Tempo, Cohesion, and Risk: Towards a Theory of Multi Domain Warfare

The US Army requires a modernised “theory of action” to thrive within the changing phenomenon of 21^st century great power competition.  At the operational level, where the essence of Multi-Domain Warfare converges, intermediate commands manage three fundamental factors in order to prevail: controlling of tempo, building of cohesion, and mitigation of risk to cross-domain convergence.  Cultivation of these variables, which balances forward convergence with the countervailing forces of friction and chance, enables initiative and synchronisation at scale.  This requires enhanced operational art that integrates emerging technologies within evolving social-political contexts in order to converge resources from diverse elements of national power, synchronise Team Warfare in specific geographies, and apply cross-domain effects to support joint and combined arms actions.

From Counter Insurgencies to Great Power Competition

Over the last decade the United States has shifted focus away from its residual counterinsurgency campaigns in the Middle East to once again reorient on great power competition in Eastern Europe and East Asia.¹  While American forces nevertheless remain engaged in stability efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan and across the world, this means, for the U.S. Army in particular, a simultaneous imperative to modernise its operational concepts to better compete against near-peer competitors and prepare for large-scale combat operations.  As argued by General Mark Milley, the 20^th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, America’s primary land power institution, as a partner in the larger joint force, must transform its approach to 21^st century warfare in order to ‘achieve a perfect harmony of intense violence.’²

In theoretical terms, the Army must develop an evolved “theory of the phenomenon” to conceptualise how the enterprise explicitly and implicitly views the totality of the political, social, economic, and military environment in relation to adversaries such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.³  In more practical terms, it must rapidly modernise its approach to degrade and defeat the anti-access and area denial capabilities of regional hegemons that are threatening American ability to conduct expeditionary combat at the operational level—where divisions, corps, and armies connect tactical actions to strategic aims.⁴  As senior, multi-star echelons that enable ‘Team Warfare’ by joint and multi-national forces, these intermediate warfighting commands own a primary and irreplaceable responsibility to both deter and overmatch threats by converging, integrating, and applying multi-domain efforts.⁵

This imperative to counter, and if need be, defeat an array of adversaries in expeditionary settings consequently requires a modernised “theory of action” to thrive within the changing phenomenon of 21^st century great power competition.  At the operational level, where the essence of multi-domain warfighting converges as ‘a duel on a larger scale’, as described by the Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz, Army commands manage three fundamental factors in order to prevail: controlling of tempo, building of cohesion, and mitigation of risk to cross-domain convergence.⁶  Cultivation of these variables, which balances forward convergence with the countervailing forces of friction and chance, enables initiative and synchronisation at scale.  The resulting equation compels relative preservation or degradation of opposing forces as they collide across the spectrum of competition and conflict.

Multi Domain Warfare and the Operational Level

Multi-Domain Warfare is a concept designed to, as described by the U.S. Army, employ the “rapid and continuous integration of all domains of warfare to deter and prevail” against adversaries who are employing “multiple layers of stand-off in all domains” in order to separate and defeat the United States and its allies.⁷  Army forces at the operational level, which operate at the nexus of tactical, operational, and strategic efforts, provide an enhanced degree of versatility and agility to multi-domain efforts.  In an expeditionary land power context, they provide tailorable combined arms capabilities to joint and multi-national teams under Combatant Command direction in order to introduce, maintain, and extend durable influence in regions of strategic interest.

This role in enabling American power projection at the operational level requires divisions, corps, and armies to integrate both the art and science of war as they continuously innovate with emerging concepts in order to attain asymmetric advantage and cognitive overmatch.  While Army commands at each echelon apply operational art as a cognitive approach to develop strategies, campaigns, and operations to achieve strategic aims, they simultaneously leverage the science of control to generate, converge, and apply combat power across the spectrum of dimensions and domains.⁸  This dual integration of art and science, which remains a historical cornerstone of land power, is essential for ground forces to engage diverse adversaries across a variety of contested settings.

The Army’s approach to land power application varies across division, corps, and army echelons as they provide, according to the institution’s capstone doctrinal manual, FM 3-0 Operations, ‘an echeloned array of higher headquarters designed toward a specific function or mission’.⁹  While divisions primarily serve as ‘tactical units of execution’ at the lower plain of the operational level, corps, as senior tactical commands with expanded capacity for command and control, provide an irreplaceable measure of joint and combined arms versatility for integrating the convergence of multi-domain combat power.  At the higher plain of operational level functions, field army and theatre army headquarters provide maximum capacity to transition multi-domain resources from global arenas into tailored employment in combat theatres and joint areas of operation.

Success at the operational level, in the context of an emergent theory of action for multi-domain warfare, stems from the coordination of resources in order to converge physical and virtual effects from higher strategic plains into granular tactical application.  This reflects a historical progression of joint and combined arms interplay across expanding battlefields that began in the First World War, expanded in the Second World War, and matured in the Cold War, and has continued to evolve in the Information Age.  The U.S. military, with access to emerging technologies that will redefine the character of warfare in the 21^st century, now stands at the threshold of incorporating degrees of resource diversity, sequence acceleration, and positional calibration to enable both material and cognitive overmatch.

Described by famed German general Helmuth von Moltke in the 19^th century as the ‘final short march from different points’ that ‘leads all the available forces simultaneously upon the front and flanks of the adversary’, the concept of convergence at the operational level has evolved to include not only emerging trajectories of competition in the space domain, but also an explosion of cognitive applications in globalised cyber and informational arenas.¹⁰  This means that intermediate commands compete as the “linchpins” of increasingly integrated joint, interagency, and multi-national teams as they compete and fight within complex social environments.  The new reality consequently requires commands to proactively develop advanced acumen in economic, political, and cultural disciplines that are revealing potential to radically disrupt and realign military realities.

This meteoric expansion of capacity to transition emergent societal structures into military application—similar to how the Prussians leveraged aspects of the Industrial Revolution such as rail, telegraph, mass mobilisation, and mass production to enable a new scale of battlefield movement and manoeuvre—consequently requires modern divisions, corps, and armies to refine operational art in order to reimagine how they attain, as described by air power theorist Evert Dolman, a ‘position of continuing advantage’.¹¹  While positional designs remain fundamental to competition between nuclear powers, they likewise enable the projection of deep operational manoeuvre against non-nuclear entities.  More importantly, intermediate commands own a central role in creating the calibrated advantage required to negate armed conflict through construction of durable security architectures during competition.

In this context, the continuous process of converging multi-domain capabilities requires Army commands to establish favourable tactical conditions for subordinate brigades and battalions to compete, fight, and win against highly capable adversaries.  This often means assertively shaping deep areas with echeloned reconnaissance and fires—physical, informational, and virtual—in order to enable successful manoeuvre by advancing combined arms teams in close and support areas.  Because potential opponents are featuring sophisticated defences specifically designed to thwart American primacy, Army forces must transform their ability to converge, integrate, and disaggregate multi-domain effects in order to neutralise layered and networked enemy fighting capabilities at depth.

Strategic advantage in competition, which revolves, in part, on success or failure at the operational level, also requires focused consolidation of gains through continuous multi-domain engagement.¹²  Reflecting operations that shape conditions for enduring advantage before, during, and following conflict, Army commands proactively converge efforts by a diverse range of joint, intergovernmental, and coalition efforts to retain and expand initiative over determined adversaries.  Seeking to bridge disparate levels of war within stated policy aims, consolidation activities by senior warfighting commands create new opportunities for strategic optionality.  Theatre armies and field armies, in particular, provide an expanded capacity to both set conditions for success in competition and to shape the environment for advantageous positioning by coalition elements at the onset of combat.

These multi-faceted activities, which occur across the conflict continuum, ultimate lead to an inescapable conclusion: American expeditionary warfighting commands must be prepared to win convincingly in large-scale combat operations against determined foes. Historically reflecting battles of expanded intensity, destruction, and consequence, the potential explosion of chaotic and unpredictable fighting with peer competitors in or near their own territory presents the highest degrees of risk for deployed Army forces.¹³  This possibility of operational isolation, or even dramatic defeat, places premium value on conducting proactive shaping, prevention, and consolidation activities in ways that posture US-led coalitions with multi-domain advantages at the moment conflict commences.  It means that success in competition tangibly reduces operational risk and accelerates the achievement of strategic aims as Army forces negotiate the vagaries of battlefield friction and chance.

History is replete with examples of unprepared armies failing in competition phases to establish favourable conditions to contest, and win, across all domains prior to the outbreak of large-scale combat.  In December of 1941, when the Empire of Japan executed a sudden assault on the American-Filipino coalition in the Philippines, the invaders first shattered the allies’ capacity to contest the air domain, then routed the U.S. Asiatic Fleet from the maritime contest, and subsequently opened a ground campaign on Luzon that converged overwhelming fires from the air, sea, and land to eventually achieve a decisive strategic victory.¹⁴  The United States military, which had utterly failed to build a modern position of advantage to fight at the operational level in the South China Sea, suffered cascading single-domain defeats in detail and paid for it by suffering the largest surrender in its history.

However, if the Japanese successfully combined surprise with multi-domain overmatch, the Allied counter-offensive to retake the Philippines in 1944 and 1945 demonstrated the potential for employing an unprecedented intensity of convergence in order to extend operational reach.  While the U.S. 7^th Fleet and U.S. Fifth Air Force unleashed long-range fires to destroy the Japanese capacity to contest the air and maritime domains, the U.S. Sixth Army, as part of a larger army group, employed air and naval support to invade Leyte, Mindoro, and finally defeat the entrenched Japanese 14^th Army on Luzon.¹⁵  This joint effort, though nascent in its ability to integrate and sequence joint effects, reflected an emergent ability to converge joint fires at the operational level.  The ability to synchronise cross-domain effects proved instrumental to allowing U.S. forces to isolate and destroy the defending Japanese forces.

Towards a Theory of Action 

The phenomenon of modernising warfare, as it evolves within context of great power competition, requires a sophisticated, yet executable, approach to bridging strategic aims and tactical actions at the operational level. For Army warfighting commands, this fundamentally means controlling the multi-domain tempo of the contest, building cohesion across the formation and coalition, and mitigating potential risk in ability to converge resources and effects.  It means that in the face of the countervailing pressures of chance and friction that define the character of the operational environment, expeditionary commands must, as described by Milley, ‘think, direct, and act at speeds the enemy cannot match’ while aiming to ‘disrupt, penetrate, disintegrate, and exploit the enemy’s anti-access systems and bring their fielded forces to operational paralysis’.¹⁶

Success at the operational level, in a multi-domain environment, begins with winning the contest over campaign tempo that unfolds and entangles between colliding entities.¹⁷  Divisions, corps, and armies, as intermediate land power formations that converge national and theatre efforts, proactively project, pulse, and vacillate pressure across overlapping domains to create cascading and inescapable dilemmas for engaged adversaries.  Whether assertively positioning for relative advantage in competition or unleashing an acceleration of violence in conflict, intermediate Army commands cultivate an intensity of campaign tempo that maintains forward momentum at the diametrical expense of enemy influence and operational reach. Envisioning relative battlefield calculus, it requires imaginative application of operational art in order to weaponised emerging technologies and capitalise on cognitive opportunities.

The second imperative at the operational level centres on building internal cohesion across increasingly complicated and integrated formations.¹⁸  For divisions, corps, and armies, the requirement to forecast and synchronise actions by diverse elements from all domains becomes a contest to maintain relative formation integrity long enough to erode the same for adversaries.  It means, in the context of multi-domain warfare, that forward Army elements who can preserve their own cohesion under pressure beyond the tolerance of the engaged enemy team can create emergent opportunities to compel adversary culmination while avoiding operational exhaustion.  Similar to controlling tempo, cohesion durability remains critical across both competition and conflict paradigms as “linchpin” warfighting commands maintain unity and interoperability for larger joint and multi-national teams.

The final factor for enabling success at the operational level centres on mitigating risk by preventing potential interruptions in joint abilities to converge resources in time and space from across all services, agencies, actors, and domains.¹⁹  This requires data-centric calculation of acceptable error rates that offset planned and unforeseen limitations on campaign tempo and cohesion.  Realising the futility of latent responsiveness to emergent battlefield flux, intermediate Army commands place premium investment on industry-enabled design and modelling to condition the operational environment and prevent single-domain culmination.  Bridging assessments of risk to force and mission, this scope of adjudication requires systems-centric wargaming—potentially with artificial intelligence assistance—in order to forecast the projection of finite resources to counter chance, friction, and enemy agency.

A Echeloned Approach – Division, Corps, Army

This logically delineated model for organising convergence will hold powerful implications for Army echelons in coming decades.  For tactically-oriented divisions, as described in the U.S. Army Concept for Manoeuvre in Multi-Domain Operations, 2028-2040, cross-domain technologies may enable the projection of decisive influence at ranges of 70 kilometres and influence out to 200 kilometres.²⁰  Cantering on shaping “deep areas” with joint fires to shape conditions for manoeuvre by follow-on brigades in “close areas,” divisions will focus, as they have in modern times, on synchronising combined arms tempo, preserving ground forces cohesion, and mitigating risks in ability to receive and complete the convergence of multi-domain effects.  However, this crucial role in combat power application will be complicated by accelerated decision cycles and battlefield chaos stemming from information overload.

The corps, as the most versatile Army command, is likewise evolving capabilities to fight across battlefields of expanded scope and scale.  Possessing a unique command and control capacity to serve as either senior tactical formations or modestly-sized joint task forces, they will feature increased ability to receive, converge, integrate, and apply multi-domain effects with potential to fight for control of contested areas out to 200 kilometres and tailor diverse types of influence to a range of 500 kilometres through physical and virtual fires.²¹  This will include performing a central role in synchronising contributions by joint, interagency, multi-national, and non-state elements with tactical actions by Army divisions and brigades that enable the pulsing and vacillation of multi-domain combat power in both competition and conflict settings.

The highest intermediate Army echelons, the field army and theatre army, serve as the ideal commands for orchestrating the convergence of national-strategic resources into specific theatres or areas of operation.  Potentially wielding an imposing ability to shape and influence battlefield conditions out to a range of 1,600 kilometres with a variety of instruments, these commands operate at the highest plain of the operational level and interface directly with combatant commands to translate military strategy into tactical execution.²²  Optimised to synchronise a panoply of Army, national, and coalition assets to “open windows of opportunity,” as forecasted by Army Futures Command, both field armies and theatre armies, which reflect respective focuses on leading large-scale manoeuvre and providing theatre support, offer maximum capacity to capitalise on emerging Information Age opportunities.²³

This echeloned approach to achieving success in multi-domain warfare through cultivation of tempo, cohesion, and risk enables the accelerated convergence of calibrated efforts towards strategic aims.²⁴  Representing a fundamental theory of action, it describes how divisions, corps, and armies maintain and increase pressure against enemy formations and coalitions in order to build and reduce relative capability.  While controlling tempo allows forward projection of physical and virtual fires to erode enemy cohesion, the converse preservation of friendly cohesion enables lateral resistance to degradation by enemy attacks.  The calculated forecasting of accurate risk parameters to ensure ability to converge multi-domain effects likewise protects the entire enterprise from failure and establishes conditions for tactical overmatch, operational endurance, and further strategic optionality.

The realities of military physics can lead to one of two polar outcomes when large-scale forces collide at the operational level: either one side manipulates the interplay of tempo, cohesion, and risk for a duration and intensity that reduces the same for the other, or both sides erode each other’s capabilities to the point of mutual culmination.  These binary results, which actually encompasses a much more complicated span of outcomes across the graduated spectrum of competition and conflict, reflects an appreciation that while campaigns have always represented “not the action of a living force upon a lifeless mass” but rather “always the collision of two living forces,” as stated by Clausewitz, the onset of multi-domain warfare has accelerated historical trends in large-scale fire and manoeuvre.²⁵

The 1944 Ardennes Counteroffensive, also called the Battle of the Bulge, provides an example where competing field armies pulsed and vacillated pressures across overlapping domains to achieve competitive advantage.  While the Germans achieved degrees of initial success by executing a rapid offensive—mostly in the land domain—designed to severe Allied lines in Belgium and Northeast France, the superior ability of the U.S. First and Third Armies to control the enduring tempo contest, recover and solidify their cohesion, and benefit from previous risk calculations at the operational level enabled a counter-offensive that rapidly eroded the integrity of the 5^th and 6^th Panzer Armies.  The Allies enabled this progress by sequencing effects across both the air and land domains, with strategic support from the maritime domain, for a duration and intensity the Germans could not match.²⁶

The First World War, on the other hand, illustrates how opposing armies can reduce each other’s capacity to manage tempo, cohesion, and risk across isolated domains to a point of mutual culmination and stalemate. In the First Battle of the Marne, which unfolded in 1914 as the German Army invaded Northeast France, the arrayed field armies of both the Allies and Axis powers shattered themselves in bloody assaults that rapidly devolved into trench warfare.²⁷  Lacking the technology to invent multi-domain solutions that could restore battlefield mobility, neither side could maintain forward tempo, preserve large-scale cohesion, or had mitigated risk through accurate wargaming.  This resulted in a costly attrition contest which eventually stimulated the nascent beginnings of multi-domain warfare in 1918 as the Allies transitioned nascent joint and combined arms innovations into practical application.²⁸

These two examples, representing the polar extremes of conflict at the operational level, hold insight for conventional confrontations during competition.  In the Cold War which followed Allied victory in 1945, NATO and Warsaw Pact forces engaged in an expensive positional contest along the border between West and East Germany that likewise revolved on their relative abilities to control tempo, build cohesion, and mitigate risk across complimentary domains.²⁹  Ultimately reflecting more a contest of resource endurance than manoeuvre acceleration, each side competed to establish strategic credibility and resilient postures for the outbreak of conflict.  More importantly, both American and Soviet forces developed concepts that sought to converge cross-domain effects across—exemplified by the Army’s AirLand Battle doctrine—in order to forecast a winning duration, depth, and intensity of pressure.³⁰

MDW and Future Conflict

The re-emergence of great power competition as the decisive influence on the phenomenon of war, when assessed in the context of the evolution of modern warfare, requires the constant refinement of operational art at the operational level.  In a world where adversaries are increasingly economically integrated and nuclear deterrence remains the first-order geo-political consideration, intermediate Army commands require a versatile theory of action that allows the requisite flexibility to create multi-domain solutions to complicated international problems.  By modernising concept to drive form and function, the Army can set conditions to achieve its primary mission to, ‘conduct prompt and sustained land combat to defeat enemy ground forces and seize, occupy, and defend land areas’.³¹

This imperative for expeditionary commands such as divisions, corps, and armies to translate strategic aims into tactical action demands mastery multi-domain convergence by commanders and staffs.  Manifesting in greatest import at the operational level, it requires an elevated form of operational art that integrates sophisticated understanding emerging technologies within evolving social-political contexts in order to converge resources from diverse elements of national power, synchronise Team Warfare in specific geographies, and apply cross-domain effects to support joint and combined arms actions.³²  The irreplaceable role that intermediate army commands play in projecting land power, which applies across competition and conflict paradigms, thus requires a creative melding of forward-thinking military art with the most advanced sciences to inform large-scale tactics and strategy.

Looking towards future evolutions in war and warfare, Army forces at the operational level will be increasingly required to converge emergent forms of physical, virtual, and informational effects.  In competition, this manifests as iterative and disruptive positioning to build advantage while creating multi-domain dilemmas for adversaries.³³  In conflict, it means, at least aspirationally, achieving a sudden degree of accelerated violence that allows cascading overmatch against paralysed opponents.  In both cases, which revolve on the ability of expeditionary commands to manage tempo, cohesion, and risk at the relative expense of engaged adversaries, the evolutionary concept of combining fire and manoeuvre will likely assume new degrees of resiliency, endurance, and operational reach as traditional large-scale emphasis on joint sequencing gives way to simultaneous application.

Just as in previous evolutions in the phenomenon of war, the changing character of future conflict will balance the efficacy of emerging technologies against the viability of the social-political environments where armies mobilise and fight.  At the operational level, the integration of automated robotics, artificial intelligence, hyper-ranged weapons, weaponised space platforms, and the continued miniaturisation and dispersion of manoeuvre elements will not revolutionise, but likely compel iterative reappraisal of how new weaponry and concepts upend or improve existing tactical structures.³⁴  This will likewise require competing militaries, and the U.S. Army in particular, to conceptualise pragmatic theories of action that accommodate the primacy of nuclear-fires complexes, enable success in messy proxy conflicts, and thrive within the over-arching context of political-economic warfare.³⁵

For divisions, corps, and armies, this reality demands strident intellectual advances in conceptions of operational art in order to master the complexities of multi-domain convergence.  Similar to when the Prussian general staff reimagined war in the shadow of the Industrial Revolution in the 19^th century, Army commanders and staffs at the operational level in the contemporary period—even as the United States grapples with social disruption at home and geo-political challenges abroad—are faced with the daunting task of reimaging the very character of modern competition and conflict at the onset of the Information Age.³⁶  If this phenomenon presents a dizzying maelstrom of inter-connectedness and digitalisation, focusing on distilling efforts into a practical approach that manages tempo, cohesion, and risk could allow reframing of problems and solutions into militarily executable strategy and tactics.

In the final analysis, it remains critical for the U.S. Army to learn, refine, and master the complexities of warfighting at the operational level in order to achieve national and coalition objectives.  For intermediate commands such as divisions, corps, and armies, this means developing an advanced acumen of multi-domain expertise in order to excel in both competition and conflict.  It means that they must, in the face of diverse and increasingly belligerent challenges, intertwine the art and science of war within a larger theory of action that allows control of campaign tempo, building of joint and multi-national cohesion, and mitigation of risk to multi-domain convergence.  If history has shown the cost of failure to modernise with the ever-changing character of warfare, the future will undoubtedly require American forces to adapt and evolve, or pay the ultimate price in the crucible of combat.

Lieutenant Colonel Adam Taliferro

US Army

Lieutenant Colonel Adam Taliaferro is an Army Strategist serving in the Futures and Concepts Center, Army Futures Command. In this role, Adam conducts broad studies and analysis on the future character of warfare. Adam also leads diverse teams on the study and implications of emerging technologies on future warfare. Adam previously served as an Armor officer with tours to Iraq and Afghanistan as a platoon leader, cavalry troop commander, and headquarters troop commander. Adam has also served as an aide-de-camp, DA Secretariat board recorder, and special assistant to the Commander, US Forces – Afghanistan / NATO Resolute Support. He is a graduate of the U.S. Army's School of Advanced Military Studies and the U.S. Naval War College.

Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Jennings

US Army

Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Jennings is Assistant Professor, Department of Military History
U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. He has recently been awarded a PhD in History at the University of Kent where he is researching Mounted Warfare Tradition in Frontier Texas, 1822-1865. He also has a Master of Military Art and Science from the U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies, a MA in History at the University of Texas at Austin and a BA in History, Northwestern State University of Louisiana. His book 'Riding for the Lone Star: Frontier Cavalry and the Texas Way of War, 1821-1865' was published in February, 2016.

 

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  Tempo, Cohesion, and Risk: Towards a Theory of Multi Domain Warfare

1. Summary of the National Defense Strategy of the United States, U.S. Department of Defense, January 19, 2018, 2
2. Mark Milley quoted by Sydney Freedberg, “’A Perfect Harmony of Intense Violence’: Army Chief Milley on Future War,” Breaking Defense, October 9, 2018
3. Theory of Operational Art Course, Advanced Military Studies Program, US Army School of Advanced Military Studies, accessed June 2017
4. Field Manual (FM) 3-94 Theater Army, Corps and Division Operations (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, April 2014), vii
5. Department of Defense, Joint Publication (JP) 3-0 Operations (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2017), I-2
6. TRADOC Pamphlet 525-3-1 The U.S. Army in Multi-Domain Operations 2028, December 6, 2018, vii-xii; Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 75
7. TRADOC, The U.S. Army in Multi-Domain Operations 2028, iii
8. Nathan Jennings, “Operational Art Links Strategy, Tactics,” ARMY Magazine, October 31, 2016
9. Field Manual (FM) 3-0 Operations (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, October 2017), 2-1.
10. Helmuth von Molke quoted in Michael D. Krause and R. Cody Phillips, CMH Pub 70-89-1 Historical Perspectives on Operational Art (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, 2005), 140.
11. Everrett Dolman, Pure Strategy: Power and Principle in the Information and Space Age (London: Frank Cass, 2005), 26.
12. Mike Lundy, Richard Creed, Nate Springer, and Scott Pence, “Three Perspectives on Consolidating Gains,” Military Review Online Exclusive, August 2019, 9-10.
13. FM 3-0 Operations, 1-2.
14. Richard Creed and Nathan Jennings, “Is Our Army Again Optimized for Defeat,” ARMY Magazine, (April 2019): 8-10.
15. Christopher M. Rein, Multi-Domain Battle in the Southwest Pacific Theater of World War II ( Fort Leavenworth: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2017), 134.
16. Mark Milley quoted by Sydney Freedberg, “’A Perfect Harmony of Intense Violence’: Army Chief Milley on Future War,” Breaking Defense, October 9, 2018.
17. Field Manual (FM) 3-90-1, Offense and Defense (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, March 2013), 3-1.
18. Mandy Mayfield, “Army Advances Future Command Post Technology,” National Defense, February 11, 2019.
19. Kevin Benson, “Tactical Risk In Multi-Domain Operations,” Modern War Institute, April 25, 2019.
20. Army Futures Command Pamphlet 71-20-1, U.S. Army Concept for Maneuver in Multi-Domain Operations, 2028-2040 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, July 7, 2020), 22, 25.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Combat Capabilities Development Command Public Affairs, “CCDC Support to Army Modernisation: Keeping pace with the changing character of war,” US Army Press, April 2, 2019.
24. Kimber Nettis, “Multi-Domain Operations: Bridging the Gaps for Dominance,” Wild Blue Yonder, March 16, 2020.
25. Clausewitz, On War, 77.
26. Roger Cirillo, CMH Pub 72–26 The U.S. Army Campaigns Of World War II: Ardennes-Alsace 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945 (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, 2019), 59-60.
27. Michael Howard, “Men against Fire: The Doctrine of the Offensive in 1914,” in Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 523-526.
28. Jonathan Bailey, “The First World War and the Birth of Modern Warfare,” in The Dynamics of Military Revolutions, 1300-2050, eds. Macgregor Knox and Williamson Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 145-146.
29. Michael Carver, “Conventional Warfare in the Nuclear Age,” in Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 811-814.
30. Wilson C. Blythe Jr., “A History of Operational Art,” Military Review (November-December 2018): 37-49.
31. Army Doctrinal Publication (ADP) 3-0 Operations (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, July 2019), 1-5.
32. Blythe, “A History of Operational Art,” 37-49.
33. TRADOC, The U.S. Army in Multi-Domain Operations 2028, x.
34. For an example emergent technology see Paul Maxwell, “Artificial Intelligence Is The Future Of Warfare (Just Not In The Way You Think),” Modern War Institute, April 20, 2020.
35. Nathan Jennings, Amos Fox and Adam Taliaferro, “The Army is Wrong on Future War,” Modern War Institute, December 18, 2018.
36. Kenneth Pollack, “Society, Technology, and Future Warfare,” American Enterprise Institute, November 6, 2019, 2.