Breaking Defense:
WASHINGTON: With one eye on China and another on North Korea, US Army Pacific is injecting cyber warfare and new joint tactics into every war-game it can. At least 30 forthcoming exercises— culminating in the massive RIMPAC 2018 — will train troops on aspects of Multi-Domain Battle, the land Army’s effort to extend its reach into the other “domains” of air, sea, space, and cyberspace. Meanwhile, USARPAC simulations of the concept test near-future weapons such as ship-killer missiles and cruise missile-killing cannon.
“The big advantage we have in the Pacific is we’ve got a boss that is pushing us,” said Gen. Robert Brown, the USARPAC commander, during a visit to Washington last week. That’s Pacific Command chief Adm. Harry Harris, a fan of Multi-Domain Battle. Harris has got PACOM’s components — Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine — working together as Brown has never seen before, the general said.
There’s a real sense of urgency on Multi-Domain Battle in the Pacific, too Brown told the Center for a New American Society. “This isn’t something 10 years from now,” he said. “If Kim Jong-un goes south tomorrow, I will need some of this tomorrow.”
A land war in North Korea is Gen. Brown’s top concern. That’s where the US Army has stood ready to “fight tonight” since 1953. But Pyongyang’s investments in nuclear weapons, long-range missiles, drones, cyber attack, and special forces might make a second Korean War murderously more complex than the first. That type of threat drives much of Multi-Domain Battle’s emphasis on air, missile, and cyber defense.
Further south rises the new threat of a naval war with China. Today that’s primarily the Navy’s problem, with the Marines and Air Force in important supporting roles, while the Army plays an essential but unglamorous part in running supply lines and communications for all four services. But with Adm. Harris’s enthusiastic urging, Multi-Domain Battle envisions ground-based batteries of anti-aircraft, anti-missile, and anti-ship weapons, supported by long-range sensors and jammers, that can strike targets well out to sea. Islands defended by such Army batteries (or Marine Corps outposts) could serve as unsinkable anvils, with the Navy and the Air Force as the highly mobile hammers.
The goal is “a Multi-Domain Battle task force that can provide ballistic missile defense, short-range air defense, cyber, (and) can be mobile and protect itself,” Brown said.
“It is nice to have longer range and be able to affect other domains. It’s, in many cases, a game changer,” Brown told me after his public talk. “In our early tabletops and experimentation and … it has made a difference.” The long-term goal, he said, is to incorporate these new technologies into real-world exercises.
There are lots of things the Army needs to buy. “Number one is Electronic Warfare (EW),” Brown said, detecting, jamming, and deceiving enemy sensors and communications while protecting one’s own. The general envisions “thousands” of cheap decoys generating signals to hide the true locations of Army radars, for example. Another priority is Short-Range Air Defense (SHORAD), made newly relevant in the age of drones. Both SHORAD and EW suffered massive cutbacks after 1991 and will take years to recover.
But there is plenty the Army can do right now to train itself for Multi-Domain Battle, said Brown. “I never had to worry about cyber (as a young officer),” Brown said. “A company commander from just a few years ago never had to worry that much about cyber, never had to worry that much about space (or) the sea.”
Now USARPAC is adding those other domains to what had been land-only exercises. Army officers must manage liaisons from the other services, coordinate operations across domains, and deal with cyber threats. Making the most of these new tools requires new training and a new mindset, Brown said: “Some of the older leaders in the military would say we need to go back to the basics, but the basics have changed…”
