Nathan Jennings
The character of war is evolving in ways that demand a dramatic reorganization of the US Army’s order of battle. Adversaries have developed antiaccess and area-denial systems, at depth and scale, that are explicitly designed to prevent US forces from deploying to, maneuvering in, and sustaining in expeditionary theaters. These architectures combine long-range fires, air defenses, electronic warfare, space denial, and cyber capabilities to construct integrated standoff defenses that can stymie American power projection. At the center of this array, an emerging panoply of drone platforms now saturates the environment, providing persistent reconnaissance, precision fires, and information warfare amplification. To prevail in these conditions, the Army must align organization, concept, and strategy with a reimagined divisional structure that can maximize emerging technologies to execute multidomain operations in the most challenging of scenarios.
To fulfill the vision of the Army Warfighting Concept, the service should move past dated armored, Stryker, infantry, and airborne categorizations to reorganize its combat forces into four divisional types according to logic of purpose: recon-strike divisions, assault divisions, consolidation divisions, and sustainment divisions. Each would be optimized for distinct roles within corps or joint force commands, providing reimagined ability to synchronize unmanned strike and protection systems in ways that empower increasingly vulnerable brigade combat teams to win in close combat. Adapting traditional maneuver theory to innovations in artificial intelligence, systemic automation, and adaptive thinking, it would enable the Army to defeat standoff networks and ensure freedom of maneuver across increasingly contested landscapes.
However, the unrealized potential of this reorganization must be balanced with enduring realities of continuity and change in warfare that will challenge planning assumptions and cultural biases. First, even as the Army modernizes to maintain land warfare primacy, it must recognize the reality that conflicts are often defined by attrition and battle damage that overwhelms preconflict notions of decisive operational maneuver. Second, the reorganization of divisions as the primary unit of action, according to tactical purpose, must include preparation to execute dynamic formation reconstitution while under enemy fire. As General Donn Starry argued after observing the destruction of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, multistar echelons must prepare to adopt “extraordinary measures” required to “quickly restore a depleted unit to an acceptable level of combat effectiveness” to ensure “timely regeneration of the force.”
Historical Precedent: German Blitzkrieg, 1940
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