James Mingus, John Weissenborn and Peter Sulzona
Editor’s note: This article is the third in an eight-part series led by retired General James Mingus, the thirty-ninth vice chief of staff of the Army, on transforming the Army to meet the challenges of tomorrow’s battlefield. You can read other articles in the series here.
In 1981, Private Mingus, an Army artilleryman, relied on a $100 handheld calculator to compute fire missions on a linear, ground-based battlefield. Today, that linear fight is a thing of the past, just as the handy HP calculator has been replaced by digital systems with a billion times the compute power. The modern battlespace, from the plains of Ukraine to the littorals of the Indo-Pacific, is a dense web of thousands of sensors and shooters deployed from the ground to low-earth orbit as well as cyberspace.
To prevail in this environment, our Army must do more than just evolve. It must reimagine the fires warfighting function and move from a rigid kill chain to an integrated fires complex: a holistic framework that converges offensive and defensive fires and will win the counter-C2 (command and control) fight, win the counterreconnaissance fight, win the counterfires fight, and rapidly destroy the key systems the enemy needs to succeed.
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