The FM 3-0 of 2008 focused on “Full Spectrum Operations” which describes the Army having to not only focus on defeating enemies but, at the same time, shape the situation through operations that stabilize the area.

The Army’s Operating Concept – debuted two years ago at AUSA – will drive the new doctrine. The AOC states the Army’s job is to “prevent, shape and win” in a “complex operational environment.”

Gen. David Perkins, the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command commander, said, in a recent statement on AUSA’s website, the doctrine and field manual is important in order to ensure the service is ready to deploy anywhere across the globe, engaging in a wide range of different types of military operations.

He noted one of the ideas the Army is exploring is “multi-domain battle” — a major focus at AUSA last week — “which recognized the inherently joint requirements of the interconnected air, land, maritime, space and cyber domains.”

Lundy also said the CAC is looking deeply at how it trains and develops its leaders and how education drives readiness — Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley’s top priority.

“We’ve got some work to do in our professional military education,” he said. The Army has “to be very dynamic,” so there are changes that need to be made in order to get the right balance in terms of how the service focuses on leadership, which includes a refocus on some technical and tactical skills that the service hasn’t had to perform recently or are new to the Army, Lundy added.

Based on several factors — from exercising a mission it hasn’t had to do in a very long time to moving equipment via rail and highway to dealing with winter weather in Northern Europe — Hodges predicts the ABCT will reach Polish assembly areas near Drawsko Pomorskie Training Area in roughly three weeks.

“I’m going to make all kinds of mistakes on this,” Hodges said, even though the Army has been rehearsing and drilling. “We haven’t done it in a long time.”

This exercise to move from the German port to Poland was tasked by Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, the supreme allied commander in Europe, in order to demonstrate speed of assembly, Hodges noted.

Once the ABCT has assembled and prepared its equipment, such as loading ammunition, testing communications and camouflaging, in order to set up its posture “like a crisis response rehearsal,” Hodges said, the brigade will disperse to areas of responsibility aligned with the Atlantic Resolve mission.

Atlantic Resolve is the framework for the US mission to assure allies in Europe and deter Russia through exercises and operations.

One battalion will head to the Baltic region — Atlantic Resolve North — while another battalion will deploy to Romania and Bulgaria — Atlantic Resolve South — according to Hodges.

The bulk of the combat team will remain in Poland, staying in Polish barracks at training areas where some of the best ranges and maintenance facilities are situated, such as Drawsko Pomorskie, he said.

Over the course of the rotation, the ABCT will mass “a couple of times,” Hodges added.

While Poland’s national exercise Anakonda is held every other year and therefore will not be held in 2017, Hodge’s command has helped to coordinate opportunities for the ABCT to heavily participate in Saber Guardian, which will take place in July in Bulgaria and Romania. The exercise will consist of more than 30,000 soldiers with 20-plus nations, making it similar in size to Anakonda. The 82nd Airborne, the US Army’s global response force, will jump in like it did in Anakonda. Saber Guardian will also be linked to Sea Breeze — a maritime exercise in the Black Sea — and Noble Partner in Georgia.

The 2nd Brigade of the 1st Division out of Fort Riley, Kansas, will replace the first ABCT in September, Hodges said.

The commander said even though the Army is having to operate under a continuing resolutionfor the next three months, which means money is only available at 2016 funding levels, there would be enough money to move forward with the deployment of the first ABCT.

Army Secretary Eric Fanning told Defense News in an interview before AUSA that he was concerned over the impact the continuing resolution might have on the Pentagon’s special funding for assurance and deterrence in Europe, called the European Reassurance Initiative.

“ERI is oxygen for us,” Hodges said. “Without the ERI money, there is no rotation of forces, there’s no buildup of Army pre-positioned stock. In other words, there is no real capable deterrent force above and beyond what we have on the ground now … it’s essential to what we are doing.”

In addition to the Pacific, soldiers from I Corps and the 7th Infantry Division also are committed around the world. Soldiers from the 7th Infantry headquarters just returned from Afghanistan, while others are serving in Iraq.

“We have to be ready for whatever the nation asks us to do,” Lanza said. “We have forces all over the world, support every combatant command, not just Pacific Command.”

Fresh off having a headquarters element in Afghanistan, the 7th Infantry Division headquarters is now fully focused on the training and readiness of the eight brigades for which it is responsible, said Maj. Gen. Thomas James, the commander of the 7th Infantry.

“What we’re here for is to build and sustain readiness to be regionally engaged in the Pacific and globally responsive,” he said.

The division has training oversight and authority for eight brigades, including the two Stryker brigade combat teams at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, and the Washington Guard’s 81st Stryker BCT through the Army’s Associated Units pilot program, which pairs active-duty units with those in the Guard and Reserve.

The division also is responsible for the 16th Combat Aviation Brigade, the 17th Field Artillery Brigade, the 555th Engineer Brigade, and more, James said.

A Mobile Gun System Stryker from the 8th Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment, 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division passes a Type-74 tank from the 33rd Infantry Regiment, 10th Division, Japan Ground Self-Defense Force during Rising Thunder at Yakima Training Center, Wash., Aug. 11.

Photo Credit: Staff Sgt. Steven Schneider/Army

The 7th Infantry headquarters and its eight brigades are “as busy as ever,” James said.

“It’s a misnomer that we’ve reduced in Iraq and Afghanistan so the Army’s doing less,” he said.

Because of that optempo, the division must “take every resource we have and maximize as much training out of it as we can,” James said.

The 7th Infantry will continue to support I Corps as it conducts exercises across the Pacific, including in Yama Sakura and Ulchi Freedom Guardian, James said. The division also supports Pacific Pathways and bilateral exercises such as Rising Thunder and Orient Shield.

These exercises not only allow soldiers to train, but they also get a chance to form relationships and friendships with their counterparts around the world, James said.

“They form these relationships that quite often will last a lifetime,” he said.

Lanza said demand for troops likely will not go down in 2017.

“The requirements are not going down,” he said. “I think the real world requirements for the military will continue to grow. When you talk about the need for the Army, there’s certainly a role for us over there [in the Pacific].”

Despite the high optempo, Lanza said he’s proud of his team and the work his soldiers have done.

“It shows what good, adaptive leaders are able to do,” he said.

“We prioritized the present, and we mortgaged the future,” said Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley. “Frankly, the biggest challenge is having a predictable, steady stream of money to work with industry, [science and technology], and research and development, to accelerate, advance and explore these opportunities and options for the future.”

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The readiness of the Army today to respond to contingencies around the world, from humanitarian assistance to combat against a near-peer competitor, is Milley’s top priority, he said. But the Army also, simultaneously, must lay the groundwork for the future, specifically “the quarter of a century between 2025 and 2050,” he said.

“For the next 10 years, we’re not talking radical shifts” to doctrine, equipment or the organization of the Army, Milley said. “But when you get to 2025, 2050, that’s different.” 

The Army must first figure out what the operating environment will be in that timeframe, then identify the attributes of the type of force it will need, Milley said.

This includes everything from the organization of the Army to the type of weapon systems it’ll need to the kind of training and talent management models it will require, Milley said.

“It’s obvious you can’t predict the future with certainty,” he said. “But there are certain things that I feel confident that we can articulate and we know will probably be true in those 25 years.”

To start, the world is “rapidly urbanizing,” Milley said. Today, between 50 percent and 60 percent of the world’s population live in urban areas, he said. By 2050, Milley predicts that will jump to 80 percent to 90 percent.

“You’re seeing a massive growth right now, as we speak, of megacities,” Milley said. “Today, an example of a megacity is Seoul, South Korea, with 27 million people, that has urban sprawl essentially from the [demilitarized zone] all the way south of Seoul, and it is this massive urban belt and complex.”

The Army has been designed, manned, trained and equipped for the last 241 years to operate primarily in rural areas, Milley said.

“In the future, I can say with very high degrees of confidence, the American Army is probably going to be fighting in urban areas,” he said. “We need to man, organize, train and equip the force for operations in urban areas, highly dense urban areas, and that’s a different construct. We’re not organized like that right now.”

The world’s population also will continue to get younger, Milley said.

“Because of the demographic growth of youth, there are certain regions of the world that are more predisposed to instability than others,” he said. “The Middle East and Africa, for example,
have large youth bulges coming in the next few decades. It’s not a certainty, but it’s a probability that we have large youth bulges, and when you have weak or tepid economies, your probability of instability is higher.”

The political environment also is changing.

“For about 15 years, we fundamentally were in a geostrategic unipolar world, with the United States being the dominant, unquestioned political, diplomatic, economic and military power on Earth,” Milley said. “That is coming into challenge, and it’s shifting to a multipolar world, with the clear unambiguous rise of China, the return of a revanchist Russia, and then, of course, you’ve got Brazil and India and other countries also rising.”

The availability of technology also is changing, Milley said.

“You’re seeing a wide variety of technologies out there that are advancing very, very rapidly,” he said. “The internet of everything, robotics, autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, miniaturization, you’re getting technologies and biological science, neuroscience and the physical sciences that can alter the human performance to conduct certain tasks.”

Robots are already playing a significant role in the air domain, Milley said.

“That’s what Predators and UAVs are,” he said. “All of these technologies together, what they tell me is that we are on the cusp of a fundamental change in the character of ground warfare. And this change is going to be so significant, so fundamental, that it would be analogous to going from a smooth-bore musket to a rifled musket to a rifle. It’s the difference between going from horse cavalry to tanks and wheeled vehicles.”

If the Army doesn’t adapt, “we’re not going to end up prevailing on the battlefield,” Milley said. “And we’re not going to get it right, but what you have to do is you have to do it less wrong than your enemy.”

In the future, the Army likely will face a battlefield that is “intensely lethal,” Milley said. This means the Army must be able to protect itself and operate in small and nimble units that are widely distributed across a large battlefield, he said.

“You’re going to have to do that in order to survive, and then you’re going to have to rapidly aggregate to achieve mass and combat power to achieve an effect on a battlefield,” Milley said. “So it’s going to have to be a force that’s essentially in a stage of constant motion.”

It’s also going to be a force that needs smart, adaptive leaders, he said.

“You can’t have leaders who are not risk-takers, who are not independent, who are not adaptive,” Milley said. “You have to have leaders who are very strong morally, very strong ethically, who are very confident in their skills, who are very comfortable in operating independently but within the construct of a set of values and ethics in which they don’t violate American principles.”

The Army is working hard to lay the groundwork for the future, conducting tests, simulations and analytical studies, Milley said.

“Over the course of the coming year, we will probably come to some fundamentally basic decisions on our organizations, our operating doctrine, and, probably, some major broad areas of weapons programs that are going to be needed in that timeframe,” he said. “That’ll be one of my big areas of personal effort over the course of the next year.”

The challenge remains steady, predictable funding, Milley said.

“It is almost impossible to work with industry and convince them to explore investment opportunities and technologies that could have application to ground warfare unless you can guarantee them a steady stream of resource dollars,” he said. “The money we have right now is only adequate enough to essentially provide seed corn for these technologies and develop some prototypes and some concepts. It’s not enough money to actually go into production-level programs or take the programs into production levels. We don’t have enough money to do that.”

The goal is “when money does become predictable, money does become sufficient,” the Army can further invest in these programs, Milley said.

“We’ve prioritized readiness at the expense of [research and development],” he said. “We have a balanced budget, but it biases toward readiness for today.”

In terms of readiness, the Army continues to make “measurable progress” in its effort to rebuild its fundamental, core warfighting skills, Milley said.

“But we have a long way to go, and it’ll be several years before I’m comfortable with where we need to be,” he said.

For 15 years, the Army and the other services have focused on the fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, Milley said.

“We’ve developed high levels of skill … but the cost of developing those skills and the cost of having to fight that war for a decade and a half is that our skills at fighting a higher-end threat, a near-peer competitor, a nation state, and the bread and butter tasks of conducting combined arms operations atrophied because we didn’t practice it for 15 years,” he said.

Milley cited as examples the Army’s combat arms units.

“Most infantry units have not practiced, on a routine basis, battalion- or brigade-level combined arms live-fire exercises,” he said. “Most armor units have not routinely, for a decade and a half, gone to gunneries. Very, very few artillery units have done battalion gunnery. Aviation, we haven’t done a legitimate brigade air assault since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Apaches haven’t done battalion-level missions since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.”

The wars have led to a “training gap in our skill set, our toolbox,” at fighting higher-end threats, leading the Army to renew its focus on training and, in some cases, re-learning these skills, Milley said.

“We have to keep that going because we’re going to be fighting that type of war,” he said.

The Army’s already seeing progress, he said.

Today, most of the Army’s active-duty brigade combat teams have had the chance to complete a rotation at a combat training center, he said.

“They’ve hit the sled at least once, but that’s not good enough,” he said. “They’re going to have to do it more.”

Milley said he’s confident the Army will continue to build on its training.

“We’ve identified what the problem is, we’ve put the right fixes in place, we’re resourcing it correctly, and we’re seeing improvement,” he said. 

But it’s going to take time to reach the Army’s goal of having about two-thirds of its Regular Army formations at a level of readiness that enables them to “deploy and fight tonight,” Milley said.

“If personnel does not continue to drop and tempo remains constant, and we have steady, consistent funding from Congress, then my estimate is it’ll take until roughly 2020, 2012 timeframe to rebalance the Army in terms of readiness,” he said.

Even though the Army has “a readiness challenge” and “a modernization challenge” while it faces threats from around the world, it should not be discounted, Milley said.

“No one should ever forget that the United States Army is not a small army,” he said. “We’ve got a million soldiers, and they’re committed soldiers. They’re smart, they’re hard, they’re tough, and they’re combat experienced. We’re very well equipped, and even today, we’re reasonably well trained. Even with all these challenges, we’re still better than our adversaries.”

The U.S. military as a whole remains the dominant force in the world, Milley said.

“It’s hard, there are challenges. We’re good, but we want to be better,” he said. “We want to be dominant. We don’t want a fair fight.”

A strong, dominant military also can serve as a deterrent, Milley said.

“Deterrence is way cheaper than war,” he said. “The only thing more expensive than deterring a war is fighting a war, and the only thing more expensive than fighting a war is fighting and losing a war.”

But there continues to be a nationwide shortage of child psychologists and child psychiatrists, affecting not just the military community, but the civilian community at large. “We have a mismatch in what we need and what the nation can provide,” said Dr. Christopher Ivany, a doctor who is also chief of the Behavioral Health Division/Service Line Office of the Army Surgeon General. Comparing the needs of military children to children in the civilian community, the “broad averages are pretty close,” Ivany said, but experts are working on more exact comparisons. 

Ivany spoke at a family forum of the annual meeting of the Association of the U.S. Army, exploring various aspects of research on the effects of deployments on military children, and some programs that help mitigate those effects. 

The Army can’t just hire enough people to provide mental health care – officials have to work with the community, he said. Through the Child and Family Behavioral Health System, they bring together best practices. Part of that is school behavioral health clinics within Army schools on post at 14 installations. Officials have found children have much easier access to the mental health care they need, he said.

Researchers at RAND Corporation have found in their various studies during the last decade that there are some common elements that can help service providers craft programs that help military children. For example, children who interacted with other military children during deployments tended to fare better, so there are opportunities to facilitate activities for these children, said Terri Tanielian, senior social research analyst for RAND.

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Parents who had deployed reported an increased need for mental health services for their children, and there were increased rates of depression and emotional difficulty in their children, Tanelian said. Teens may have a particularly difficult time with family relationships after the deployment; and the longer the parent was deployed, the greater the difficulty the teen faced. And findings show that a child may be more at risk when the parent is exposed to combat trauma, so programs could be targeted to those children.

But there are still gaps in the research and knowledge about the effects on military children of these deployments, Tanielian said. For example, more longer-term research is needed to consider the effects on children as they age into young adults, she said. And to the best of her knowledge, there have been no studies on college-age military children.

Officials highlighted some programs that are aimed at shoring up the resilience of military children, such as a resilience program for teens, adapted from the program for adults, said Cherri Verschraegen, chief of Child, Youth and School Services for the Army Installation Management Command. It’s being piloted at 18 Army installations.

It also expanded his soldiers’ views on international partners, as his soldiers worked with troops from France, Gabon, Chad, Cameroon and the Republic of Congo.

Thomas, 23, and his soldiers spent a month in Gabon, and for most of that time, his soldiers were working in squads, each paired with a different partner army.

This taught him how to operate in a more decentralized manner, as he bounded from one squad to another to make sure the training and partnering were going well, Thomas said.

“Even though we have different equipment, different ways of doing things, even though there’s a language barrier, we can still work together in an international setting to achieve a common mission,” he said. “My squad leaders were really bringing their experience to the mission.”

His soldiers also sharpened their own skills as they trained to conduct a live-fire exercise with the Gabonese army, Thomas said.

“Our team leaders and squad leaders were able to get in the trenches with the Gabonese,” he said. “That’s where I think the Army needs to focus, that junior leader level. If our teams are as strong as they can be, then the squads and platoons and companies will be successful, and it builds up from there.”

Marfongelli agreed.

“You can tell the difference between soldiers who’ve deployed and ones who have not in terms of maturity and basic skills,” he said. “Before we deployed, there was a significant line between those who had and those who hadn’t. While deployed, our junior leaders got that broadening experience to work in a joint agency, multinational environment and put them out of their comfort zone.”

Programs such as Cyber Support to Corps and Below, which aims to

, provide greater understanding to commanders of all stripes. Cyber Support to Corps and Below exposes commanders to cyber capabilities, with some saying: “I didn’t know I could do that,” Cardon said. Once commanders understand this, Cardon added, cyber can be more widely incorporated.

“I have spent the entire year trying to correlate something to pricing, and in fact we have found you can’t really correlate that. My answer to you is we don’t have an economic indicator out there,” Rixey told reporters after his speech. “It could also be currency difference. There are so many factors that it’s not what I thought it was. I thought we could directly correlate it.”

“Now, I’m sure oil price is having an impact on that particular number, but I didn’t find the correlation I was looking for,” he added.

The drop in dollar value is also partly misleading, Rixey noted, because a number of high-end sales – most notably a trio of fighter jet sales to Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain – have been delayed. The package reportedly includes 72 Boeing F-15E Strike Eagles for Qatar and up to 40 Boeing F/A-18 E/F Super Hornets for Kuwait. Bahrain’s package includes Lockheed Martin F-16 fighters.

“What would have happened if they had gone this year? We would have had record sales again,” Rixey said. “So we’ve decided maybe we should look at this like a rolling three-year number” in order to have a truer sense of trends.

But Rixey also downplayed the overall figure, noting that the US does not set a sales target each year.

“We don’t look at sales like a benchmark we’re trying to capture. It’s not a number we’re trying to go for. Sales is really a fundamental result of foreign policy. We just have to understand what kind of workforce we’re going to need to prosecute those sales,” Rixey said. “It’s nothing more than a tool for us to anticipate what we’re going to anticipate and work with.”

The admiral also continued his defense of the speed of the FMS system, following up on comments made last month at a conference and an editorial featured in Defense News.

As to the jet sales, Rixey would not comment on the full status, but acknowledged media reports that the sales are “moving forward.”