An official website of the United States government
A .mil website belongs to an official U.S. Department of Defense organization in the United States.
A lock (lock ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .mil website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

ArticleCS - Article View

News | Oct. 21, 2024

FORSCOM-led panel discusses warfighting, readiness, lethality

By Ms. Mikie Perkins U.S. Army Forces Command

“When you look at what our Soldiers are doing at the National Training Center, down at the Joint Readiness Training Center, we are incorporating domains we previously had not fought in,” said Poppas, “The integration of space and cyber—those are new capabilities on the battlefield today we have not used before.”

Poppas said even though electronic warfare on the modern battlefield can be extremely lethal, especially in the offensive realm, there’s also the very real potential that same technology will put Soldiers in harm’s way.

“The electromagnetic nature of things in electronic warfare increases your identifiability because of what you emit,” he said. “How do you mask your signature in this environment when you can easily be captured?”

Poppas indicated that the answer to that question and others are being studied using information gathered from the current battlefield not just in Ukraine but also in the Middle East and with the technology and capabilities used in the Pacific.

Dr. Frederick W. Kagan, Senior Fellow and Director, Critical Threats Project, American Enterprise Institute, and Maj. Gen. Brett G. Sylvia, Commanding General, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) United States Army share comments during the AUSA...

Also on the CMF panel was Dr. Frederick Kagan, director of American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project, and Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia, commanding general of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) at Fort Campbell, Ky.

Kagan said there’s a transformation in warfighting now that cannot go unnoticed, and that’s the use of unmanned aerial systems.

“One of the reasons why the Ukrainian counter offensive last year was not successful was because the Russians did something that, as far as I know, is unprecedented in modern warfare,” said Kagan. “They so blanketed the area with electronic warfare that Ukrainian tanks were not able to communicate with one another. They couldn’t use their radios and couldn’t speak to each other,” he said. “We need to be thinking about an incredible scale of the deployment of these systems continuously along the front lines of the battlefield,” said Kagan.

Poppas also addressed the Army’s alignment between core warfighters and fighting theater armies saying rotating divisions and warfighter exercises are incredibly important because those are the next echelon FORSCOM and the Army in total, are going to have to be able to incorporate into future warfighting capabilities.

“We can measure and synchronize multidomain effects at the division level and rotate them in the dirt,” said Poppas. “Previously, we did that at the brigade level, but by concentrating our efforts at the division level—the level where we’re having training rotations, we can synchronize across all the multi domains,” he said. “That’s the echelon we’re going to fight at,” Poppas said.

Last August, at Fort Johnson’s JRTC in Louisiana, the 2nd Mobile Brigade Combat Team, paired-up with 101st Airborne Division where they built three hunter killer platoons that broke into smaller recon teams armed with small drones.

Army Gen. Andrew P. Poppas, Commanding General United States Army Forces Command, Dr. Frederick W. Kagan, Senior Fellow and Director, Critical Threats Project American Enterprise Institute, Maj. Gen. Brett G. Sylvia, Commanding General, 101st...

“We have to look at the cognitive load that’s now placed on these particular formations,” said Sylvia. “What we see on traditional rotation is that from the time a target is identified until when a round hits is sometimes as long as 15 minutes,” he said. “With unmanned systems though, we can generate that fire mission and have rounds on target in less than a minute,” said Sylvia.

Continued analysis of training rotations is key for determining where to improve and strengthen existing forces. Objectively analyzing how best to integrate new systems and weaponry to increase overall lethality of our Army is also essential to maintaining superiority on the modern battlefield today and into the future.

“One thing I hope that you take away from this discussion is a sense of comfort and pride,” Poppas said at the conclusion of the panel discussion, “because, though it's a very difficult time in the world today, you can see from the discussion that we've laid out for you, we are putting in the intellectual energy to understand the operating environment and how it's changing the character of war that we see across the globe," he said. "We're putting in the operational energy to address it.”