Unified Quest Army Future Game
We are in the midst of a uniquely challenging time in our Army’s history, although frankly it seems like we can always say that.
We still have a significant number of troops in combat in Afghanistan and continued involvement in the Philippines, the Horn of Africa and other places around the world and ensuring their success is our main effort. North Korea and Iran remain challenges we cannot ignore. We are on the front edge of a drawdown in an era of fiscal austerity. Lastly, our national strategy is shifting to focus on the Asia-Pacific region and broadening to a construct of “prevent, shape and win.”
At the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, we consider these challenges and our national strategy, and determine how we might best shape the future force. One way to accomplish this is through our “Unified Quest” series of seminars, workshops and symposia.
Results from the UQ series will inform our revision of the strategic concepts found in the Army Capstone Concept and the Army Operating Concept. Results will also help us implement Unified Land Operations Doctrine (ADP 3.0), particularly in consideration of doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, and facilities (DOTMLPF).
The capstone event of this year’s Unified Quest is the “Army Future Game.” This war game will examine the role of the Army as a decisive, adaptive force across a range of military operations. During the war game, held June 3-8 at Carlisle Barracks, two working groups will address operational scenarios set in 2020 in the PACOM and CENTCOM theaters. Free-play “Red Teams” will employ anti-access and area denial operations within an overarching hybrid strategy to enable a rigorous examination of key proposed concepts. Additionally, a strategic working group composed of more than 60 senior leaders and subject matter experts will examine key strategy and policy issues relevant to shaping the Army of 2020 and informing the Quadrennial Defense Review.
In the Army Future Game we are going to wrestle with some critical challenges. For example, we’ve steadily improved our integration and interoperability of special operations and conventional forces over the last decade of combat. A key issue is how this integration should evolve to best defeat future threats. Additionally, we’d like to develop thoughts on how we accomplish this at home station, at our national combat training centers, and in regional engagement activities.
We’ll also consider how we overcome the hybrid strategy of adversaries that combine the capabilities of conventional, terrorist, criminal, proxy, and irregular organizations and forces. To do this, our scenarios will cause our “Blue Forces” to closely examine how innovations across DOTMLPF might help defeat hybrid strategies.
Overall, we’ll examine about a dozen of these kinds of issues. This analysis will provide us strategic and operational insight and potential implications for Joint and Army concepts. Ultimately, we’ll develop recommendations to posture both the institutional and operational Army to successfully execute their roles during the 2018-2030 timeframe.
This event will help leaders shape our Army as the operational environment changes, and as we transition our national strategy. We’ll see the next step of this process in July, when the Chief of Staff of the Army leads a senior-leader seminar to review the insights and recommendations of the Army Future Game. At that point, I’ll bring you up to date with what we think we have learned. In the meantime, if you have thoughts on integrating special operations and conventional forces, or how we might defeat hybrid strategies, then please join in the conversation. The more voices in the discourse, the better chance we’ll have of getting this right.
I think it is interesting (and good) that GEN Cone posts on Small Wars Journal and uses it as a tool to communicate. Since he is posting here, he most likley is reading it so all of you disruptive thinkers out there who want to be able to influence senior leaders take heart in that someone is listening (or reading!).
I agree with Dave, it is excellent to see senior leaders reaching out to the community. I guess the CAC blogs didn’t really kick off as expected.
I hope that in these war-gaming series junior leaders 0-3 and below, E-8 and below who recently returned from overseas environments are integrated and leveraged. I’d hate for these future conflicts to be mostly assembled from retired GO’s, ORSA specialists, and think-tank “futurists”.
It would be interesting to work through hybrid scenarios where the US Army does not have air superiority, or is unable to use FOBs of any kind due to enemy threat.
Will any unclass versions of the results be published?
In the Introduction to his autobiography, The Story of an American Jihaadi [link downloads safe copy in .pdf] posted today, Omar Hammami (Abu Mansur al-Amriki) writes:
The emphasis on narrative as “more important than … navies, napalms, and knives” in his reason #2 is what catches my attention here, and it reminds me of a recent article in SWJ by Mehar Omar Khan, a graduate of Pakistan Army’s Command and Staff College in Quetta, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, and U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies, both at Fort Leavenworth, KS.
Khan wrote:
and:
I’m one of the “wretched minds” Khan mentions, a poet and scholar of religion, so my question for GEN Cone and those who are planning Unified Quest is: how will words and narratives – not so much in terms of propaganda and deception but as recruitment lit, as moral suasion, as scripture, and as poetry and song — figure into your game?
Thanks for the opportunity to ask.
GEN Cone,
Thank you for posting in SWJ. Some initial thoughts on the wargame and beyond. In the first part of your post you mentioned the broader approach of shaping and preventing, which I think we have been doing moderately well since the end of WWII. Of course we’ll probably never know how many conflicts we deterred with our capacity building efforts, presence, treaties and so forth. What has changed (since the end of the Cold War) is we’re now in a multipolar world again, and not only see the emergence of powerful states (economic and otherwise), but also more powerful non-state actors, so “our (U.S. only)” ability to shape and deter even without defense cuts is on a downward slope. If we can effectively lead then “our (including our network of allies and partners)” ability acting in a unified way to shape and prevent is greatly improved. After years of doing coalition operations we still aren’t good at for a lot of reasons, one of the most significant reasons is our inability to rapidly share information and intelligence to other than NATO allies. Not sure how you wargame this, but it needs to be addressed at the most senior levels.
GPF and SOF are better integrated now than when we started this conflict, but it still isn’t where it needs to be. I think SOF has a pretty good idea of how GPF operates, but the opposite isn’t true. SOF is still often significantly degraded (freedom of action) by GPF battle space owners. There are no simple fixes, but a start would be mandating that GPF leaders from Bn and up receive education on special operations so they understand why SOF need to operate outside the norm of GPF operations to maximize thier effectiveness.
As for defeating hybrid threats, I can’t think of a conflict that characterized a hybrid conflict more than the Vietnam War. Tactically we prevailed, but for reasons I can’t explain between the end of the Vietnam War and 9/11 the Army lost that mindset (not the skills). The Army that invaded Iraq in 2003 was very slow on the uptake when it came to shifting from fighting soldiers to militias. I have to assume it was the training leading up to the conflict. Our Army has the skills and equipment to prevail in a hybrid conflict, but they need training scenarios that encourage anticipating and adapting rapidly based on the threat presented. The Army should never again deploy to NCTC and simply fight tank on tank battles, but at the same time they still need to be the best in the world in those tank on tank battles. Scenarios should be unpredictable, soldiers should be put in situations where they are forced to adapt. This isn’t hard, it is really just some minor changes in training and powering down to the lowest levels possible. You can trust them if you train them well, don’t save money on the training end when the cuts come.
As an aside and not to move in a divergent direction from General Cone’s post, but I am unclear as to what “success” we have had in Iraq, as Bob Jones asserts. What I ask have we the United States gained in Iraq in terms of appreciable strategic and policy goals. To be sure one can point to operational successes, but operational success is not an end in itself in war. In short for the entire American blood and treasure spent as well as the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, maimed, and displaced what has this war gotten us?
I would suggest to General Cone that as we think about the future we ought to do it based on an honest and objective assessment of the recent past in Iraq and Afghanistan. If we think that military force as it has been applied in Iraq and Afghanistan has been successful in a Clausewitzean political sense, then we are looking into the future on the wrong basis.
Lastly Bill M said that the we were slow to learn in Iraq. But I disagree. In fact the evidence shows quite conclusively that at the tactical level we learned and adapted very quickly from the start in Iraq. The key point here and related to General Cone’s post is that in war an army can learn and adapt perfectly, but then still lose the war.
The American army has come to believe that if it just “understands” the situation, that if it is a learning organization then voila any war can be won or conflict resolved. But this attitude is reflective of the continuing darker side of the Army, a side that since the Vietnam war has buried itself in the tactics and operations of war, but has lost the bubble about war’s totality.
I would like to thank everyone for your collective feedback. Your thoughts are shaping our approach to the game.
Our preparation of the Army for current and future challenges is fundamentally based upon a close examination of the lessons of the past, supported by rigorous analysis founded in plausible & challenging scenarios. I expect future conflicts to be complex, characterized by a range of threats that are likely to blur the distinctions of past conflicts and challenge us in new ways. Our adversaries will seek to attack our will to fight, avoid our preferred methods of war, and exploit both strategic and other levers to set conditions that force us to fight where they see advantage. History and recent experience indicates that this sort of complex environment can be created deliberately or by happenstance as multiple opportunists join the fight.
We will include scenarios that likely place us at disadvantages compared to today, such as the inability to secure basing and overflight. We will also examine challenges to capabilities where we currently have competitive advantage or even overmatch, such as low and high technology threats and anti-access/area denial techniques.
Your comments about ‘words and narratives’ are interesting. We are investigating how we effectively address friendly, adversary and neutral viewpoints.
Again, thank you for the feedback please keep it coming. Following the AFG, I plan to come back to this forum and share the insights and recommendations it produces.
GEN Cone
This diverges a bit from what Gen. Cone is asking for from the SWJ community. However, I think what has been abandoned in advance of these scenario-driven exercises is the need to determine what is sufficient for securing vital national interests. Instead of defining that threshold, the Army has sought to be competent across all of the primary mission areas outlined in the defense strategic guidance (January 2012) and has invested its intellectual energy in exploring scenarios which (1) best fit the focus of the current presidential administration [i.e. Asia-Pacific region, etc.] and (2) highlights the need for a desired force structure. Intelligent threats will always seek to attack our weaknesses. Preparing an army principally on that convention is shadow boxing. The target is a mirage because the future conditions of conflict are so unknowable.
The Army’s experimentation ought to be premised on an understanding of what the nation’s enduring interests are. This is the escape from tactical and operational myopia. Anti-access/area denial, as an example, is a perennial issue that has primarily risen to prominence because of contemporary obsession with China. The critical issue is not learning how to answer transitory aggregations of operational methods (hybrid, 4G, etc.) as applied by hypothetical threats. The matter at hand, for the Army and her sister services, is how to best protect what is truly vital and also be able to scale up to advance other important interests. It is a matter of determining where the line is for achieving acceptable sufficiency in capability.
Having defined sufficiency, the Army can then move forward to address challenging and relevant scenarios to guide doctrine development and force modernization without incurring as a great a risk of giving in to tacit assumptions and hidden biases. When strategically-based, venues such as the Army Future Game could then provide the military with the basis to better inform leaders at the policy-level by giving them a proper picture of what is in the realm of the possible and hopefully avoid fatally flawed military misadventures.