Oct 13, 2014
New armies evolve to meet an array of challenges
Boeing C-17 Globemaster airlifts Rwandan soldiers and equipment to the Central African Republic, aiding French and African Union forces against militants in January.
U.S. Army Africa
The rise of asymmetrical warfare, advances in weapons and systems, and the mundane but no less relevant impact of budget cuts are changing how many armies structure their forces and conduct operations.
Put simply, nations are trying to do more with less without sacrificing readiness, force projection, impact and, ultimately, deterrence. Whether an army directly engages an enemy, such as Israel did last summer in Gaza in Operation Protective Edge, or joins a coalition to preserve a country’s sovereignty or keep the peace, just putting boots on the ground with conventional weapons and tactics no longer yields optimum returns.
Consequently, armies are renewing their focus on several key areas to meet evolving threats. These include:
•Training and equipping local forces to bolster their battlefield effectiveness and eliminate the need for intervention by allies.
•Ongoing integration of new technologies to improve situational awareness among all echelons in combat, and permit rapid responses to imminent threats.
•Increasing regional and cultural familiarity to improve relations with indigenous forces, or smooth the way should deployment of outside forces be necessary.
The overarching goal is to maintain an efficient force that makes full use of personnel and assets. Maximizing the operational capabilities of both is a good hedge against the uncertainties of budgets, national interests and political will.
After more than a decade of war and facing budgetary constraints, U.S. military leaders have adopted the concept of the Regionally Aligned Force (RAF) to maintain readiness around the world while keeping a lighter—and cheaper—footprint overseas.
Coupled with the goal of training and engaging allies and partner nations to handle local crises and threats without massive U.S. assistance, the RAF concept has steadily grown in acceptance since its origin in 2010.
RAF is designed to shape operations and prevent conflicts from spinning out of control by training partners to handle crises themselves while providing U.S. troops with regional and cultural familiarity of areas in which they may operate.
“While we’re prepared to do major combat operations, RAF provides the combatant commander the forces to ‘shape and prevent.’ And the more you invest in that up front, the less you’ll have to invest later on in a conflict,” says Lt. Col. Jason Charland, lead strategist for Regionally Aligned Forces Policy at Army headquarters in the Pentagon.
The U.S. Army has no significant bases or units permanently deployed in Africa and South America. To remedy that situation and maintain a small footprint while still maintaining readiness, the Army has a U.S.-based RAF for Africa and South America. These are units that are neither assigned semi-permanently to a combatant command or allocated like the units rotated into Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, they are service retained: troops based in the continental U.S., but parceled out to combatant commands to help in training and integrating with partner-nation militaries.
Since 2013, two brigade combat teams from the 1st Infantry Division of Fort Riley, Kansas, have been rotated as the RAF for Africa, the first to be so designated. So far, 3,204 soldiers have been deployed for 199 engagements, ranging from large-scale multinational exercises such as Western Accord 14 in Senegal and Southern Accord 14 in Malawi, to short military-to-military missions involving as few as two U.S. soldiers. The troops usually consist of experts such as engineers, military police and intelligence analysts who train a foreign country’s military in crowd control, foreign internal defense, counterinsurgency, explosive ordnance disposal and other skills.
Merkava Mk.4M tanks, equipped with the Trophy APS, defeated rocket and missile attacks in the Gaza war. Credit: Israel Defense Forces
The 1st Infantry Division’s 4th Brigade was part of a 50-soldier contingent from Fort Riley that flew to Malawi in July to take part in the nearly month-long Southern Accord 14 exercise. Participating African countries included Namibia, Botswana, Swaziland and Lesotho, as well as Malawi. The sessions combined classroom training with team-building for a tabletop command post exercise built around a fictional deployment in support of a United Nations peacekeeping mission.
Since U.S. Army Africa was integrated into the RAF concept in 2013, 13,553 African soldiers from 38 of Africa’s 54 countries have received training, according to the Army.
The impact of technology on army operations planning was evident in Operation Protective Edge. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) used advanced precision weapons and support systems that were developed, tested and fielded as part of the land forces modernization program, which seeks to make battalions better networked, more maneuverable and protected, and capable of delivering precise, measured firepower while maintaining manpower at current levels.
While these capabilities have always been available to higher echelons, battalions, companies and platoons lacked the autonomy and freedom of action they provide. As in many armies, lower echelons depended on others for support, including intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, airborne defense, artillery and mortar fire, or air strikes.
In fact, everything but direct fire has been based on services from other elements involving extended processing time, complex coordination, and greater risk of friendly fire and collateral damage. In engagements, a hidden, lightly armed enemy has a clear advantage over a regular force operating with these constraints.
Among changes being implemented are the introduction of sensors, enabling tactical units to gather intelligence and targeting information in real time. Lower echelons can also manage close air support and artillery fire using new targeting and communication systems, and relying on visual (geo-pixel) information exchange rather than the transfer of coordinates, which requires error-prone translation from visual to geospatial domains.
New systems for force protection were also field-tested in Gaza. Merkava Mk.4M main battle tanks equipped with the Trophy active protection system (APS) were deployed in large numbers. In at least 10 documented cases the Trophy APS system was engaged by different weapons. All threats were stopped without damage to the tanks or harm to nearby troops. The IDF is set to expand APS to more tank battalions as well as other vehicles.
During Operation Protective Edge, the Israeli army received the first shipment of counter-rocket, artillery and mortar radars developed by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) to provide tactical units with early warning of imminent attacks. Derived from the combat-proven Windguard radar employed with the Trophy APS, the “Green Rock,” as it is called, provides targeting data for a unit’s weapon systems—tanks, mortars and precision-guided weapons—to engage threats while alerting forces to take cover.
A similar system developed by Rada Electronic Industries has been fielded on the Gaza border, beefing up the early warning network against mortar attacks and incursions by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV).
Situational awareness is another gap at the tactical level. New sensors available to lower echelons are being fielded, providing elevated views of the battle space. With access to an elevated platform, battalions gain better situational pictures and improve communications coverage, particularly in urban combat, where rooftops are essentially high ground.
New elevated platforms, such as the HoverMast 100 from Skysapience, offer persistent surveillance in an autonomous, tethered platform that ascends 150 ft. and remains aloft for days. Equipped with a high-powered electro-optical (EO) payload and optional radio relay, the system provides critical surveillance that tactical units never had under their direct control. The IDF received the first HoverMast in 2013.
Accelerating the targeting process means faster fire support. To streamline this process, Rafael developed MatchGuide, an image-processing system that turns every pixel in a picture or video stream into a targetable coordinate. Rafael’s Pointer image processors are attached to standard observation equipment such as binoculars. Pointer grabs the target image, compares it to its geographic database, extracts target coordinates and transmits data to a firing unit over existing combat radio networks, enabling a dramatic reduction in the sensor-to-shooter cycle time.
Affordable precision fire is another capability tactical forces are likely to deploy with the help of new guidance systems. Precision-guided weapons have usually been associated with expensive sensors, dedicated communications and complex platforms. The miniaturization of EO and electro-mechanical systems is enabling dramatic cost reductions in precision fires.
The IDF is evaluating two artillery guidance systems developed in Israel by BAE SystemsRokar and IAI. Added to standard projectiles, these GPS/INS-based guidance systems enable artillery tubes to strike targets at 30-40 km (18-25 mi.), with a single round hitting within 10-20 meters (33-66 ft.) of a target.
Similar capabilities are possible with mortars firing guided projectiles developed by Israel Military Industries. These guided bombs reportedly hit targets at 7.5 km with 10-meter accuracy. This means that conventional artillery and mortars can provide fire support much closer to ground forces with significantly lower risk of collateral damage.
Broadband communication is often unavailable to a combat echelon. IAI developed a network based on commercial elements and hardened to military standards. The TAC4G network serves brigade, battalion and subordinate units by establishing a cellular network, with selected units equipped to function as base stations, creating a “communications cloud” wherever they operate. The network supports data, images, video and voice communications at very high speed, enabling the sharing of sensors, intelligence, voice and video streams, and conferencing.
Meanwhile, in Europe the German army is restructuring. It is phasing in its future infantry extended systems program as new equipment enters service, namely Boxer armored transport vehicles and Puma armored infantry fighting vehicles (AIFV). The army is also coping with planned reductions in personnel, to 62,000 from 69,000.
The army command has moved east—from Koblenz and Bonn to Strausberg—to be closer to the defense ministry in Berlin and, coincidentally, nearer to NATO’s eastern allies, which feel threatened by Russian aggression in Ukraine. The headquarters commands two mechanized divisions, the 1st Panzer and the new 10th Panzer, plus the rapid-response division of special forces soldiers and paratroopers.
The central element of the German army is the brigade, which is designed to be self-contained for training and operations. Each of the army’s six brigades consists of a light infantry (jaeger) battalion; mechanized (panzer grenadier) battalion; armored (panzer) battalion; and reconnaissance, armored engineer and supply battalions, plus a second, inactive infantry or armored battalion.
Lt. Gen. Rainer Korff, commander of the German multinational corps and basic military organization, sees the infantry as the backbone of operations, which along with armor, provides core capabilities to the army. The importance of infantry is one lesson taken from operations in Afghanistan—but the Ukraine crisis has also prompted leadership to emphasize armor as well as artillery.
Under its new structure, the army seeks to conduct a stability operation sustainable throughout its duration, with a command element and two reinforced battalions totaling 5,000 army troops out of a total of 10,000 from all services, or an initial entry operation with a division-sized command element, a German brigade and possibly a multinational brigade, along with special forces and airborne forces. Support for each operation would come from a tailor-made mix of army units and a helicopter task force from the air force. A NATO Article 5 collective defense mission would involve a division with two mechanized brigades and combat support, taking six months to prepare and possibly resulting in the scaling back, or even the ending, of other missions.
But Korff says that German army units are only 70% equipped. Brig. Gen. Josef Niebecker, head of planning and international cooperation, says unit assets—of small arms, at least—could increase through urgent operational requirements, and through cannibalization, which explains how the army could form nine mechanized battalions with an authorized strength of 44 Puma AIFVs each when the total ordered has been reduced to 350 from 405.
The army’s level of ambition includes providing standby forces for the NATO Response Force and EU battle groups. Korff, who was commander of NATO’s Multinational Corps Northeast (MNC-NE) in Poland, says multinational operations account for 10% of army personnel. Lt. Col. Juergen Fischer, responsible for public affairs and strategic communications, cites as examples the Franco-German Brigade, “a 25-year-old success story,” and integration of the Dutch army’s airmobile brigade into the German rapid-response forces division.
The Danish-German-Polish MNC-NE will be upgraded from low-readiness to high-readiness status. This means deployment in 30-90 days and an increase in personnel, all by mid-2015. Full operational capability in 2016 means the force will command missions across a spectrum of operations, with an emphasis on NATO collective defense.
This article appears in the October 13 issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology’s Defense Technology International. To read more about the critical role of defense technologies globally, click here to subscribe.
No comments:
Post a Comment