mwi.westpoint.edu

The United States Army spent the last two decades optimizing sustainment for permissive environments defined by uncontested supply lines, contractor support, and static forward operating bases. As the National Defense Strategy shifts toward strategic competition and multidomain operations, however, this efficiency-driven model has become a liability. In large-scale combat operations, victory will depend less on

During our brigade’s recent rotation at the Joint Readiness Training Center, an infantry battalion discovered something essential to success on the modern battlefield. Tasked to screen the approach of a larger air assault, 2nd Battalion, 506th Infantry built a layered web of sensors—company drone operators tied directly to mortar sections, scout teams pushed beyond the forward line of troops, and medium-range reconnaissance drones feeding the targeting cycle. The battalion’s single most effective intelligence asset was that medium-range platform. And the after-action lesson its leaders drew was blunt: The drone and its operators had become such a high-payoff target that the system needed to be flown by a specially trained infantryman who could survive in the close fight—not by a tactical unmanned aircraft system (UAS) pilot trained for employment at higher echelons.

More recently, while commentators proclaiming the need for the Army to adopt massed unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) use have not been shy in citing the more advanced capabilities of various nations including rivals such as Russia and China, these arguments sidestep the reality that any such US adoption would not automatically cause a corresponding decrease in the capability of any adversarial military. An admittedly incomplete survey of multiple force design proposals, new warfighting concepts, and field reports (including our own) on continuing experimentation with UAS reveals a disturbing tendency to ignore or minimize the degree to which an opposing adversary strike system must be initially and continuously challenged and defeated. Authors instead focus on the potential for new US Army strike complexes combined with increased layered protection schemes to drive an inexorable massing of kinetic and nonkinetic fires in support of traditional ground combat elements to restore maneuver to the battlefield.

Written as a perspective on the US, but it is globally relevant in my opinion.

This last point is key, because the lesson from this exercise is that the Ukrainian participants employed tactics adapted for the modern, drone-saturated battlefield, while NATO forces have not been forced by the realities of war to do the same.

This last point is key, because the lesson from this exercise is that the Ukrainian participants employed tactics adapted for the modern, drone-saturated battlefield, while NATO forces have not been forced by the realities of war to do the same.