Army’s Future Isn’t All It Could Be
Crouched behind an armored vehicle on the mud-coated hills of this sprawling military training base, 24-year-old Sgt. William T. Minnehan seems the very picture of the Army’s soldier of the future:
His backpack includes a satellite navigation set that tells him his precise position, and a laptop computer that receives up-to-the-second data from satellites about everything from weather to enemy tank positions.
His helmet is equipped with night-vision goggles that enable him to see almost everything that moves - even in pitch black - along with a viewfinder with an eye-sized video display showing a real-time picture-map of the battlefield.
Even his weapon, an updated M-16 rifle, is right out of sciencefiction: It has thermal sensors, a laser rangefinder and an imageintensifier that permit him to pinpoint almost any target.
But an impromptu demonstration reveals some imperfections:
The computer system takes more than 15 minutes to set up - a critical drawback in a battlefield situation; the batteries last only a few hours; and the helmet assembly is so heavy that Minnehan has difficulty keeping his head up when he is in a prone position.
“It’s worth having, but it needs a little work,” Minnehan says sheepishly of the new gear.
His assessment underscores what is perhaps the central dilemma facing defense planners as they try to reshape the military for the 21st century:
Pentagon leaders have predicted that new technology will spawn a “revolution in military affairs,” dramatically altering the way the military fights, eventually leading to a smaller force.
But analysts say that, despite major advances in weaponry, not all the bugs have been worked out. And more fundamentally, military strategists have not figured out how to revamp their doctrine, tactics and organizational structure to take full advantage of the new gear.
“For all of the hype, the improvements we’ve seen in military capability so far have been incremental,” says Robert W. Gaskin, a former Pentagon planner.
Moreover, six years after today’s high-tech weapons first showed their worth in the Persian Gulf war, there still is no consensus among top officials about how commanders will use the technology to carry out operations involving two or more services simultaneously - a vital element in military missions.
The issue is important because, on orders from Congress, the Defense Department is about to begin a full-scale review of the nation’s defense posture aimed at reconsidering everything from the military’s basic mission to how big a force the United States needs.
“We’re now at the point where everything is on the table,” says Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonpartisan defense monitoring group.
The use of sophisticated sensors and video-display terminals, combined with ultra-long-range weapons such as cruise missiles, will enable U.S. forces to disperse themselves widely over huge battlefields, attacking hundreds of “fronts” simultaneously.
Individual fighting units, whether companies or brigades, probably will be more self-contained. And even smaller forces will have to include their own combat support elements, such as supply components. Both groups will have to be able to move quickly.
By Macgregor’s reckoning, and that of many other defense analysts, the Army ought to be scrapping its structure of 10 permanent command-heavy 18,000-person divisions and creating smaller, more mobile, 5,000-member combat-and-support units that would be far more flexible.
Almost every day, infantry and armor units equipped with technology such as Minnehan is carrying engage in war games against more traditional battalions and companies, while commanders try to work out the bugs and develop new tactics.
A full-scale test of what has been accomplished here has been scheduled at the Army’s national training center in Fort Irwin, Calif., next March.
Still unresolved is how the services will pay for all this change in the face of steady - or possibly declining - defense budgets.