Five Challenges for Future Infantry: Thinking about Adaptation and Change
Abstract
The purpose of this article is to highlight five challenges for Future Infantry in order to stimulate thinking about Future Infantry’s requirement to adapt and change. While this paper is Infantry focused, the challenges outlined will resonate with many people in the wider Army, and are of likely interest to people from Joint, whole-of-government, coalition, contractor and non-government organisations who expect to operate with Army in the future.
In the twenty-first century, Future Infantry—fighting in complex human, physical and informational battlespaces, operating in a combined arms, joint, whole-of-government context incorporating coalition, contractor and non-government organisation partners—will execute Infantry’s role:
To seek out and close with the enemy, to kill or capture them, to seize and hold ground, and repel attack, by day or by night, regardless of season, weather, or terrain.1
While the role of Infantry is enduring, constantly changing operating environments suggest the time has come for Future Infantry to re-examine how it operates in order to inform Army’s modernisation requirements. The purpose of this article is to highlight five challenges for Future Infantry in order to stimulate thinking about Future Infantry’s requirement to adapt and change. These challenges are:
1. Incorporating continuous learning
2. Operating across the fives lines of operation in accordance with Adaptive Campaigning – Future Land Operating Concept
3. Balancing the fighting force
4. Employing LAND 400 – Combined Arms Fighting System
5. Employing JOINT PROJECT 2048 – Enhanced Amphibious Capability.
While this article is focused on the Infantry the challenges outlined will resonate with many people in the wider Army and are of likely interest to people from joint, whole-of-government, coalition, contractor and non-government organisations who expect to operate with Army in the future.
Future Infantry Challenge 1: Incorpoarting Continuous Learning
Successful organisations are able to adapt to changes in their environments in a timely manner—this requires effective learning. For most people, effective learning is continuous and involves a dynamic combination of education, training and the understanding of lessons. For Future Infantry to become an effective, adaptive and learning organisation, the following attributes may be useful: accept honest mistakes, support the free flow of knowledge between people at all levels, mentor subordinates, and reward people who foster learning and cultural change.
To ensure success in increasingly complex battlespaces, Future Infantry must seek to frame problems, understand learning gaps and develop methods and tools to retain, develop and share knowledge in changing circumstances. Examples of resource and knowledge sharing systems available to the Future Infantry, which may assist adaptation and change, include: enhancing leader and instructor skills; formal and informal after action reviews; timely, agile and relevant doctrine; and forums, blogs and/or wikis.
Future Infantry Challenge 2: Operating Across the Five Lines of Operation
Adaptive Campaigning – Future Land Operating Concept, released by the Chief of Army on 16 September 2009, is centred on the formation of the Land Force components of which might include, as well as ADF services, government and nongovernment agencies and Australian Civilian Corps.2 The document
...defines the actions taken by the Land Force as part of the military contribution to a Joint and Whole of Government approach to resolving conflicts and advancing Australia’s national interests.3
Fundamental to Adaptive Campaigning are five interdependent and mutually reinforcing lines of operation: Joint Land Combat, Population Protection, Information Actions, Population Support, and Indigenous Capacity Building.
In accordance with Infantry’s role, Joint Land Combat is the primary responsibility of Future Infantry. For the last decade, in Australia, our region and beyond, the Infantry have also employed Population Protection to protect people from immediate danger, and Population Support to establish an environment that allows people to carry out their normal lives with family, work and education.
For the last decade and throughout the Infantry’s history, the Infantry have relied upon smart, empowered soldiers and leaders, supported by robust training and professional mastery, to support the Land Force’s Information Actions, often while in contact with adaptive, agile and lethal enemies. Well orchestrated Information Actions ensure that the Land Force’s message, or dominant narrative, is effectively portrayed and understood by all people within Land Force’s battlespace.
Experienced Infantry personnel know that the Land Force’s message must be honest and consistent. While the Land Force can tailor messages for different people and different audiences, Future Infantry must understand that it is difficult to send any messages that will be understood in the same way by the many audiences that may hear it.4 For example, the message for the enemy differs from the message for coalition partners, and may be different again for the people who actually live in Future Infantry’s battlespace. Unless these messages are honest and consistent, the Land Force risks causing effects in the information environment that impede the conduct of friendly operations, or adversely affect friendly forces; this is colourfully dubbed ‘information fratricide’ by the Information Office.5 The failure to create consistent messages across intentional and non-intentional recipient groups may lead to conflict-laden messages.6 Frequently, information fratricide ‘results in credibility loss [and] contrary messaging’.7
Future Infantry as demonstrated by current Infantry operations, must have the ability to support and empower Indigenous Capacity Building within complex future battlespaces. Future Infantry support to indigenous or local people through training, mentoring, guiding and partnering, in combination with the four other Adaptive Campaigning lines of operation, will help to ensure that indigenous force elements can become self-assured, self-sustaining, self-learning and ultimately self-sufficient.
In summary, Adaptive Campaigning’s five interdependent and mutually reinforcing lines of operation present Future Infantry with both challenges and opportunities. The starkness of these challenges and opportunities are self-evident to experienced Infantry personnel, who understand that Future Infantry’s need to adapt and change will be conducted in direct competition with equally adaptive, agile and lethal enemies.
Future Infantry Challenge 3: Balancing the Fighting Force
Infantry personnel will understand that Infantry’s operational tempo is high, and has been high since 1999. This high operational tempo has placed some strain on Infantry’s training models. In the last decade, the Infantry have faced the following challenges:
1. Maintaining a multitude of Infantry skills including: Special Forces, commandos, light infantry, airborne, mechanised and motorised
2. Allowing soldiers enough time to achieve excellence as riflemen, prior to promotion to lance corporal, and beyond
3. Maintaining Support Company skills in reconnaissance, sniping, direct fire support weapons, mortars, assault pioneers and communications
4. Conducting foundation warfighting training and education in the face of unique current operational requirements.
Arguably, these challenges may be exacerbated by Infantry’s lack of balance. Infantry maintains a number of specialised battalions, companies, platoons, sections and individual Infantry personnel. Often such specialised organisations and people are not easily deployable and rotatable which, in an era of persistent conflict, presents a challenge for an army engaged in multiple force rotations in disparate operational environments. Is the Infantry trying to develop and maintain too many specialist skills? As the battlespace becomes more complex should Future Infantry remain a ‘multi-specialist’ force, or should it aim to become more balanced in order to achieve excellence in fewer skills?
Given these challenges in Infantry’s balance and maintenance of skills, what issues should Future Infantry address? The following are some questions for possible
Future Infantry adaptation and change:
1. How will Future Infantry demarcate the difference between Special Forces and other Infantry?
2. What is the Future Infantry relationship with the Future Cavalry and Future Armour? How does Future Infantry generate combined arms teams that are modular and interoperable Future Cavalry and Future Armour?
3. What is the future of Support Company? Does Future Infantry need all of the ‘traditional’ Support Company skills, or can other corps fulfil those skills in support of the Future Infantry?
4. What combat team level intelligence and operations capabilities does Future Infantry require?
5. Is the current Infantry platoon structure appropriate for future operations? Do Future Infantry platoons need the ability to coordinate joint fires, see beyond ‘the next hill or village’, and conduct dynamic breaching in complex environments? What other capabilities do Future Infantry platoons need?
Future Infantry Challenge 4: Employing Land 400 - Combined Arms Fighting System
Defence White Paper – Force 2030 (White Paper 2009) states that Army would, in future years, ‘acquire a new fleet of around 1,100 deployable protected vehicles’.8 This project, which in the Defence Capability Plan 2009 is designated as LAND 400,9 has been named by Army as LAND 400 – Combined Arms Fighting System (L400-CAFS).
L400-CAFS has the potential to change Army, and change Future Infantry. The following are some questions for possible Future Infantry adaptation and change in the context of L400-CAFS:
1. Will L400-CAFS see a merging of current mechanised and motorised infantry skills into a single, enhanced, networked, mounted close combat infantry capability?
2. What does L400-CAFS mean for Future Infantry’s employment as part of the broader combined arms team? How does L400-CAFS affect Future Infantry’s interoperability with Future Cavalry and Future Armour?
3. Will Future Infantry fight from and/or with L400-CAFS and its associated combat systems?10
4. Does Future Infantry require L400-CAFS to carry an Infantry Section? Should Future Infantry crew L400-CAFS?
5. Fo what extent should L400-CAFS be interoperable with allies/coalition partners?
Future Infantry Challenge 5: Employing Joint Project 2048 - Enhanced Amphibious Capability
The 2009 White Paper states that Defence would, in future years, receive an enhanced amphibious capability.11 This project, which is noted in the Defence Capability Plan 2009 as JOINT PROJECT 2048 (JP 2048), includes: two new Landing Helicopter Dock (LHD) amphibious ships with ship-to-shore connectors; a large strategic sealift ship; and six new heavy landing craft.12
Like L400-CAFS, JP 2048 has the potential to change not only Army, but the entire Australian Defence Force. The following are some questions for possible Future Infantry adaptation and change in the context of JP 2048:
1. What is Future Infantry’s position on amphibious specialised brigades or battalions?
2. Noting current challenges in maintaining Infantry skills, will JP 2048 require specialist roles for Future Infantry to enable amphibious operations?
3. What amphibious training will be required for Future Infantry? Does the ADF need an amphibious training centre of excellence?13
4. Employing JP 2048, how will Future Infantry achieve: ship-to-objective manoeuvre, distributed operations; and sea-based logistics?14
5. To what extent should JP 2048 be interoperable with L400-CAFS?
Conclusion
The purpose of this article has been to note five challenges for the Future Infantry in order to stimulate thinking about Future Infantry’s requirement to adapt and change. These challenges are:
1. Incorporating continuous learning
2. Operating across the fives lines of operation in accordance with Adaptive Campaigning – Future Land Operating Concept
3. Balancing the fighting force
4. Employing LAND 400 – Combined Arms Fighting System
5. Employing JOINT PROJECT 2048 – Enhanced Amphibious Capability.
This article has proposed, in the context of adaptation and change, many questions for Future Infantry. Importantly, these questions are only a beginning. They may not be the right questions. They may not be complete questions. Or they may be questions that Future Infantry will address without significant learning and/ or intellectual effort. Alternatively, perhaps Infantry may seek to explore comprehensive thinking on these questions and challenges in order to inform the development of Future Infantry.
There is no doubt that Future Infantry—fighting in complex human, physical and informational battlespaces, operating in a combined arms, Joint, whole-of-government context incorporating coalition, contractor and non-government organisations partners against adaptive, agile and lethal enemies—will need to adapt and change.
Whatever rank or position held, the breadth, depth and range of this adaptation and change for Future Infantry is now firmly in the hands of Infantry personnel.
About the Author
Colonel Chris Field is the Director of Future Land Warfare and Strategy, Army Headquarters, Canberra. This article is based on a presentation to the August 2009 Infantry Corps Conference, and is the result of collaborative work and ideas from many fine Infantry personnel and other warfighters in Army.
Endnotes
1 ‘Rifleman’, Defence Jobs website <http://www.defencejobs.gov.au/army/jobs/Rifleman/> accessed 10 September 2009.
2 Adaptive Campaigning – Army’s Future Land Operating Concept, Head Modernisation and Strategic Planning – Army, Department of Defence, Canberra, September 2009, p.xii; ‘What is the Australian Civilian Corps?’, AUSAID website, <http://www.ausaid.gov.au/acc/>.
3 Adaptive Campaigning, p. iv.
4 This idea was generated by Lieutenant Colonel Chris Smith, Staff Officer Grade 1, Future Land Operating Concept, email to author 13 October 2009.
5 FM 3-13 (FM 100-6) Information Operations: Doctrine, Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures, Department of Defence, November 2003, p. 1-5.
6 Lodd C Helmus, Christopher Paul and Russell W Glenn, Enlisting Madison Avenue, The Marketing Approach to Earning Popular Support in Theaters of Operation, prepared for the United States Joint Forces Command, RAND National Research Institute, Santa Monica, 2007, p. xv.
7 Ibid., p. 34.
8 Defending Australia in the Asia Pacific Century: Force 2030, Defence White Paper 2009, p. 75.
9 ‘Land Combat Vehicles’ in Defence Capability Plan 2009, (Public Version), Department of Defence, 2009, p. 17; ‘Acquisition Categorisation’ in Defence Capability Plan 2009, (Public Version), p. 6.
10 LAND 125 will preferably, for example, be scoped to include interoperability with LAND 400 – CAFS. ‘LAND 125’ in Defence Capability Plan 2009, (Public Version), p. 159.
11 Defence White Paper 2009, ‘Amphibious Capability’, para 9.23–9.25, p. 73.
12 ‘JP 2048’ in Defence Capability Plan 2009, (Public Version), p. 92.
13 ‘Expeditionary Warfare School’, Marine Corps University Foundation website, <http://www.mcuf.org/mcu_ews.html> accessed 14 October 2009. A possible model for an ADF amphibious centre of excellence is The United States Marine Corps Expeditionary Warfare School, which was established at Quantico as the Amphibious Warfare School in 1921. It offers a nine-month course providing career-level professional military education, with emphasis on combined arms operations, warfighting skills, tactical decision-making, and Marine Air Ground Task Forces in amphibious operations. It prepares Marine captains to function as commanders and staff officers at appropriate levels within the Operating Forces and Supporting Establishment. In addition, it provides career-level professional military education to selected officers from the Marine Corps Reserve.
14 For more detailed descriptions of each of these attributes, see Australian Defence Doctrine Publication (ADDP) 3.2 – Amphibious Operations, Second edition, 29 January 2009, Chapter 1, para 1.22–1.25.
