‌Resetting Land Forces for Contingency

Abstract

The conclusion of combat operations in Afghanistan opens the debate over how land forces can be best structured, equipped and manned for future tasks. In conditions of substantial uncertainty roughly equivalent to those that prevailed in the lee of the Cold War, the British Army must shape the broader defence debate if it wishes to remain relevant. While this will present a challenge given current resource constraints, this article offers a potential roadmap for the journey ahead, building on the Army’s strength and purpose, and mitigating its weaknesses. Many of the ideas expressed are contained within the British Army’s conceptual development agenda and could well become part of its future strategy as we approach a Strategic Defence and Security Review.

Introduction

During the Cold War, the armed forces of the United Kingdom (UK) focused their attention on a continental land war against a peer adversary that compensated for its relative lack of technological prowess with overwhelming mass and a comprehensive nuclear arsenal. With the Soviet Union’s demise, the UK lost the ‘benefit’ of a known adversary. And with the potential for a ‘peace dividend’ for investment elsewhere, articulating a new role for Defence presented a number of challenges. In the event, civil conflict in the Balkans served as a timely means to develop new roles in peacekeeping, peace enforcement and peace support operations. From a force development perspective, the rapid drawdown of our predominantly Germany-based army led to land forces shifting their focus, adapting equipment and structures previously geared towards major combat operations to something altogether different. In doing so, lessons learned against an irregular adversary in Northern Ireland were incorporated into doctrine hastily rewritten to meet the requirement.

We have now reached a similar hiatus and need to consider how best to adapt our organisations, equipment and personnel to a period of strategic uncertainty. This is a task far less easy than it sounds. For a start, recent campaigns, however successful at the tactical level, have ingrained certain characteristics into the military not necessarily suited to unpredictable strategic environments. Evidence from collective training, for example, suggests that many soldiers are cognitively less well equipped for long periods of austerity without recourse to secure tactical basing. Attitudes to casualties, Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and Rules of Engagement (ROE) have also developed into untenable articles of faith for future contingency operations.

Although the immediate future has often been termed a ‘return to contingency’ within the British Army, there is no return to the sort of relatively heavy combined arms manoeuvre prevalent as a doctrine prior to the UK’s commitment to Operations Telic, Jacana, Fingal and Herrick.¹ The reasons for this are manifold:

• There is little to suggest that our contingency readiness prior to Operation Telic (Iraq) in 2002 had geared land forces effectively for the protracted task they were about to undertake; we should not therefore be too ready to re-adopt the same profile. Arguably, we had not entirely identified how the character of conflict might evolve and were therefore relatively ill-prepared for stabilisation tasks in ‘wars amongst the people’.
   
• Our focus on the enemy and ground created the capacity for rapid tactical manoeuvre at high tempo, but did not force commanders to consider the impact of their operations on the mindset of the people amongst whom and with whom they operated.
   
• During that period we had different equipment, some of which has since gone out of service. We now have new equipment, much of which was acquired primarily for stabilisation operations and has not been tested in environments geared to the high-tempo requirements of major combat operations.
   
• We have a whole generation of officers and soldiers whose only experience has been in conducting counter-insurgency and stabilisation operations, largely executed at sub-unit level and below. While their skill in integrating joint enablers and land capabilities is generally far greater than that of their predecessors, the current generation lacks experience in high-tempo integrated battlegroup operations.
   
• International norms and expectations — the readiness of policy-makers to authorise the use of force where civilian casualties might result, for example — have developed through the international community’s involvement in and observation of conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
   
• We do not have the resources in our core program to prepare for contingency to the same degree we had in the past.
   
• Lessons from other operations (for example, in Mali and Libya) have been introduced into our lexicon. In particular, the speed of response (strategic and operational mobility) by the French in Mali suggests that ‘fast power’ may form an element of what is required in the future.²

For the future, the British Army (and land forces in general) must move from its familiar, heavily orchestrated task-specific ‘readiness’ to a period of less predictable ‘constant readiness’. Put simply, it must prepare for a broad range of operations across the mosaic of conflict. To be relevant, land forces must be able to cope with both the enduring nature and changing character of conflict, and adopt profiles of readiness for a range of scenarios that cannot yet be envisaged. They do not necessarily require new equipment to do this; in post-Cold War operations ‘new uses [were] found for old weapons and organisations’.³ Institutional learning and adaptation, however, must be incorporated into our psyche, and lessons must be geared towards the production of new concepts.⁴

We do not know whether future conflict will be ‘conventional’ or ‘unconventional’, or indeed whether these terms will have any real relevance. We cannot guarantee that campaigns will follow a particular path, that the government will seek to constrain our expeditionary ambition to a particular geographical zone, or that we will become environment specific. Although recent publications offer consolidated thoughts on the threat and operational environments in which land forces will need to be capable of conducting operations, they serve mainly to underline the uncertainty of it all. In such circumstances, the requirement is for rapid agility — both in the physical and cognitive domains. This will ask a great deal of our people.

There are things we used to do to which we need to return, and there are things we do now that we may do well to stop. But there are also many things we have learned from our experience in Afghanistan and Iraq that will serve us well.

The likely future character of conflict has been well articulated, and the endorsed view (‘The Future Character of Conflict’, due shortly to be revised by the UK’s Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre) remains valid as a baseline. Land forces will be required to operate within an environment that is — at the same time — congested, cluttered, contested, connected, constrained and coalition in nature. Many of these factors will be familiar from recent experience. What has changed, however, is our degree of understanding concerning the threat environments in which land forces may deploy. After years of gearing tactical actions to the strategic objectives of NATO (and the UK) in Afghanistan, a similar environment should be envisaged, but with new endstates, new adversaries and different dynamics in general. Moreover, while Afghanistan may well represent a fair reflection of the sort of physical and human terrain into which land forces may be propelled, both threat and task could differ substantially.

The future will almost certainly be multi-polar and involve a policy environment dictated by the government’s key objectives of ensuring a secure and resilient UK and shaping a stable world.⁵ The state will almost certainly remain the defining actor of the international system, although its relevance may be diluted by the continued effects of globalisation and by supra and sub-national organisations and movements. The increasing world population will drive and concentrate the demand for resources (water, food and energy in particular), particularly in the developing world.

In order for land forces to contribute to the UK’s capacity to wield ‘soft’ power, whether through Defence engagement or by other means, there is an uncompromising requirement for them to excel at warfighting.⁶

Should deterrence fail, land forces must be able to intervene and apply decisive lethal force to defeat adaptive, hybrid — potentially peer — adversaries within the land environment. But they must also have the capacity to conduct — simultaneously if necessary — less lethal operations designed to stabilise or provide humanitarian succour. The principal difficulty will lie in preparing them, both in a physical and cognitive sense, for all eventualities.

In order to do this, land forces will need to calibrate their approach such that they can apply combined arms manoeuvre in line with the principles of war, using a manoeuvrist approach and with mission command a central tenet of their philosophy. They must also invest substantially — more so than they do at present — in the ‘centrality of influence’ in achieving their objectives, noting that this requires a higher degree of understanding than has previously been the case.⁷ So, while pre-Telic land forces were broadly capable of manoeuvre in the physical domain, post-Herrick land forces must also be capable of manoeuvre in the cognitive (human) and virtual (information) domains.

The UK remains likely to deploy forces across the world to secure resources, ensure stability, or to support international disaster relief efforts. Such deployments may bring us into conflict with a variety of adversaries and rivals. These may range from peer armies, formally part of a functioning state, through to state-sponsored or state-supported groups, and groups not formally representing any polity. Combinations thereof represent what many have termed a ‘hybrid threat’. We are almost certain to be deployed into situations of poor governance, economic deprivation and inequality, in which the civil authorities are being overwhelmed or ignoring the plight of the population. The societies in which we will operate will almost certainly be culturally and linguistically different to ours.⁸ We will be required to operate within limits defined by a mandate and by our political leaders. With a reduction in time from concept to delivery, high technology items will be widely available and widely used. This proliferation of technology means that we will almost certainly have lost the broad technological edge that has traditionally offset our lack of numbers. In addition, lower governance overheads in less developed nations could well contribute to a more rapid acquisition of technologies in future.

Our most likely adversaries and rivals (as well as some of our partners) will come from, or resemble, the local society. They are likely to be amorphous, changeable and agile rather than hierarchical. It is likely that they will, at the very least, have access to some of the levers of power traditionally wielded by a state. As such, we should focus on achieving our outcomes and not on our adversaries and rivals, lest we surrender the initiative. Like Fabius Maximus,⁹ our adversaries will seek to avoid our strengths; it is almost certain that they will choose to fight where our capabilities are ill-suited and our actions most constrained. Noting David Kilcullen’s most recent thoughts, this will almost certainly be populated urban terrain, with a realistic probability of being located in the littoral. We cannot, however, rule out the requirement to operate in dense vegetation and in the desert. Nor can we ignore the possible requirement to defeat a peer enemy. If we do so, we will surrender the hard power that underpins the UK’s soft power and deterrence, and undermine credibility with our allies and other prospective partners.

Our most likely adversaries will have increasing access to technology at a level comparable to ours, and will generally be attracted to those capabilities that are simple to operate and require little maintenance or support. They are likely to seek a Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) capability, and will employ anti-access and area denial systems. Their capabilities may be modified, geared to the situation at hand, and used in novel ways.

The tempo of operations will accelerate. We will continue to be heavily reliant on the virtual (information) domain, and our adversaries and rivals are almost certain to exploit this in order to operate flexibly and to fight the battle of the narratives. Given that military intervention will seek to set conditions rather than secure outcomes, the opinions of the people (local, regional, home and global) will be crucial to success. We must, therefore, regard influence as an outcome and not an activity; this will be difficult in a world in which social media and citizen journalism may set the information agenda.

We will continue to be reliant on existing infrastructure and civilian capabilities to deploy, sustain and recover the force. This is a vulnerability that our adversaries are likely to target. We will not be able to achieve our objectives and those of the government unless we operate comprehensively with JIIM (joint, interagency, intergovernmental, multinational) partners and usually in a supporting role.

Finally, despite the desire of the government to avoid protracted operations of prolonged duration, we should also note that the length of time committed to operations has historically been longer than first anticipated.¹⁰

Noting the UK’s competitive advantage, land forces should aim to develop their strengths in such areas as:

• the intellectual capacity of the officer corps to combine a good degree of situational awareness with cultural knowledge based on education and develop a fundamental understanding of the situation;¹¹
   
• the capacity to exploit relationships and linkages between allies, the host nation and inter-agency partners to generate understanding and leverage resources that support our operational design;
   
• the capacity to deliver precision lethal effect, through liaison and interaction with Special Forces as well as the delivery of well-targeted joint fires;
   
• the ability to integrate joint effects using a developing targeting process at the heart of our operational design to apply a range of means both against our adversaries and the people amongst whom we operate;¹²
   
• the generation of multi-dimensional manoeuvre, on land, in the air,¹³ in time, and in the virtual domain – improving our capacity to deliver offensive action in support of information and cyber operations;¹⁴
   
• the decisive application of integrated combat power at the point of decision; and
   
• the capacity to manage consequences, thereby shaping and managing the battlespace to achieve success.¹⁵

At the same time, we must mitigate our weaknesses:

• our lack of mass, mitigated through our alliances and the use of proxy indigenous forces (where achievable). Concentration of physical and cognitive force at the decisive point, however, is as important as economy of effort elsewhere;
   
• our initial lack of understanding, mitigated by rapid deployment of joint strategic intelligence enablers and augmented by our capacity to integrate ISTAR for tactical ‘find’;
   
• our ability — in complex terrain — to find and engage the enemy with kinetic and non-kinetic effects, mitigated by maintaining HUMINT capability and manned reconnaissance, as well as maintaining a role for suppression where appropriate;
   
• our need to protect the force, mitigated by professional competence in force protection TTPs, equipment, deception and concealment. Land forces will need to become more used to breaking cover only when required,
   
• with headquarters developing the means to deliver a more staccato application of force at times and places of our choosing; and
   
• our lack of sustainability in the field, which we mitigate by training to improve our capacity to operate in austere field conditions, away from tactical basing, and our use of commercial partnering to deliver contractor solutions.

Innovation requires imagination to explore the possibilities and potential to change and a willingness to do so. This in itself requires an organisational culture that encourages the upward flow of ideas and perceptions, as well as direction from above.

For the British Army, the situation has fundamentally changed and we must change with it if we wish to remain relevant in an uncertain world. While the fundamental nature of war remains unchanging (for now, at least), its character could evolve in any number of directions. Constrained by resources, the UK is likely to remain keen to lead the European element of NATO in its capacity to deploy and conduct even the most complex of operations. But it cannot do this with limited mass and a declining technological edge. Instead, it should seek the synergies that arise from well-crafted employment of joint capabilities in an agile and scaleable force package that is targeted with an appropriate degree of understanding.

The role of land forces within this package is vital to its success. Our lack of mass will need to be resolved through expertise in crafting highly effective shaping operations — blending lethal and non-lethal capabilities for precise application where required — and committing combat force elements to exploit (rather than decide) the situation; in short, combined arms effect. This places renewed emphasis on the importance of higher headquarters in shaping the situation, freeing lower headquarters to concentrate on the tactical battle and, at the same time, allocating ISTAR, fires and information operations capabilities to the point of need. While this is complex, every effort should be made to create simple plans with messaging at their heart.

Dispersion, concealment and good fieldcraft will become the norm, with tactical basing likely to persist only during the latter stages of stabilisation operations. Force elements must therefore become more comfortable with operational security and deception, concealing their whereabouts, communications and intentions, and committing from dispersed locations only when necessary to achieve decisive effect. Training for unpredictability must become the norm, and officers and soldiers at all levels must be comfortable with this. Land forces need to be adaptable, versatile and scaleable.

We have an opportunity to shape the way we operationalise the structures we have been given under A2020. It is now time to reset for contingency in a manner designed to win the wars of the future, taking account of our experiences in the wars of today without slavish adherence to these. To achieve the best that we can requires our officers and soldiers to assist in conceptual development; a bottom-up learning culture should be encouraged, and those with the best ideas rewarded for their efforts. Journals such as this remain an excellent receptacle for debate.  

Endnotes

‌1    The British Ministry of Defence codenames for the various operations conducted in Iraq and Afghanistan.
2    Dr John Chipman, Director-General IISS, ‘The Age of Fast Power’ at: http://iissvoicesblog. wordpress.com/2013/02/04/the-age-of-fast-power, accessed 5 March 2013.
3    General Sir Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World, Allen Lane, UK, 2005.
4    B. Barry, ‘Adapting in War’, Survival, Vol. 54, No. 6, December 2012–January 2013, pp. 171–82.
5    Source: The National Security Strategy.
6    This decisive warfighting effect also engenders the credibility required to operate alongside, and at times to command, allies and partners.
7    Understanding is a command issue and not a function of ISTAR. It involves a combination of cultural and situational awareness, and requires officers with an inquisitive nature — encouraged and rewarded for their attention to detail in learning the physical, human and historical geographies of the region to which they are to deploy.
8    Positive efforts to require — and potentially reward — the acquisition of language skills must be made as a matter of priority.
9    Fabius Maximus, ‘Fabius the Delayer’, earned his soubriquet in the 2nd Punic War when he adopted a series of delaying tactics against Hannibal’s superior Carthaginian army. Although at first derided, Roman defeats — including that at Cannae — led to a broad adoption of his philosophy in avoiding the enemy’s strength while playing for time and denying supplies as a means to cause widespread attrition.
10    A 2011 study by the Directorate of Force Development (equivalent to DARA) concluded that, excluding Op Banner, the mean duration of British interventions since World War II is 48 months, and the median 33. Since the end of the Cold War (1990), the mean duration has been 67 months, with the median 79.
11    While language skills are a weakness at present, and cultural awareness not a given, recent campaigns have demonstrated the importance of developing a high level of understanding prior to embarking on a campaign.
12    There is some work still to be done to embed messaging at the heart of our decision-making, and cultural, organisational and doctrinal changes may be required. The Directorate of Force Development proposes experimental work to determine whether a new estimate process with the ‘message’ at its heart will simplify operational planning and provide a more relevant approach for the future.
13    The exact degree of air mechanisation and air manoeuvre available to land forces will be dictated in training by limited availability of airframes, but there is a requirement to maintain a baseline understanding of air mechanised operations with which land forces have become familiar on Operation Herrick. How this is achieved is an issue for the UK’s Directorate of Training (Army) and its Joint Helicopter Command.
14    Noting that more work needs to be done in institutionalising the latter into the land environment beyond specialist domains.
15    This may require formalisation of the consequence management role in formation and unit headquarters.