Land war changes. It will always be changing. In order to make sure that the Army stays ahead of it, and to give it an institutional lens directed at the future, Fred Franks and his team created a concept in 1991 under which all the various ideas about the evolving battlefield could be included. These ideas would then form the basis for experimentation in simulations and in the field. Out of the experimentation would come new insights and discoveries, which in time would lead to changes in the individual ideas. This concept TRADOC called 'Battle Dynamics.'
There were five central ideas to Battle Dynamics:
BATTLE COMMAND. The battlefield envisioned during the Cold War was almost scripted. After the Cold War, the U.S. Army found itself in a strategic situation where ambiguity ruled. How best to combat ambiguity?
• By reviving the art of command — command in the fluid and constantly changing attack instead of in the defense, which is more orderly and controlled.
• By rapidly applying principles of doctrine to situations that commanders might not be able to predict far in advance.
• By rapidly assessing situations — that is, by rapidly seeing oneself and the enemy and the terrain.
• By focus on the commander, not on the command post. The information and command system would be so constructed that the commander could make decisions and focus combat power from wherever he needed to be on the battlefield. Thus he would be freed from what Fred Franks calls 'the tyranny of the command post.'
Battle command is decision making. The commander will visualize the present friendly and enemy situations, then the situation that must occur if his mission is to be achieved at least cost to his soldiers, and then devise tactical methods to get from one state to the other (which is what leadership skill is all about). The more completely and accurately a commander can share his pictures of both situations with the rest of his command, the more effectively he can move his organization at a high tempo and focus his own combat power with the combat power available from outside. He will do all this while being with his soldiers, while feeling their pain and pride, and then making the necessary decisions.
BATTLESPACE. In the Cold War, we arrayed our own forces to defend against a powerful force that echeloned itself in depth in order to constantly feed forces into battle and thus maintain momentum. To defend against that threat, the United States laid out geometric lines for its own forces (phase lines, etc.) in order to determine who was responsible for real estate on our side and for carving up the enemy echelons deep in their territory.
That was a special situation against a special enemy. In the future, enemies will look and behave differently, yet we will still want to attack him in depth. To do that may not require the precise geometry of the Cold War battlespace. We may not need forces to be right next to one another. In fact, units will likely operate out of visual range of one another — though they will be in close electronic contact. And battle lines between opposing forces may well be much more amorphous than they are now. Thus, Franks wanted Army commanders to think their way through the tactical problems of the (likely) fluid, free-form, and ambiguous future battlefield without automatically applying Cold War battlespace templates. Since these templates had been so closely associated with the term 'AirLand Battle,' the Army dropped that term.
DEPTH AND SIMULTANEOUS ATTACK. In the past, there had been a segmented, sequential battlefield model of rear, close, and deep. That model would change and be redefined in future operations. In these operations, we would attack the enemy (or control a situation in operations other than war) simultaneously — not sequentially — throughout the depth of the battlespace.
EARLY ENTRY, LETHALITY, AND SURVIVABILITY. In a fast-moving situation, when a force has to go into an area quickly (called early entry), you want to be able to tailor it so that it goes in with power and protection. Just Cause in Panama was an example of a force so well tailored for that mission that it finished the fight in hours. Similarly, the 10th Mountain Division was rapidly tailored for its Somali mission, and later for Haiti. The Army wants to make a habit of such situations — especially in a world where the likelihood of early-entry missions has increased (and likely to be over a very wide range of situations).
Thus, early-entry forces must be tailorable in a number of ways. They need
• to meet changing conditions and a variety of missions;
• to provide the commander as many options as possible;
• to be able to protect themselves;
• and to have punch, not only close in, but out deep.
In short, they have to be able to win the first battle.
COMBAT SERVICE SUPPORT. In the Cold War, most of the focus was on tactical logistics. Force projection puts a premium on strategic and operational logistics. This new strategic environment will demand rapidly tailorable logistics systems, which must be capable of providing support for joint and combined operations, sometimes over great distances.
Tactical logistics will also continue to be one of the keys to more rapid tempo operations. Anticipation, long a goal of logisticians, will sometimes be aided by what are called telemetry-based logistics. Telemetry on equipment will allow support personnel to know when something is needed before it is needed. Total asset visibility, or the ability to pinpoint supplies worldwide, should help strategic logisticians to provide more precise support in future operations and in more than one operational theater.
BATTLE LABS
Ideas are not enough. The Army is a pragmatic profession. It makes things happen. It gets results for the nation. Army professionals are military practitioners, not military philosophers. As noted, the worth of a new approach has to be demonstrated before Army professionals will change over to it.
During Fred Franks's professional lifetime, he himself was powerfully impressed by the success of air assault and attack helicopter ideas. The pioneers who brought these ideas to the Army banded together in the late 1950s, got senior-level support, some resources for experiments, and by 1963 had a full-scale experimental division going. In 1965, the division was the 1st Cavalry, which fought successfully in Vietnam from 1965 until its departure in 1971. Air assault and attack helicopter pioneers demonstrated the worth of both their war-fighting ideas and their organizational changes, and they supported them either with new technology or with technology that had long been available in the civilian sector.
From this, Franks concluded that the Army needed to do some experimenting. Specifically, it needed an organization to try out new directions in land warfare… something like the air assault division experiment in the early 1960s and the series of field experiments known as the Louisiana Maneuvers in the early 1940s, just before World War II.
TRADOC had a major advantage over earlier experimenters — computer-assisted simulations. These simulations, including the new virtual reality simulations, had reached such a level of accuracy that they could replicate the battlefield with great fidelity, which permitted experiments to be performed. This was not only cheaper than running experiments in the field, it also allowed many more repetitions in a given time. When results justified full-scale field experiments, they could then be set up. This approach became the basis for the TRADOC Battlefield Laboratories formed in April 1992. There were five of them, each corresponding to a core idea of Battle Dynamics — a single area where the land battle was changing.[59]
In the labs, various organizations, not only from within the Army, but from academia, civilian contractors, other services, and the like, came together to work on a common battlefield idea. Such teamwork was unprecedented in the Army.
But there was more to the labs than that.
