In fighting, as we have seen, at each echelon (battalion, brigade, division, etc.) you integrate arms — including tanks, infantry, artillery, aviation, and fire support — to get the combined-arms orchestra effect. Franks wanted the same approach in the Battle Labs. There, new technology and ideas were to be integrated at each echelon, rather than vertically by arm.
For example, in the past, the next generation of night-vision equipment might go to Abrams tanks, but not to Bradleys or other members of the combined-arms team. That would no longer be the case. Franks also demanded in the Battle Labs that war-fighting experiments be done with what he termed 'real soldiers in real units.' That way the Army would get normal soldier and leader behavior. He also wanted the experiments done at the NTC or JRTC, the most tactically competitive environments. Both these directives would increase the fidelity of the results.
Battle Labs proved to be such an innovative idea that the Air Force recently announced the formation of six of their own, and the USMC adopted the concept three years ago.
During those days at TRADOC, an excited buzz of activity could be found at Fort Monroe. People were eager; people were brimful of ideas; there was a lot of productive talk… there was a glow of energy about the place. Fred Franks used to tell people that he wanted the energy level at Fort Monroe to be so high that when a satellite passed overhead, the fort would glow in the dark like a diamond. Now and again in those days, I would look into my own Maryland night sky south toward Virginia and catch an unusual brightness over Fort Monroe…
FUTURE BATTLEFIELDS
Battlefield technology evolves and develops, as does the nature of threats, tactics, strategy, and doctrine. Yet the military is a hierarchical institution. It needs to be in order to impose some order out of the chaos of battle. The way that order normally is imposed is by adherence to a strict hierarchy of command and by the physical means of control, such as formations, the ability to see others, the assignment of sectors to operate in, and phase lines. When radios came along, units could become more dispersed and still retain a semblance of control, yet adherence to physical means of control continued — and for good reason. There was no better way to bring the team of teams together at the right place at the right time in the right combination relative to the enemy and terrain, and then to fight and win physically.
The outcome of land battles is still decided by physical force. In army versus army, on a given piece of terrain, forces that prevail kill the enemy, destroy his equipment, and capture his soldiers, then control the area. Raw physical courage, physical toughness in all types of terrain and weather, combat discipline, skill with weapons and in units, and leadership in the face of chaos and life-and-death choices are still very much needed. Lethality, survivability, and the tempo of the operation are still measurable quantities that very often determine the physical outcome of the battles and engagements.
Deciding where and when to fight, and at what cost, and where battles and engagements will lead, continue to be the province of what the army has called operational art and strategy. These continue to be influenced by a variety of factors, some physical and some not.
TRADOC and the Army have long been very much aware of what other high-performing organizations also have learned — that information not only passes through the normal hierarchical chain of command, it flows in other ways to get quickly where it's needed. In order to take advantage of that fact, the Army needed to structure its own organizations and problem solving so that information flowed in ways that enhanced unit performance. Then the Army had to invest in technologies that promoted it.
Today there's a lot of buzz about winning the information war, as though that in itself wins battles and engagements, as though it were something new. In point of fact, since the early days of warfare, one side has always tried to win the information war over the other. Sun Tzu advised us to see ourselves and see the enemy. The goal of units in combat has always been to know the enemy and to see the terrain, then to decide what to do… and to have the skills to do it faster than an enemy. The information age just provides new ways to do it on the battlefield.
That does not mean that the information age is not changing the battlefield. Far from it.
The emergence of information technology, operated by truly high-quality soldiers, is bringing about a revolution in land warfare. In the not-at-all-distant future, commanders will find themselves on a battlefield where all soldiers and weapons platforms will carry sensors. With their help, soldiers will not only know precisely where they are, they will also be able to engage the enemy directly and at the same time to transmit information about the enemy to other platforms that also can engage the enemy. Thus, combat power can be applied simultaneously throughout the depth of the battlespace to confound and stun, then rapidly defeat any enemy.
And that's only the beginning. Other changes may follow:
• telemetry-based logistics;
• broadcast and warrior pull-down intelligence on demand;
• an expanded direct-fire battlespace;
• battle command on the move; and
• rapid tailoring of combat capabilities.
This transformation will have enormous implications for how units are commanded and soldiers are led into battle; for the size and function of staffs; for the interaction of combat-support organizations in such a high-tempo context; and for interactions among joint partners.
Thus, for example, the trend in land combat has been toward fewer and fewer friendly forces in a given battlespace. They will no longer have to be confined to preset physical control measures. They won't even have to be contiguous to one another. Though massed effects on the enemy will still be possible (and usually without the need to mass physically), dispersal will be the norm, physical mass the exception. If it is necessary to physically mass in order to achieve an intended purpose, you can still do it, and then rapidly disperse again afterward. Such dispersal has the added benefit of increasing survivability probabilities.
In other words, we are moving toward what the British writer Paddy Griffith calls 'an empty battlefield' — a battlefield where the trend in direct-contact battle is away from gaining coherence by means of physical mass to gaining it by means of a common picture of the situation, one that is constantly updated and available to all elements in the team of teams.
The U.S. Army vision for the future battlefield has been driven by the following overriding concept: quality soldiers and leaders whose full potential is realized through the application of information-age technologies and by rigorous and relevant training and leader development.
Two recent technical innovations symbolize that vision in a small way.
In September 1992, when the Army took its first M1A2 tank platoon to the National Training Center, Fred Franks and Major General Butch Funk, his old 3rd AD commander in Desert Storm, and at the time the commander of the Armor Center at Fort Knox, visited the NTC in order to see how well the soldiers could handle the rapid display of information while they fought their individual tanks (they did it very well, incidentally, and with initiative). It was the first de facto experiment of the future.
Inside the M1A2 were two revolutionary devices. The first was an independent viewer for the commander. With its addition, both commander and gunner now had sighting systems that could fire and find targets simultaneously. Thus the tank's lethality was almost doubled. As the gunner was engaging one target, the commander was independently finding another, which allowed the gunner to go right to the next.
The second device was even more significant. It looked something like a laptop computer and it was called the Intervehicular Information System (IVIS). IVIS was initially invented so that units would be able to know the location of all vehicles, transmit orders, automatically update logistics information about each tank, and consolidate that information for virtually automatic resupply.
Following the NTC tactical exercise, Franks and Funk huddled with the tank platoon and their platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class Phil Johndrow, and listened to their experiences. What he learned from the unit was more than just eye-opening.
Navigation was no longer a concern. Nor was the location of other tanks in the unit. The IVIS told them not only their own exact location, but the exact location of each of the other tanks in their unit (there were screens for
