Loren Thompson
The U.S. Army is currently in the midst of its most successful modernization campaign since the Cold War ended. All of the service’s most pressing gaps in battlefield capability are being remedied, and there is little sign of the setbacks that marred previous efforts to replace aging weapons.
This is a significant achievement because the Department of the Army spends a much bigger portion of its budget on people than the Air Force and Navy do, while spending a much smaller portion on weapons development and procurement.
In fact, the Army’s total spending on new equipment in its fiscal 2023 budget request is less than a third of the amount available to the Air Force ($36 billion versus $112 billion).
Congress will adjust these amounts when it finally gets around to passing a defense budget for the fiscal year that began October 1, but in the end the Air Force and Navy departments will still have a multiple of what the Army does for upgrading its weapons.
So why does the Army modernization program seem less troubled by problems than those of the other services do? The nation’s second major ground force, the Marine Corps, has spent the last several years trying to implement a transformation of its most fundamental warfighting plans, and the result is not inspiring.
Marine leaders can’t even secure support for their plans within the Department of the Navy, much less at the joint-service level where resource allocations are finally adjudicated. Senior defense officials are doubtful about the path the Marines have chosen, even though their plans are supposedly tailored to the demands of the China-centric national defense strategy.
No such doubts afflict the Army’s modernization agenda. Senior Pentagon leaders have made minimal interventions in the Army’s execution of its priorities, with all major modernization initiatives funded in the fiscal 2024 budget request to be unveiled early next year.
Recent events have tended to strengthen the Army’s hand, because circumstances surrounding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have underscored the importance of long-range precision firepower, integrated air defense, secure communications and electronic warfare.
Of course, it helps that both the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff hail from the Army. They understand at a fine level of granularity why the Army is pursuing the modernization goals it has identified. But that wouldn’t matter if Army plans were as exotic as those put forth by the Marine Corps.
So here are four lessons that help explain why Army modernization efforts are progressing smoothly, while other services are encountering political resistance and resource constraints in trying to implement their own plans—despite having more money to work with.
Stick with a plan. The Air Force and the Navy frequently alter their modernization plans. The Air Force this year cut its planned annual buys of the F-35 fighter in half from what had previously been announced, while the Navy has become notorious for changing its shipbuilding plan with each new budget.
The Army doesn’t do that. In 2018 it settled on six capability areas that needed to be markedly improved by 2030, and it has stuck with that plan. The priorities are long-range fires, next-generation combat vehicles, future vertical lift, networked warfare, air and missile defense, and soldier lethality.
Service leaders have maintained these priorities through two administrations, so they do not need to explain with each new budget why their plan has changed. Because the plan has been kept on track, several next-generation warfighting systems will begin reaching soldiers in 2023 while the other services are mired in delays.
Build a cohesive team. The Army in recent years has been led by an unusually collegial team of senior officers and political appointees. There is little sign of the frictions that often arise between uniformed leaders and political players, with many of the most important political types like Trump-era Army Secretaries Mike Esper and Ryan McCarthy being former soldiers who served in places such as Afghanistan.
The Army’s current acquisition chief, Douglas Bush, is himself a former infantry officer who went on to become a senior defense staffer on Capitol Hill. He thus combines a deep understanding of Army operational needs with a measure of legislative savvy that often is missing in political appointees.
Working under Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, a defense intellectual who came to her current job with prior service in senior Pentagon posts, the leadership team has kept the modernization plan inherited from the previous administration on track, and helped assure its acceptance at the top level of the defense department.
The continuity of the leadership team has been bolstered by the fact that when Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley was elevated to Joint Chiefs Chairman, he was replaced in the service’s top uniformed position by former Vice Chief Gen. James McConville, who has proven to be a tireless advocate of the modernization plan.
Be realistic about goals. Army modernization initiatives repeatedly faltered during the Bush and Obama years because they were too ambitious. The plan put in place by Esper, McCarthy, Milley and McConville was a carefully crafted roadmap of how to modernize within the constraints imposed by politics, budgets, and available technology.
So, unlike the Air Force, the Army isn’t trying to modernize all of its major warfighting platforms at the same time. The Apache helicopter and Abrams tank will remain in the force to mid-century, receiving digital upgrades to keep them relevant.
Investment in next-gen systems will come in areas where opportunities for major advances are promising, for instance in doubling the range and speed of the ubiquitous Black Hawk assault helicopter while reducing the logistical footprint of its successor.
In cases where a current modernization project was determined to be too difficult, the Army has not been shy about reshaping the effort. For example, its original development schedule for a replacement of the Bradley troop carrier was reworked when industry warned the timeline was too aggressive.
Don’t reinvent the wheel. The Army’s modernization plan is focused first and foremost on deterring Chinese aggression in the Western Pacific during a period of digital transformation. This requires the service to prepare for combat over vast distances, but it also offers the prospect of new technologies with which to achieve novel warfighting effects.
Army leaders have kept their modernization plan affordable by exploiting capabilities already resident in other parts of the joint force to accomplish those novel effects. For instance, the service’s number-one modernization goal, increasing the range and accuracy of its fires, is relying heavily on missiles already fielded or in development for the Navy.
Similarly, the Army is looking to the intelligence and reconnaissance capabilities of sister services in helping to detect, track and engage hostile targets using its new weapons. A recent test demonstrated that Army ground forces could utilize data gathered by F-35 fighters to identify distant targets and facilitate their destruction.
The test, part of a broader series of experiments called Project Convergence, was aimed at removing barriers to cooperation across service lines in wartime. The advent of digital networks is transforming the Army from a data-starved to data-rich player in piercing the fog of war, but Army leaders are the first to admit that they must work more closely with other services to achieve wartime goals. By doing so, they reduce the overall cost of their modernization efforts.
No comments:
Post a Comment