Does the US Army’s Future Lie in Europe or Asia?

It could not wage wars in both at the same time

By Denise Rivette

There is a very interesting article on the future of the U.S. Army in British-based magazine, The Economist, that you can read HERE. If you encounter a paywall and would like to read the entire article, please contact me as my subscription allows me to “gift” a limited number of articles. Below are some highlights.

The article discusses three unsettled questions between army civilian and military leaders:

One is whether profound shifts in the character of war, some evident in Ukraine, might render ground forces less important, if not irrelevant.

A second is how to balance resources between Asia and Europe (Asia being the Pentagon’s priority and Europe where Russia is rearming fast). The army can prepare for conflicts in both places but it cannot actually wage those wars at the same time—and it is no longer asked to do so. The 2018 National Defence Strategy ended the “two war” standard, a change accepted by the Biden administration.

That leads to a third, and the most existential for the army. What, beyond the provision of logistics and air defence, would be the role of a ground force in a future war in the Pacific?

In discussing these, current wars and military exercises are taken into account:

Ukraine’s battalion command posts comprise seven soldiers who dig into the ground and move twice daily. “That standard”, they warn, pointing to ingrained habits of hardened command posts, “will be hard for the US Army to achieve.”

The commanders of battalions (about 1,000 soldiers) and brigades (a few thousand), the core units of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, would be consumed by this intense fighting in a way they were not during counterinsurgency missions. The army is thus reorganising so that more of the burden of planning, logistics, command and control and long-range firepower falls on divisions—larger formations typically led by two-star generals which stand farther back from the front lines and have more time and space to orchestrate the frenetic battles of the future.

“At the end of the day, decisions are going to be made by the pointy end of a gun.”—General Charles Flynn

General Harrington says that an exercise in the Philippines last year was a reminder that HIMARS rocket launchers and intelligence equipment, full of delicate electronics, fare less well in the heat and humidity of tropical Asia than in the American proving ground where they were first tested.

The article ends with recruitment and reserve numbers and a look to the future:

The army expected to finish last year short of 10,000 recruits, a 15% shortfall and the second consecutive year of under-enlistment. Much of that is down to America’s tight labour market but it also reflects waning enthusiasm towards military service, and towards combat arms in particular.

The fall in the size of the “individual ready reserve”—reservists not allocated to a particular unit—from 450,000 in 1994 to 76,000 in 2018 worsens the problem. Ukraine shows how intense wars tend to chew up regular armies, requiring an infusion of citizens with military experience. Today’s shortage of combat soldiers is tomorrow’s shortage of reservists.

Now, as in the pivotal moments of the mid-1970s, the army finds itself wrestling with profound questions over its size, shape and purpose, ones that will eventually touch, as they did then, its relationship to American society.