1st Cavalry Division brigade from Fort Hood to Kuwait has demonstrated that the Army has indeed become a strategic force for the 1990s.
More and more, the Army is finding itself involved in non-war-fighting missions, in operations such as VII Corps's humanitarian relief efforts in southeastern Iraq following Desert Storm; Provide Comfort in northern Iraq; and peacekeeping operations, such as that which the U.S. Army has been performing in the Sinai Desert since 1979. In a world that is no longer bipolar, regional conflicts or crises are sure to demand the peaceful use of U.S. forces.
There is a sharp distinction between the two types of operations: On the one hand, there is war, the deliberate use of force to gain a national or coalition strategic objective. The Army's purpose is to fight and win the nation's wars as part of a joint team, and it trains, equips, and mans itself to do that. In war you want aggressive, tough soldiers and units. That behavior does not always work best in an operation other than war.
On the other hand, military forces can be used to gain objectives by means of (usually) non-combat operations, and (usually) in combination with other elements of national power. Though occasionally some of these operations might involve actual combat, force is not the principal means to the strategic ends. However, the discipline, skills, teamwork, and toughness that come from preparing to fight and win can be used in these operations. (You cannot go the other way. Soldiers and units trained only in skills for operations other than war are not prepared for the rigors of the land battlefield.)
OOTWs, as such operations are called, are not new. The Army has long conducted them — beginning with George Washington's use of the militia to put down the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania in 1794.
How do you conduct OOTWs?
You need
• a sense of objective: the ability to focus all your efforts on achieving that objective; and the discipline to stay within those parameters;
• unity of effort: all the various military, government, and non-government agencies have to work toward the same goal;
• a sense of legitimacy: the operation must be conducted in such a way that the authority of the local government is reinforced;
• perseverance: OOTWs tend to take much longer to reach objectives than the use of force;
• restraint: you have to stay within specified rules of engagement; and, finally,
• security: you need to protect the force against a variety of threats while it is conducting its operations.
One interesting anomaly that the Army began to notice about OOTWs: while the actual battlefield was becoming less dense with soldiers, these OOTW missions tended to be manpower-intensive. Such a contradiction would lead to tensions, as budget analysts attempted to reduce the Army end strength.
Passage of the Goldwater-Nichols legislation in 1986 ensured the pre-eminence in the U.S. military of joint operations over operations conducted by a single service alone.
Does that mean that Goldwater-Nichols created joint warfare? Far from it. It's been practiced almost from the beginning of the nation's history. World War II saw the largest joint operations in the history of the U.S. military, and the landing at Inchon in Korea was a joint operation masterstroke. Later, however, the long Cold War fixed the services into set patterns of operation. They were ready to fight if that conflict grew hot, but were perhaps not as ready to combine forces to operate quickly in other environments. That changed when Desert One and Grenada inspired a reemphasis on the skillful conduct of joint operations. After that, Desert Storm proved the worth of the new legislation.
Before 1986 little joint doctrine had been published, and actual warfighting doctrine was published by individual services (principally by the Army and, to a lesser extent, by the Marine Corps, since operational doctrine seemed most useful to land forces). The services would then informally meld their doctrines together — essentially with a Cold War scenario in mind — to achieve whatever harmony was appropriate. Starting in 1973, for instance, and lasting into the 1990s, the Army and the USAF had struck up a close working partnership at TRADOC and the AF TAC (Tactical Air Command). The result was the AirLand Battle doctrine. Similar close relationships between the Marines and Army had for years harmonized land battle doctrines — while recognizing the special nature of amphibious warfare.
Yet no body of joint doctrine existed when forces of two or more services were combined to conduct operations. Goldwater-Nichols changed that, but it was General Powell who drove the first real operational joint doctrine, JCS Pub 1, published after Desert Storm, that laid out operating guidelines for joint forces. Soon after that came JCS Pub 3.0, which was a joint version of the Army's FM 100-5.
The June 1993 FM 100-5, written by Fred Franks and his TRADOC team, contained an entire chapter on joint operations, which gave members of the Army the basic outlines of joint operations, joint task force, joint command, unified commands, and command relationships.
Joint operations were clearly not always going to be on the scale of a Desert Storm. In today's more multipolar world, a smaller joint task force would be formed quickly to deal with fast-moving situations in areas such as Somalia, Haiti, or Bosnia. Each would be commanded by a joint task force (JTF) — a headquarters comprised of members of all the services, with component commands of each service reporting to the JTF. Normally, the commander of the JTF would be from the service with the most forces represented, while individual members of the joint task force staff would have to be skilled in working with a joint team. This was a marked change from the Cold War. Learning how to do this — and teach it — required a significant redesign of curricula in the service and joint schools: another provision of the 1986 legislation requiring joint education and joint duty.
In a combined — as opposed to a joint — operation, the U.S. military conducts missions with the forces of another nation, either in coalition warfare or coalition operations other than war. In the emerging multipolar world, with U.S. Army forces now smaller than in generations, most future operations will likely be combined.
Combined operations are not new to the U.S. military, either. Without the assistance of the French army and navy, Yorktown would not have happened. And in the twentieth century, combined operations have been the norm rather than the exception. During the Cold War, most combined operations were within the NATO framework… or, to a lesser extent, within the framework of the alliance with South Korea. Procedures within those two alliances had long been worked out.
In Desert Storm, the U.S.A. put together a political and military coalition of a very different kind — ad hoc, more or less improvised, but highly effective. As Fred Franks and the thinkers at TRADOC looked about the world, they saw that this was likely to be the model for future operations. If so, TRADOC needed to teach the upcoming generation of Army leaders how to do their part in putting such a coalition together, and then operating within it.
Some of the lessons learned in Desert Storm proved applicable:
• Teamwork and trust among members of the coalition team are absolutely essential.
• You have to consider how to combine the forces. Normally, you like to retain a single command; you don't want to break up the allied force and put it with your own. Such a principle governed the use of Pershing's U.S. forces under the French in World War I, and they governed Fred Franks's use of British forces in VII Corps in Desert Storm.
• Forces placed under a single operational command must be employed in accordance with their capabilities and assigned missions with a reasonable chance of success.
• National pride is often at stake… and so is mission accomplishment. Assignment of a mission to a subordinate national force that results in failure of the mission or in high casualties has serious consequences for the combined commander and the nations involved.
LAND OPERATIONS: BATTLE DYNAMICS
