Nathan Jennings
With the adoption of multidomain operations (MDO) as its central operational concept, the US Army is modernizing its approach to more effectively compete against a variety of state and nonstate adversaries. This development offers a pathway forward for the service to, as argued by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General C.Q. Brown, Jr., “keep focus on what is essential in Jointness—working seamlessly across domains, Services, and the Total Force.” Seeking to compel decision on increasingly lethal battlefields that challenge operational maneuver and formation endurance, the MDO concept—now codified in the Army’s capstone doctrine with corresponding changes in force structure—calls for novel interplay across the land, air, maritime, space, and cyber domains in order, as argued by the chairman, “to fight today’s battles but also to prepare for tomorrow’s wars.”
While the Army must implement MDO and prepare to fight across the spectrum of conflict, conventional and large-scale combat operations pose a particularly important set of challenges. The rise of peer threats around the world and their involvement in such conflicts raise the possibility that the United States may, if deterrence fails, need to fight a war of expanded scale and intensity. At the same time, there is gradually diminishing institutional memory or experience the United States military can draw on to know what to expect during large-scale combat operations. Thus, it is important to balance the requirement to retain hard-won counterinsurgency competencies learned in Iraq and Afghanistan with emerging imperatives to prepare for expeditionary campaigns against peer adversaries.
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