Military Review English Edition November-December 2015 | Page 52

T

he Army’s white paper expressing the Army’s
latest vision for Force 2025 delineates three primary lines of effort: First, force employment is
defined as “Army forces in 2025 conducting decentralized, distributed, and integrated operations to prevent,
shape, and win using agile, responsive, and innovative
combined arms capabilities and special operations
forces.”1 Second, science and technology and human
performance optimization focuses on enabling effective
combat units through effective and efficient application
of science and technology.2 Third, force design is developing and validating new operational and organizational concepts so the Army can accomplish its missions.3
Are these lines of effort sufficient to prepare the
Army for dealing with threats in 2025 and beyond?
From the perspective of maneuver warfare, this article
suggests these lines of effort should be further evaluated to determine sufficiency in the context of emerging
threats that cavalry squadrons will be called upon to
address. Consider this alternate perspective on Army
operations conducted during the last two decades:
our success in Desert Storm, remarkable as it was, in
fact became the death knell for large-scale, set-piece
battles. The result of the one hundred hours of ground
combat not only proved to the world our ability to

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absolutely overmatch our enemy in a conventional
fight, but it also highlighted to our enemies the necessity to adapt their forces in order to avoid such a fight
in the future—which they have done.
Our Desert Storm experience lulled us into complacency and a disregard for the adaptive nature of our
enemies. This became apparent as our initial success in
the 2003 invasion of Iraq (with planning largely based
on assumptions drawn from Desert Storm) proved, in
reality, not to be a victory but rather a significant failure to anticipate the primary threat—the insurgency
that immediately followed.
The consequence of the changed security environment after Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and
Operation Enduring Freedom is that the core competencies of the U.S. Army are now, and must continue
to be, grounded in asymmetric warfare in order to
deal with the most likely future threats. Conventional
conflict has been redefined because of the recognition
by our prospective enemies that they cannot stand and
fight a set-piece war with U.S. forces. Just as important,
our enemies have concluded that there is no need to
attempt to match our outsized expenditure on defense
programs when they may fight effectively on another level that exploits our weaknesses. An American

November-December 2015  MILITARY REVIEW