Discovery Before Disaster: The Louisiana Maneuvers and the Untested Warfighting Concepts of Today’s Army

Matthew Revels and Eric Uribe

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This slogan is among the Army’s favorites, yet its application at the operational level remains uneven. Brigade combat teams rotate through combat training centers, maneuvering largely in isolation while simulated adjacent formations execute scripted roles that fails to introduce the friction that defines the real world’s battlefields. To compensate for the absence of field training at echelons above the brigade level, the Army increasingly relies on command post and simulation-based exercises. While such exercises are valuable for refining staff processes, they cannot replicate the uncertainty, degraded communications, and cumulative friction inherent in multidivision operations. The result is a training system optimized for confirmation rather than correction.

The Army’s shift toward preparing for large-scale combat operations has necessitated that the combat training centers reorient from training brigades on counterinsurgency doctrine to implementing the Army’s new operational concept, multidomain operations. Doctrine manuals make it clear that divisions and corps are the central maneuver elements under the new concept. To better align with its operational doctrine, the Army developed the Army of 2030 plan to reorganize the force, shifting responsibility away from brigade commanders by allocating additional resources to division and corps commanders, effectively centralizing an increasing number of resources and assets within higher echelons to limit brigade commanders’ span of control.