Preparing U.S. Land Forces to Fight in an Era of Strategic and Technological Disruption

CSIS | Jerry McGinn, Jason Paul "JP" Gresh, Alek Jovovic

United States land forces are overhauling force structure and doctrine to counter rapid technological disruption from unmanned aerial systems, stand-off precision strikes, and contested logistics environments. While the US Marine Corps has committed to divest-to-invest restructuring through its Force Design initiative, the US Army is establishing operational concepts via its "How the Army Fights" guidance.

However, these modernization goals confront severe structural headwinds from post-Cold War fiscal drawdowns, shrinking recruiting pools, and competing personnel expenditure. Munition stockpiles remain dangerously thin. Beyond direct combat capabilities, the US Army carries a disproportionate share of joint executive agency responsibilities, managing theater logistics, theater sustainment, and integrated air defense. Accelerating the rapid adoption of autonomous systems requires closer feedback loops between military acquisition branches and commercial defense suppliers. Overcoming these persistent institutional bottlenecks is critical to sustaining joint force combat posture across increasingly contested global operational theaters.

Comment

The structural friction in US land force modernization stems less from doctrinal ambiguity in the US Army than from industrial capacity limits across the defense manufacturing base. While the US Marine Corps' Force Design shifts force structure toward distributed lethality, surge production for precision-guided munitions remains bottlenecked by legacy procurement models. The US Army's "How the Army Fights" framework similarly assumes rapid tactical consumption rates that current defense industrial throughput cannot replenish during high-intensity conflict.

This disconnect mirrors the sustainment crisis faced by the US Department of Defense during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, where rapid munition consumption exhausted stockpiles and forced emergency military airlifts. Commercial defense suppliers remain constrained by long-lead manufacturing for solid rocket motors, contract lead times, and fragile sub-tier supply chains. Consequently, the US Army's employment of long-range precision fires under its "How the Army Fights" concept depends directly on expanding sub-tier defense industrial production.

Strategic Question for Discussion

Which factor presents the more immediate risk to the US Army's "How the Army Fights" guidance — the industrial inability to expand solid rocket motor production, or the structural friction of joint executive agency responsibilities?

The available evidence points toward sub-tier industrial bottlenecks, particularly in solid rocket motor manufacturing, as the far more acute operational constraint. While joint executive agency duties impose heavy administrative loads across Army echelons, those requirements remain predictable, whereas depleted munition stockpiles directly cap high-intensity strike capacity in a peer conflict. My assessment is that operational doctrine will remain vulnerable to rapid attrition until defense acquisition models move beyond peacetime inventory limits.

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