How U.S Army Radically Transformed for WW3

The year is 2030, a cyber attack just hit America's major seaports and rail network. Border incursions break out in the Baltic along the border with Russia. At the same time, China imposes a blockade of Taiwan, and Iran launches a ballistic missile barrage against U.S. forces located throughout the Middle East. This is exactly the kind of worst-case scenario that would aim to overextend the U.S. Army across three different theaters simultaneously. It's exactly why the Army is implementing a radical new war plan and complementary weapons systems that are unlike anything we've seen in 30 years. What new capabilities are they prioritizing in this once-in-a-generation transformation? How does this new multi-domain warfare doctrine work? And what is the historical context that informed these changes? I'm your average Infantryman Chris Cappie, hit the like and subscribe button and let's find out. 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Enter U.S. Army General William DePue, a battle-hardened badass who'd seen action as a second lieutenant in World War II and later commanded a division in the hellscape of Vietnam. DePue wasn't just the guy for the job, he was the guy that understood that warfare was evolving faster than most people could wrap their heads around. He called for the creation of a new beast of an institution, the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command. This wasn't just another basement-dwelling office of the Pentagon, Traydok's mission was to entirely rip apart the old playbook and write a brand new war plan in response to the shockwaves sent by the Yom Kippur War. DePue was handed the keys to Traydok as its first commander, and what followed was nothing short of revolutionary. By 1976, DePue and his team had brewed up the U.S. Army's first bona fide named doctrine, FM-100 Operations, which was later dubbed Active Defense. Despite DePue's humble 11 Bravo Infantryman roots, he envisioned the future of warfare being armored mechanized centric. In earlier U.S. Army doctrine, large reserves were retained far back from the front so you still had some forces to counter attack with. However, in this new Active Defense strategy, most of your firepower was already committed, kept forward so you could bring everything you have to bear against the enemy right away. It called for hitting the enemy with everything you got, then pulling back in a kind of controlled manner to lure them into a kill zone. Advancing enemy forces would be pushed into a more narrow salient that you could effectively pinch off. It's more complicated than that, but it's largely about defense in depth, pulling back from battle position to battle position in a retrograde fight. This wasn't just theorycrafting for the sake of it, there were some hard realities behind the need for this new approach. For example, new forms of surveillance like improved spy planes and satellite images meant it was no longer really possible to secretly mass troops and surprise your opposing forces as easily as it was in WW2 Korea and Vietnam. There was also a rapidly shrinking American force size which meant that the army would be estimated to be fighting outnumbered 2 to 1 in the European theater against the Warsaw Pact. Depew was known for having no patience when it came to suffering fools, and his method of implementing his Active Defense war plan was by ramming it down the army's throat. Who would have guessed the infantry guy was less about diplomacy and more about brute freaking force. His second in command and chief of all armor at the time, General Starry said if you don't like it, get out of the army. Or like my dad always said, it's my way or the highway. This approach meant that there was friction and widespread criticism of the active defense strategy. Some generals claimed if you positioned all your forces forward in an aggressive posture like this it would needlessly provoke the enemy. Critics also said that active defense didn't account for the enemy's reserve forces looming in the rear. War games of the time repeatedly showed you could win a battle only to run into the second line of fresh defenses and get annihilated, forcing the use of nuclear weapons at that point. But if you ask me, military critics and people who comment on war can f**k, and that's where the army's second official war doctrine comes in. In 1977, Depew retired and his right hand man General Don Starry took over as the second commander of TRADOC in history. By now TRADOC had become like the church of the army, and FM-100 operations was its bible, and General Starry was its preacher, and all the soldiers were the disciples. I'm taking this analogy way too far now. Starry had commanded the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment in the Vietnam War, he'd been wounded in action by an enemy grenade. War was more than just theory and numbers to this guy, he had one job, address the inadequacies that were presumed about the active defense doctrine. His solution was the development of the army's second named doctrine, air-land battle, which was fundamentally rooted in the concept of maneuver warfare. Or to put it more simply, it was about getting in the enemy's face and breaking their ******* teeth. There were several key differences compared to active defense. For one, air-land battle was far more of an aggressive plan. There was not a whole lot of withdrawing back and luring the enemy in, no, this was all about moving forward, violence of action, doubling down, and completely exploiting and destroying the enemy. That's the kind of philosophy that wakes you up in the morning with an already full, raging war plan. But in order for this strategy to work, it would require a complete overhaul of the army's aging main weapon systems. Between the late 1970s and the early 1980s, the US defense industry had what I like to call a renaissance period. Nay, it was a golden age. The military-industrial complex went full sicko mode and developed what came to be known as the so-called big five weapon systems. These efforts led to the birth of America's modern firepower. It consisted of the AH-64 Apache Helicopter, the M1 Abrams Main Battle Tank came alive at this time, the UH-60 Black Hawk Transport Helicopter was born, the M2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle was a vehicle that combined the roles of troop transport and fire support, enhancing the mobility and protection of the infantry units, and finally the Patriot Air Defense Missile System protecting it all. I think the term game-changer is wildly overused, so I'll just call them what they are, regime-changers. General DePue had previously highlighted the urgent need for the modernization, stating, quote, because of the cost and preoccupation of the Vietnam War, the army lost a generation of modernization, end quote. These big five were seen as tools that were essential for air-land battle strategy to work, because air-land battle emphasized flexibility, speed, and ability to disrupt enemy forces by striking deep into their rear areas with a combination of ground and air forces. Let me explain. In order to accomplish this, U.S. Army Grunts were integrated with the new A-10 Warthog that was flown by Army Pilots. This all solved a major problem from active defense strategy, because it allowed for these devastating deep strikes against enemy forces' reserves that were 20 kilometers back from the front line. General Starry learned from his past actions that he would have more success by using some more tact when it came to winning his fellow subordinate officers over. If DePue was a killdozer, Starry was a real diplomat in camouflage. So Starry sent out advanced copies of the plan to pool everyone's opinion so he could get advanced buy-in. He made sure that the experience was much more consensual this time. Air-land battle became the primary doctrine of U.S. forces in 1982. Despite its innovation, air-land battle was still controversial at the time. Many senior military leaders criticized the doctrine. They argued that it risked spreading U.S. forces too thin and neglected the importance of maintaining a solid defensive position. However, that argument was soundly put to bed by the First Gulf War in 1991, which shocked not only the U.S. Army by its own effectiveness, but also its adversaries. These quotes about American warfighting doctrine are part legend and part myth, but they make me laugh because I think they capture something really true. A Russian document said, quote, One of the serious problems in planning against American doctrine is that the Americans do not read their manuals, nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine. I think it captures something fundamentally true about American doctrine. When I was an infantryman, my squad was given a lot of leeway to accomplish our platoon leader's intent and direction however we saw fit, and the same is true all the way up the chain of command. The U.S. military doesn't have any kind of top-down micromanagement approach that a lot of authoritarian adversaries favor. A German officer wrote, The reason the American Army does so well in wartime is that war is chaos, and the American Army practices chaos on a daily basis. After the year 2001, something strange happened. The U.S. Army adopted a new doctrine known as full-spectrum operations. This was a hard left turn from the previous three decades of building upon a single theory of war. It replaced the previous focus on conventional warfare and instead focused on something new, counterinsurgency. The once again controversial plan was created by Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki, who originally was a forward observer in the Vietnam War. This was a wild period of transformation of the Army that I witnessed firsthand when I served as a lower enlisted grunt. The new plan focused on deploying self-sustained small units in remote parts of the world. The key piece of equipment that allowed this strategy to work was the development of the new lightweight mobile striker armored fighting vehicle. The large-scale military divisions were cut up and focused around the deployment of 31 separate brigade combat teams that operated independently and rotated through the wars each year. The doctrine was a product of its time, born out of a unique moment in world history where the U.S. government believed that great power competition might be off the table for the foreseeable future. We were the top dogs, we were on top, and we could have whatever doctrine we wanted. Take a look at this map here, it perfectly shows how full-spectrum doctrine warfare works. Each area of operations in Iraq was split up with different brigade combat teams of roughly 4,000 troops responsible for smaller areas of operation. Each brigade is responsible for what's happening in their own area. There's no real front line, and what happens to your neighbor is kind of their own problem. Between 1968 and the year 2000, the U.S. military had shrank from 3.5 million personnel down to 1.3 million around where it remains today. And this new strategy was meant to work with those reduced force strength numbers. Under full-spectrum operations doctrine, many of the air defense artillery battalions were completely disbanded, left and right like toys that we decided we were done playing with. They were reclassified into infantry battalions because we needed anyone with a warm pulse. Starting in the early 2000s, the army seriously divested from air defense because they weren't considered mission critical. Of the 1,100 Avengers, that were built, only 400 remained operational after the reduction. However, this is a democracy and the enemy always gets a vote. During this same time period, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, all the usual suspects, they were closely studying all these changes. They were copying off our dang homework and designing systems to subvert America's strengths. In response, they developed their militaries to be focused heavily on what's called A2AD, or anti-access area denial warfare. They started pouring money into long-range missile platforms. They saw that the U.S. military's real strength at the time was being able to mass forces near your border, and if they're able to, then you've already lost the war. So their weapons were developed around denying freedom of movement. But it wasn't a serious threat at the time. We looked at it and thought, oh, that's cute. So the army half-heartedly tried to counter this between 2000 and 2009 on the future combat system. They tried to adopt new artillery, helicopters, and infantry fighting vehicles that all failed to materialize. Once again, like during the Vietnam War, I think the army had been distracted and lost an entire generation of modernization. If we don't know what we're doing, the enemy certainly can't anticipate our future actions. But starting in 2015, the army got back to work, and this time they were taking it more seriously. This time, General Mark Milley, the army chief of staff at the time, established a new command. It was separate from TRADOC, and it was called Army's Future Command. Milley was a veteran of the conflict in Panama, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His idea was that red tape and bureaucracy had grown and festered inside TRADOC since its inception in 1973. Future's Command was stood up as this kind of separate four-star command with its own authority to effectively get around all that bureaucracy. Sir, that just made me hula so hard. Please teach me how to dominate any adversary. It was headquartered in Austin, Texas, with 17,000 personnel working on one thing, transforming the army to fight and win future wars. The U.S. Army is undergoing the most significant transformation since the end of the Cold War. Congress allocated about the same amount of funds as the last effort, 30 billion bucks, for them to use towards modernization, make it rain however you want, all over them capabilities. They were given a stern wag of the finger and told, hey, do not f*** up again or else. The results have been far more impressive this time around. On February 27th, 2024, the army published this white paper outlining their new war plans. In it, they said, we're coming out of more than two decades of counterinsurgency conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The army's waking up with a bad hangover from those conflicts. They're slamming some coffee and refocusing on the threat at hand. In total, the army plans to cut between 24,000 and 32,000 jobs across the board to make room for these air defense jobs. So that's going to mean cutting 5,000 special forces slots. But what we've heard is that these are mostly unfilled jobs like print media and psyops in special forces. So not your hitters necessarily. So conventional forces will also face cuts. Some striker cavalry squadrons, for instance, will be cut. But cutting one capability to invest in another is as controversial today as it was in World War II. In 1939, when Poland was invaded by Germany, the U.S. War Department was pushing the chief of cavalry to disband horse cavalry units so that they could make room for mechanized forces. He refused, saying, quote, under no circumstances will I agree to further depletion of my horse cavalry. To do so would be a betrayal to the nation's defense. Not sure why I give him that accent. That quote might not be historically accurate. There's some reason to believe it wasn't actually ever said. But I think it's interesting because it captures something that I do think is undeniably historically true, that there is well-documented tendency by generals to want to fight the last war. Understandably, it's a part of human nature to be resistant to change. Sometimes change is best tackled by heading into it straight head on instead of hiding from it. You see, it all begins with the strategy. What do you want the army to do? Then importantly, what capabilities does the army need to have to meet that strategy? The new strategy they're talking about is called a multi-domain operations. It's an evolution. It's the logical next step of the theory of U.S. Army Fighting Doctrine and let me explain why that is. The key difference is that it's reorienting the fight back to a conventional war in multiple theaters simultaneously again, but there are some new domains, including coordinating with and protecting civilian assets now. We never really had to worry about that kind of stuff recently, but rail networks, ports, and roadways all need to be considered now. The U.S. Army is currently creating five multi-domain task force. Three of them will be assigned to the Pacific Theater, one is already in Hawaii, one will go to Europe, Africa, and another will be kept in the states for headquarters. The reason it's so different from the last theory of war is that these are theater level assets, meaning planning happens at a much larger scale. Instead of operating a brigade of 4,000 soldiers, you're operating and coordinating an entire division of 20,000 soldiers along a major front line and across multiple domains. I think the whole main point of multi-domain operations is all to counter the enemy's new anti-access area denial strategies. In order to do that, the Army is now working with what's called the Big Six, a reference to the old success, so we'll go through what some of those systems are now. One of the most important ones is the new Typhoon launcher that fires the SM-6 missile. It's able to hit targets over 1,700 miles away, or 2,700 kilometers. It's basically similar to the Russian Iskander missile launcher that you've probably heard about, or China's Dongfang missile series. The US Army's Typhoon battery has three missile launchers hooked up to a single control center. It doesn't look very threatening, it looks more like a Walmart truck with a missile attached to it. The idea was each multi-domain task force would get one battery. Key to this new weapon is the idea of standoff. The Army wants to give the infantry and tanks as much standoff from enemy missile technology as possible. The purpose of these would be to hit the enemy high-value targets like command centers, airfields, or key infrastructure like bridges. It's also meant to hit enemy Iskander missiles themselves. Next is the Army's new long-range, ground-launched hypersonic missile, also known as Dark Eagle. Not something I would personally want to f*** around with. It'll be ready in 2025, and it hits out to over 3,000 kilometers, or like from New York City to Paris to Moscow, and most importantly, it can move at 3,800 miles per hour, or five times the speed of sound, and maneuver in midair to avoid air defense. It looks like an extra dumpy version of the Mobile Patriot missile system, but with only two missile capacity. Each missile costs like 41 million dollars, so it's reserved for the highest-of-value targets. If the US government is targeting you with one of these things, consider yourself a very special person. This picture shows how multi-domain task forces are organized. It has an air defense battalion, strategic fires battalion, HIMARS battery, mid-range capability battery, and long-range hypersonic missile battery. This is a radical transformation compared to how the Army was organized in the past. And the thing to keep in mind here is that you also got two military intelligence companies and a signals battalion, all attached to you with the purpose of helping coordinate those long-range fires. So infantry and tanks, they're on the front line and they're meant to paint targets for those long-range strikes. Just like how long-range fires are layered, so too are defensive layers. The Army first started to realize that they had a major air defense vulnerability in 2014, and now it's a major part of the future multi-domain task force. The issue only really became an emergency after the war in Ukraine proved how units without air quickly. In order to counter long-range missiles and drones, the Army now plans to add 17 air defense units. This will add 7,500 air defense soldiers who will operate new Maneuver Short-Range Air Defense Systems, or MSHORAD, and new counter-UAV weapons. If you're not listening closely right now, that's absolutely insane. That's over a brigade's worth of troops dedicated to just one job. Between 1953 and 2004, the U.S. Air Force had always proudly stated that no U.S. personnel had been killed by enemy air attacks. This is arguably no longer the case, though, after three U.S. soldiers were killed in a drone strike in Jordan. Today, our concept of what constitutes an air attack has significantly changed since 1953. To address this, the Army is acquiring up to eight battalions of more than 144 MSHORAD units for $69 million. This is a major upgrade compared to the old Avenger system. The Army is modifying Strikers for the air defense role. Originally, it was going to have two AGM Hellfire missiles for taking out tanks, but they decided to scratch that and just go with eight short-range air defense missiles instead. These are the new version of the FIM-92 Stinger missiles that were designed to hit drones with a max range of five miles. It's equipped with the new XM914 30mm autocannon. That's a more powerful weapon than even the infantry version. The 30mm ammo is large enough for programmable airburst rounds that can hit those FPV drones. Like the other layers, though, air defense battalions will also have your Patriot, your THAAD launchers that shoot down your ballistic missiles, for instance. Again, the purpose of this is to give troops standoff. They want to create as big of a protective bubble around them as possible. The radar system on the vehicle is sensitive enough to track and automatically send target distance data to the ammo. This way, you can shoot down $500 drones with 30mm ammo that around $150 a pop. Increment 2 will cost $88 million and will eventually add 50kW directed energy weapons, meaning your lasers and microwaves, to fry drones as well. A key part of this theory is a working concept known as joint forcible entry. This includes seizing and holding a contested airhead or beachhead against armed opposition. This gives you the ability to continuously land troops and material for subsequent operations. The adversaries think one of the weaknesses of the US Army doctrine is that it takes a long time to build up forces. This is part of the reason as to why the army recently developed the M-10 Booker light tank so that the infantry could have a tank organic to it and they could have more firepower on the ground quickly to clear those points of entry for more follow-on masses. In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is invaluable. There are numerous examples throughout military history of radical adjustments to weapons or tactics ending up being entirely wrong. For example, adopting the M-14 turned out to be a mistake, the Israeli systemic operational design doctrine turned out to be an overcomplicated confusing mess, and it's almost always the lower enlisted regular troops who pay in blood for these mistakes instead of the higher up leadership. But on the other hand, there are just as many examples of leadership not adopting new technologies quickly enough and getting toasted by a new weapon system. This is the stakes. It's the push and pull inherent to any major change of war plans. Even the infantry's primary rifle is a reflection of multi-domain task force strategy. The new XM7 and XM250, whether you think these are correct weapon systems for grunts or not, we can't deny it's aligned with the army's vision. The XM7 new round gives twice the standoff range, twice the firepower, and its optic takes advantage of that. The army is convinced they're going to be outnumbered 2-1 in a future war, and if that happens, they believe the only way to fight themselves out of that disadvantage is for their weapon systems to outmatch the enemy's in terms of quality. Whether or not we agree or disagree with this philosophy, it's hard to deny that it's a clear common thread throughout all their weapon systems and their strategy for organizing and structuring their forces. The army version of the big 5 today is your M10 Booker, M1A3 Abrams Tank, Shorad Striker Air Defense, Typhoon Missile Launcher, Precision Strike Missile, Bell V-280 Valor which will transport army infantry quickly to the front lines and drop them off, new drone transportation, and loitering drone munitions like the Switchblade. In total, we're talking about 30 key weapon systems and capabilities supporting that new multi-domain operation strategy which the army is already fielding to troops. This is a combined strategy of weapons development and training of troops all under one purpose. Whether or not it works out, I'd be curious to know what you think. Do you think multi-domain operations is the future of warfare, or do you think it's a step backwards? I want to know what you have to say in the comment section. Thank you for watching. I'm your average infantryman Chris Cappie signing off this net time now.