Military

US outlines its vision for the Army of 2030

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The US Army is reorganizing to deal with new technologies and emerging threats
US Army
The US Army is reorganizing to deal with new technologies and emerging threats
US Army
Army 2030 infographic
US Army

The US Army has released its outline of what it expects to look like in 2030 after it has reorganized itself to incorporate the lessons learned after 30 years of post-Cold-War conflicts and revolutionary advances in military technology.

One of the things that should be obvious about the military, but isn't, is that it undergoes a seismic change about once every generation. This may seem like a simple truism, but is important to understand. Whatever one's opinion of military power is, it plays such an important role in our world that we need to understand what the military actually is, instead of relying on preconceptions that could be half a century out of date.

During the Cold War, the US Army was based on the doctrine of the "Big 5," which was an army built around main battle tanks, armored personnel vehicles, attack and utility helicopters, and anti-missile systems, as a part of a strategy to counter the massive armed forces of the Warsaw Pact.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the US Army turned to a more mobile, integrated force that was better suited to low-level insurgencies, regional wars, and anti-terrorist operations. At the same time, technology had changed with the introduction of the World Wide Web, drones, cyberwarfare, and increasingly effective precision weapon systems through the 1900s and into the 21st century.

Army 2030 infographic
US Army

Along with this have been the lessons learned by conflicts in the Middle East and the emerging threats of Russia and China that have required rethinking both tactics and strategies.

In its current plan for realignment, the US Army is looking to develop a force that is not only able to integrate with the other branches of the American military to act as a single unit, but also uses advanced sensors and long-range weapons backed by increasingly sophisticated cyberwarfare systems from widely dispersed locations to engage threats.

The idea behind this is to provide a potential enemy with as nebulous and stealthy a target as possible while being able to concentrate firepower at the time and place of the field commander's choosing. This will involve not only land assets, but also those based in the air, at sea, in orbit, and in cyberspace all working together.

In addition to this, the Army sees 2030 as a time when virtual reality and simulations will provide soldiers in large and small units with experience in operating in a wide variety of environments and scenarios at low cost and low risk. The latter is particularly important because the intense training US soldiers undergo often results in unwanted casualties.

Another way the Army is changing is by placing greater emphasis on larger units. For the past 30 years, the Army has been based on brigades of about 4,000 soldiers led by a colonel. The new plan is to rely on divisions that are made up of several brigades that are able to handle large-scale conflicts and will incorporate lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan. This includes forward positioning troops and equipment to make it difficult for an adversary to predict US actions.

Added to this, the Army of 2030 will rely more heavily on crewed and uncrewed sensors to monitor the battlefield, as well as faster, more survivable vehicles that will likely be robotic and field more firepower than current equivalent systems. New weapons will include hypersonic missiles and high-powered laser and microwave weapons for mobile short-range air defenses.

Backing all this up will be a new logistical chain for supply and support that will take advantage of lighter, more climate resilient vehicles and structures.

Source: US Army

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5 comments
TpPa
it's always good for a Government to tell their military plans for the future, I hope they lied a lot
Wavmakr
TpPa is completely on target. Our current government is insane............
Jinpa
No mention of hacking resistance/ability, in which the Russians, Chinese, N.Koreans and others have shown ability to pierce DOD and civilian intelligence systems and western corporate systems. Also no mention of U.S. domestic energy generation and distribution vulnerabilities, which are crucial to be able to produce all of that military hardware and software. Integrating military branches alone is in-the-box thinking.
Louis Vaughn
The internet has its origin with DARPA and the MIL needing tools to communicate (UUCP) and collaborate (BBS); which led to the EDU inclusion as Military-Industrial partners. Back then commercial-advertising was frowned upon and policed by users and moderators.
With the advent of HTML's servers and browsers, Big business saw a goldmine of opportunity and wanted in ($$$). Ultimately leading to FaceBook, Google, Cambridge Analytica, Big Data, .Privacy and Identity Breaches, etc.
The advent of all this goes back to the naccient birth of the underlying RFCs and Protocols which emerged and the embedder culture of trust in the pre HTML resistance.
Unfortunately, ongoing maintenance of the protocols was lagging with respect to security; and on, and on.
I believe the MIL needs a new advanced network with improved security and ID authentication protocols.
All MIL and Nationally Critical Infrastructure should be on this network which is isolated from the public network.
There should at least be a conversation in the MIL community regarding these issues.
Daishi
@Louis Vaughn You can build private air gapped networks now that support MACsec, IPsec, TLS etc. The issue is many companies and organizations don't follow best practices. NIST publication 800-63B for digital identity guidelines from 2017 is actually good advice but many companies (including PCI standards) have not yet fully adopted the best practices outlined in it. Efforts that I am aware of to ignore best practice and instead build proprietary systems have ended spectacularly and efforts to do this at a DoD level would result in no bid contracts resulting in heaping piles of buggy, insecure, incompetent trash.