An argument that the Army is too light gets some points right, but others deeply wrong.
How can we have forgotten the terrible lessons of the early 2000s, when losses in Iraq and Afghanistan prompted a scramble to deploy up-armored HMMWVs and Mine Resistant Armor Protected Vehicles? Today’s Army, far lighter than the one that took such damage in so-called “low-intensity combat,” is ill-equipped to deter or contend with the likes of China or Russia.
Let’s take roll of the Army’s 31 active maneuver brigades. Eleven are heavy brigades equipped with tanks and infantry fighting vehicles—well-protected platforms suited to modern war.
Another six brigades are Stryker formations equipped with their eponymous lightly armored, wheeled infantry carriers. Originally called the “interim armored vehicle,” the Stryker was intended to serve only until the arrival of the Future Combat Systems, which imploded instead. From conception, Stryker units have suffered from doctrinal and conceptual confusion. Stryker units carry more dismounted troops than Bradley units, which are intended to fight primarily mounted. But they are infantry carriers, not infantry fighting vehicles. With poor off-road mobility, they are vulnerable to hand-held anti-armor systems, and their units have towed rather than self-propelled artillery. Repeated National Training Center rotations show they cannot survive when employed against armor.
The remaining 14 active maneuver brigades are light infantry formations, cheaper and easier to deploy but, realistically, unable to compete with today’s threat. Under current guidance, they go to war in “infantry squad vehicles”—essentially, unarmored dune buggies without heavy weapons.
Compounding the problem, the commanders of these light brigades have dramatically less firepower than they used to. The recent decision to eliminate the air cavalry squadron from the aviation brigade in Army divisions removes half of each division’s 48 AH-64E attack helicopters, a massive reduction in combat power. Only slightly less dangerous was the Army’s recent decision to deactivate the cavalry squadron in Stryker and light infantry brigades, with their many wheeled vehicles and heavy weapons. The same directive stripped light infantry battalions of their antiarmor/heavy weapons companies: mounted formations armed with automatic grenade launchers, heavy machine guns and heavy antitank systems. These actions removed much of the brigade’s available firepower.
Meanwhile, light artillery battalions still use the venerable M119 105mm towed howitzer, which has a lower rate of fire, shorter range, and weaker weapons effects than the 122mm and 152mm systems used by Russian and Chinese brigades. They are also slower to displace than self-propelled systems, making them far more vulnerable to counter-battery fire and drone attacks.
Promises to offset all these reductions with “Unmanned Systems and Ground/Air launched effects” raise serious questions, given the lack of specifics provided and DoD’s poor acquisition track record.
A quick look at adversary force structure illuminates the challenge. Russian maneuver brigades (tank, motor rifle, airborne/air assault, naval infantry) are remarkably similar. All include four maneuver battalions; three artillery battalions (both tubed and rocket); anti-tank, air defense and reconnaissance battalions; and an electronic warfare company. Chinese brigades have four maneuver battalions supported by strong artillery, air defense and EW units. U.S. brigades have three maneuver battalions, a single artillery battalion, and no dedicated anti-tank, air defense, or EW units. At higher echelons, adversary artillery, air defense and EW continues to outmatch U.S. capabilities, and both the Russian and Chinese militaries have evinced strong commitments to advance their drones and unmanned systems. Overall, their forces are clearly stronger, a dilemma only exacerbated by repeated moves to lighten or weaken U.S. ground forces.
What should the U.S. Army do? Several things: re-equip light brigades with protected, wheeled transport mounting heavy weapons, as before; restore their antiarmor companies; increase the density of Javelin anti-tank and Stinger air defense systems across light formations; replace towed light artillery with wheeled, 155mm systems like the French Caesar or German RCH-155; reverse the deactivation of divisional air cavalry squadrons; and arm divisional UH-60 assault helos with the Hellfire antitank missile system.
Stryker brigades should be converted into true heavy brigades, perhaps with reconditioned M1 Abrams tanks and M2 Bradley fighting vehicles that are now in storage. Hundreds of earlier variants of the M1, M2, and M109 self-propelled howitzer are stored at Sierra Army Depot in Nevada. Should Stryker brigades be retained, they should include an armor battalion, similar to Russian motor rifle brigades. Heavy brigades should be upgraded with the M1A3 Main Battle Tank and M2A4 Infantry Fighting Vehicle as soon as possible.
Army divisions should field a general support 155mm artillery battalion in addition to the artillery battalions providing direct support to the maneuver brigades. All brigades and divisions should include air defense and electronic warfare units, as well as dedicated drone formations with trained operators at every echelon from company to division.
America has not fought a high-intensity war against heavy forces since the Gulf War, when it enjoyed crushing superiority in all domains. Today that superiority now longer exists.
Touted as a move away from a GWOT-focused Army to one more focused on “lethality” and better suited to the Indo-Pacific region, current changes in fact cut deeply into the Army’s ability to hit hard and mass combat power. An America optimized to fight in only one theater is an America content to be a regional but not a global power—a recipe for decline. In the real world, challenges erupt suddenly and unexpectedly (think December 1941, June 1950, October 1963, August 1990 and September 2001). True national security requires a flexible and adaptive Army trained and equipped for sustained, intense combat at the high end of the spectrum of conflict. This means mobility, protection and firepower in all Army formations.
In a word, light is not lethal. It’s time for a rethink.
From Defense One.
What does this analysis get right?
Sufficient armor to protect troops against small arms fire and IEDs does make sense. The “infantry squad vehicles”—essentially, unarmored dune buggies without heavy weapons, indeed don't make sense. They utterly unprotected against even rain or hail or dust or snow or children throwing rocks. They have no weapons of their own and don't have storage capacity to carry squad scale heavy weapons or medical supplies. And, they concentrate a whole squad in a tiny space where a single grenade or volley of automatic weapons fire or IED can kill all of them in one blow. It isn't particularly capable off-road (unlike, for example, the Humvee). The only thing that recommends an infantry squad vehicle at all is that it is faster than walking. Using that as the core model for 14 of 31 Army Brigades is indeed nuts. Maybe one or two brigades of them for paratrooper type deployments into very lightly armed theaters might make sense, but these are, indeed, far too light for almost any conceivable conflict.
These units aren't even really heavy enough to take on civilian drug cartels (as President Trump has urged the Army to make a priority). U.S. police SWAT teams routinely use more armor and heavier weapons to take on tiny domestic drug dealing gangs in U.S. cities, and protesters without firearms, or a single violent boyfriend and husband or mass shooter with a handful of small arms none of which is more than 0.45 caliber.
Cutting close air support from helicopters with missiles doesn't make much sense either.
But, how can you think that the future of near peer ground warfare lies with heavy tracked tanks and infantry fighting vehicles after having seen how the Ukraine War has played out. The author of this piece forgets that the U.S. Army deliberate fielded few main battle tanks in Kosovo due to its mountains, and that it took many critical weeks to ship them by boat and train to the front in all of the conflicts in which the U.S. has been involved since the Gulf War, despite the fact that the pace of modern warfare has not gotten slower.
Strykers and MRAPs were adequate in the main U.S. wars since the 2000s, the firepower of the main M1 Abrams tank has not been very useful, tank v. tank warfare is basically no longer a thing, and guided missiles like anti-tank Javelin missiles, Hellfire missiles, and TOW missiles have all delivered much more firepower per pound, with greater precision, at equivalent or longer ranges than the main guns of tanks. Traditional tanks like the existing Abrams and traditional infantry fighting vehicles like the Bradley, have no air defenses and no anti-drone weapons, are challenging to operate in tight urban warfare and mountain warfare settings, and aren't particularly mine resistant.
Another lesson of the wars that the U.S. has fought in the last 25 years is that off-road capabilities, where tracked vehicles are a bit faster than off-road capable wheeled vehicles, are rarely used in practice. But the tracks vehicles slow down their entire units, and because they are profoundly less fuel efficient, require more, completely vulnerable fuel tanker trucks to be sent to supply them (and those tanker trucks can't go to the off-road places that the tracked vehicles can). In wars where the front lines are often ill-defined, this is a huge problem.
As for howitzers, either towed or self-propelled, tracked or wheeled, there are also problems. Their range is only 12-24 miles. They are very heavy relative to their firepower. And, they aren't very accurate, so its takes multiple rounds to destroy a target. Mortar systems are even worse in basically every respect. Guided missile systems like HIMARs, or like or Hellfire and Javelin and TOW missiles, produce equal or greater results, with much more accuracy, at longer ranges which enemy artillery can't reach.
We need a middle ground. Yes, Army units should have heavy and lethal weapons like grenade launchers/canons, heavy machine guns, anti-tank missiles, and anti-aircraft missiles. But, for just about anything more than 50mm rounds, guided missiles or handheld recoilless rifles (e.g. for breaching bunkers or fortifications) are superior to tank shells and artillery shells.
Also, yes, they should mostly have sufficient armor to protect against shrapnel and small arms fire, and provide force protection to resist land mines and IEDs. But trying to use heavy armor to protect military vehicles against dedicated anti-armor weapons is generally futile. In Ukraine, every single type of armored tank or infantry fighting vehicle, former Soviet and Western alike, has taken extremely heavy losses no matter how strong their armor was. Against these threats, the options are to either run and hide so as not to get hit, or to employ active defenses like Israel's Trophy system, or lasers, or ground based versions of the Navy's Phalanx close in weapons system, or electronic warfare tools that disrupt the guidance systems of cruise missiles and drones.
And, finally, except in extremely niche roles in very small numbers, wheeled vehicles are superior to tracked vehicles. They are lighter. They can still handle many off-road condition. They are much faster. And, they are much more fuel efficient.
A new off the shelf JTLV, which weighs about half of the original M2 Bradley (which means that you can deploy them in twice the numbers in the same time and with C-130 aircraft that can't transport a Bradley), has about the same fire power as the Bradley, and is similarly or more protective against forces without anti-armor weapons. Both are equally vulnerable to forces with anti-armor weapons. And, the JTLV is 50% faster and has a much lighter logistics trail (it needs much less fuel per mile than a tank or a tracked infantry fighting vehicle) and is cheaper. Yes, it carries fewer infantry to dismount, but this is made up for by allowing units to field twice as many of them.
Looking at how Strykers perform against armor is a straw man argument. Strykers aren't meant to primarily be tank destroyers, any more than it makes sense to send masses of dismounted infantry up against a machine gun nest for no cover. Their carried soldiers need anti-armor weapons (like the Javelin missile, or TOW missiles) that have a range longer than the range of a tank, or other systems to support them, like helicopters or drones armed with anti-tank weapons need to be deployed as tank destroyers.
Current U.S. military doctrine is based upon the assumption that U.S. forces will quickly gain air superiority, and will then use that air superiority to destroy enemy armor and artillery, before U.S. ground forces move in. Strykers aren't supposed to enter the field of battle until the armor, that they indeed don't fare well against head to head, are dispatched, and especially not a close range without at least anti-tank weapons for their dismounted infantry.
The Ukraine War, Houthi attacks on shipping, and recent clashes between Israel and Iran, however, have demonstrated that gaining air superiority and dominance may not be possible in every case, particularly against longer range guided missiles and one way armed drones. Traditional anti-aircraft weapons, meanwhile, are optimized against manned helicopters and fixed wing attack aircraft, not numerous cheap, deadline guided munitions that blur the line between armed drones and guided missiles. Against a "near peer" force, slow and heavy main battle tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, with big, vulnerable logistics trains are targets and not assets.
The U.S. Army does need to increase air defenses and drone defenses across the force. And, the U.S. military should seriously consider switching out more vulnerable and slower attack helicopters as close air support providers, for more robust and faster dedicated close air support aircraft to replace the A-10, and drones, in addition to traditional fighter aircraft designed primarily for air to air combat, and bomber aircraft, at high altitudes, dropping "smart" bombs.
The U.S. Marine Corps has learned these lessons. It has ditched its tanks and howitzers, but kept integrated fixed wing fighter aircraft and armed helicopters to support them.
The U.S. Army hasn't yet fully woken up to these realities and is still trying to fight World War II and the Korean War.
The Foreseeable Conflicts
It also bears noting that wars against China and Russia, which the author identified as the threats against which the U.S. Army needs to be prepared, are two very different things.
Plausible Russian Scenarios
The Ukraine War has given us a sneak preview of what a war in Europe with Russia would look like. The Ukraine War also means that Russia's resources to fight a large scale conventional war will have been profoundly reduced. And, any plausible conflict with Russia would be fought not by the U.S. alone, but with all of its European NATO allies.
Tanks have been destroyed at high rates by both sides in that conflict and their main guns have been very unimportant in that fight.
Conventional howitzers received heavy use early on, because that is what was available to Russia and Ukraine at first. But now, 70%-80% of the damage is done with armed drones, missiles, snipers, and machine guns do a fair amount of the rest of the damage, and while artillery does still play a significant role in that conflict (because the supply of drones and guided missiles is more limited) it is steadily decreasing as artillery batteries are destroyed (the Russian's have lost more than two-thirds of their's so far and lose more almost every day), while supplies of drones are being replenished (since replacing lost howitzers is much more difficult). Further, artillery resources have not given either side enough of an edge to budget the current territorial front lines for years.
And, if the U.S. and NATO, unlike Ukraine, were able to overwhelm and defeat Russian air defenses (which their guided munitions, satellite intelligence, stealth aircraft, and medium range artillery missiles would all help facilitate), Russia would be in a much worse position in terms of conventional warfare. Still, one might try to argue despite this for heavier U.S. Army forces.
Plausible Chinese Scenarios Don't Heavily Implicate The Army
In contrast, there is no sensible scenario in which U.S. forces invade any significant part of mainland China with a plan to hold it and rule it for any significant length of time.
The U.S. missions in the Indo-Pacific theater, vis-a-vis China, are to (1) protect Taiwan from being invaded, (2) protect the Philippines from maritime harassment or subjection by China, (3) to protect Hawaii, Alaska, and the U.S. territories in the Pacific (e.g. Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands) from invasion or embargoes, and (4) to protect Japan and South Korea and other allies in the region from Chinese attacks or intimidation.
A threatened invasion of Taiwan is the dominant concern among those possibilities. And, mostly, the U.S. role would to be employ the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. naval aviation, U.S. surface combatants with anti-ship missiles, U.S. attack submarines, and naval and air force resources from Japan, South Korea, and Australia, and possibly other U.S. and Taiwanese allies, to sink as many invading Chinese ships and destroy as many Chinese aircraft as possible, in support of Taiwanese forces on the ground, and to destroy the facilities on the coast of China from which those forces are deployed without occupying them on a medium or long term basis.
The U.S. Marine Corps, based in places like Okinawa and Guam would play the leading role in reinforcing Taiwanese ground troops on the island of Formosa and nearby islands. In part, this is because the U.S. Army with the help of U.S. Air Force and allied transport planes going into a contested airspace, and painfully slow U.S. Navy transport ships going into a contested maritime space, wouldn't be able to arrive in meaningful numbers in sufficient time to make a difference (especially their heavier forces which would have to come from South Korea, Hawaii, Alaska, and the West Coast of the mainland U.S.).
And, invading Chinese forces that did manage to make it to Taiwan, would most likely be light infantry, because all or almost all of the ferries carrying heavy Chinese armor would likely be sunk by a barrage of air, sea, and land sources missiles, torpedos, and sea mines while crossing the 100 mile straight to Formosa from the Chinese mainland. U.S. special forces or Marines might briefly set foot on the Chinese mainland to destroy an airport or a port or a military base or to disrupt the supply chain of the Chinese forces, but they would most likely bug out as soon as their narrow and destructive mission was accomplished.
Taiwanese forces would be doing the heavy lifting to fight any Chinese forces that managed to cross the straight and in dealing with inbound Chinese missiles and armed drone with whatever anti-drone and anti-missile defenses they could muster. In any conflict where U.S. Army ground troops were doing more than just tipping the balance slightly in an evenly matched fight between invading PLA troops and Taiwanese defenders, their role would be a lost cause, and would need to happen in a matter of days, before PLA victory became a fait accompli. Artillery or tank duels between the U.S. Army and the PLA are highly unlikely.
All of which is to say that the Army's case that its forces need to be heavy armored forces to engage in a ground war with China doesn't stand up to close scrutiny. Even if the Army is able to secure the long range fires with a 1,000 mile range that it is seeking in defense procurement fights, that wouldn't matter. Hawaii is about 5,250 miles away from Taiwan. Alaska and the U.S. mainland are farther away.
South Korea is about 830 miles away from Taiwan (about 28 hours or more by U.S. Navy transport ships once at sea through highly contested waters) and this distance would put it barely within striking distance with missiles with ranges almost three times as great as its current longest range option (which is in short supply). This is also too far for the Army to deliver its troops by helicopter without midair refueling in the face of very vigorous Chinese air defenses.
Okinawa, which has mostly Marines and Air Force and Navy personnel, is 400 miles away from Taiwan (which is still 13 hours away on an amphibious assault ship through hotly contested waters). Guam is about 2,750 miles from mainland China and has naval and air bases, but no meaningful Army or Marine Corps presence.
There are no U.S. military based on Taiwan itself, so it has almost no prepositioned troops or heavy military equipment there, and it doesn't have the depth of a relationship with local military forces that it does in Japan and South Korea either.
Plausible Scenarios Against North Korea
Really, the only plausible scenario in which U.S. Army forces would be engaged in ground combat with heavy opposing forces in Asia would be in North Korea, defending South Korea together with its own forces and with support from Japan and from other branches of the U.S. military. This would be a profoundly different kind of conflict than the conflicts against China or Russia that the author references.
North Korea may be armed to the hilt, but it is still a small country and its forces are hollow. And, it would be facing adversaries who had been planning for this moment for decades.
The Second Division of the U.S. Army, which is the main U.S. combat force stationed in South Korea (in addition to about 8,000 airmen), is divided between an artillery brigade with armored, tracked M270 multiple rocket launchers, and a combat aviation brigade with a mix of Apache AH-64 gunships, an assault regiment of troops deployed in UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters, and a regiment of general support transport helicopters, as well as some larger reconnaissance and armed drones.
The Seventh Air Force stationed in South Korea consists of two fighter wings with three squadrons of F-16 fighter aircraft and one squadron of A-10 attack aircraft.
There are about 300 sailors at a U.S. naval base in Busan, which is about 4,860 miles from Hawaii (about 162 hours by naval transport ship, in addition to time to travel from Busan to the DMZ over land). So, it would take more than a week to get more U.S. Army soldiers and equipment to South Korea that could not be air lifted (although the Marines in Okinawa would be much closer, about 25 hours by ship to Busan plus addition time to the front over land).
There are about 100 Marines and about 100 special operations forces and 20 Space Force "guardians" at the Army base there (Camp Humphreys) that also houses the 20,000 U.S. Army soldiers who are not special forces, and the U.S. Air Force base with 8,000 airmen. Camp Humphreys is 40 miles (64 km) south of the former base in Seoul and about 60 miles (97 km) from the Demilitarized Zone that divides North and South Korea. That puts the base about twice as far from North Korea as its predecessor, one of the main reasons for the move. While the new location moves the bulk of U.S. troops out of the range of North Korean artillery, the North Korean military has developed large caliber rockets and ballistic missiles, as well as a nuclear capability, capable of reaching Camp Humphreys.
Camp Humphreys is 143 miles from Busan Naval Base, which is less than three hours away for wheeled vehicles (or by train) and less than four hours away for tracked vehicles by road. It would take another hour to the DMZ for wheeled vehicles and another hour and twenty minutes for tracked vehicles by road. So, it would be a full seven days of travel from Hawaii to the front by sea, assuming that no detours were necessary to avoid attacks in contested maritime waters, and however long it took to load and unload the forces onto their sealift, to make sealift arrangements, and to decide to deploy them.
The Marines from Okinawa make take a couple of day to arrive by sea with heavy equipment and reach the front.
