect the cultural aspects of the component cultures. It is at the HQ level that economies of scale through the integration of components can and has worked – sometimes.
Third, having closely read the NCFA report, I can only state my disappointment with the lack of discussion on alternative force structures and capabilities. The report seems to publicize more or less of the same. Where are the alternative looks, like those of Doug MacGregor, for one? Where are the hybrid scalable task forces that are going to be required for rapidly changing tactical, let alone operational, environments? Where are the serious discussions of the impacts of robotics at a time when we can easily envision within current technologies, a near future in which over 20% of battlefield capabilities will be automated in one form or another. This clearly will have force structural implications.
Fourth and finally, I am personally appalled at the comments of the Maryland Adjutant General concerning her hypothetical reluctance to use of National Guard units from the 1980s and 1990s on the streets of Baltimore. She clearly dismisses the massive transformation of Army Guard capabilities that mirrored the transformation of regular Army units in the wake of Vietnam. She demonstrates her ignorance of the history of progress in the capabilities of those generations’ units and desperately needs a remedial course in just what that generation of soldiers, AC and RC, accomplished. At the very least, she owes an apology to legions of retired Maryland Guard and Reserve soldiers from that era. Her comments reflect an all-too-common thread in today’s discussion of the future: that to embrace some future, we must disown the past.
How silly, stupid and poorly reasoned.
I heard Dr. Nora Bensahel say ( and I’m parphrasing) that people in the Army community past and present often say that “we tried mixed units and it never works!h
Her comment is “When did you try them?” Because communication systems and technology have evolved since 1987 and continues to do so almost by the hour. What may not have worked during the Cold War might go swimmingly in 2020. We don’t know until we try. Moreover, American economics in these lean times demands more efficiency. We don’t have the luxury of saying “we did that once and it didn’t work.”