Decisive Point Podcast – Ep 4-19 – Katie Crombe and John A. Nagl – A Call to Action: Lessons from Ukraine for the Future Force

Fifty years ago, the US Army faced a strategic inflection point after a failed counterinsurgency effort in Vietnam. In response to lessons learned from the Yom Kippur War, the United States Army Training and Doctrine Command was created to reorient thinking and doctrine around the conventional Soviet threat. Today’s Army must embrace the Russo-Ukrainian conflict as an opportunity to reorient the force into one as forward-thinking and formidable as the Army that won Operation Desert Storm. This episode suggests changes the Army should make to enable success in multidomain large-scale combat operations at today’s strategic inflection point.

Read the article here: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss3/10/

Read the episode transcript below.

Email usarmy.carlisle.awc.mbx.parameters@army.mil to give feedback on this podcast or the genesis article.

Keywords: strategic inflection point, Ukraine, multidomain operations (MDO), mission command, large-scale combat operations (LSCO)

Episode Transcript

Stephanie Crider (Host)

You're listening to Decisive Point.

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

I'm talking with Lieutenant Colonel Katie Crombe and Dr. John A. Nagl today, authors of “A Call to Action: Lessons from Ukraine for the Future Force,” which was published in the autumn 2023 issue of Parameters. (https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss3/10/)

Crombe is an Army strategist currently assigned to the joint staff. She was the chief of staff of an integrated research project commissioned by TRADOC (Training and Doctrine Command) during academic year 2023 at the US Army War College.

Nagl is a professor of war fighting studies at the US Army War College and was the director of an integrated research project commissioned by TRADOC during academic year 2023.

Welcome to Decisive Point, Katie and John.

John A. Nagl

Thanks, Stephanie, it's good to be here.

Katie Crombe

Thanks, Stephanie.

Host

Katie, please give our audience some background and tell us about the establishment of TRADOC (Training and Doctrine Command).

Katie Crombe

During this study, we went back to the last strategic inflection point that we saw the Army go through. And we recognized that as 1973, following the Yom Kippur War. And so, we began digging a little bit deeper on why that was such an important point for the US Army.

What we realized was not only the Secretary of Defense, but the Chief of Staff of the Army at the time, Creighton Abrams, had a revolutionary and evolutionary leader in a guy named General William E. DePuy, who was a combat leader in World War II but also known for being a deep and thoughtful intellectual. They knew that the Army needed to change. They knew that the Army needed to rise to the occasion of the conventional Soviet threat, and they figured that the training and education that the Army had established was not going to get us there.

So, they had General DePuy stand up something called Training and Doctrine Command in 1973. And what he did right at the beginning was do a deep study on the 1973 Yom Kippur War through a couple of lenses, both his intellectual lens—you know, he was just deeply interested in that as a curious man— and also, his combat lens, as he lost 100 percent of his battalion in World War II. That deeply affected him, and he wanted to ensure that the US Army never faced this again. So, when he established Training and Doctrine Command, his concept was really to lead training and education and do this through a series of exercises, different ways to train, and also the development of new fighting manuals that the Army would read at echelon. Everyone from the lowest in the squad up to the division commander really could understand how and why people were fighting. And so, we really used that as the genesis.

Over the years, TRADOC—as we all know it by now—I think that it's a little bit of a culture thing, but we think of it as more the doctrine side rather than the training side. We don't think of it as a revolutionary kind of think tank–type of organization. And we know now what's going on with Russia and Ukraine and what will (or could, eventually) go on with China, that we need TRADOC to go back to its revolutionary roots and really start thinking about the future. And we think that they have infrastructure and the people and the leadership to do it. It's just that they need to be the drivers of change for the future.

Host

John, what else can you tell us about the study that this article is based on?

Nagl

So, this study began when General Funk (Paul E. Funk II), then the commander of Training and Doctrine Command, asked the Army War College, about a year ago, to look at this ongoing war between the Russians and the Ukrainians, the biggest war in Europe since 1945. And General Funk believed, as I do, that the lessons available to us from this rare, horrifying event were so important that we would be sadly remiss if we didn't learn from them. And I was privileged to be able to pull together a team of what ended up being 18 students from the Army War College class of 2023 (and) half a dozen faculty members. The leader of the students was Katie, and we looked across the Army's warfighting functions. But even more broadly, we looked at medical lessons we could learn from this war. We looked at airpower and seapower lessons we could derive, and we came up with a, I think, a pretty extraordinary list of ideas that the Army, we believe, can benefit from as it prepares to deter war with China and as it prepares for whatever other fights it may have to engage in in the years and decades to come.

Host

Katie, you argue that TRADOC “can lead the Army back to the basics of education, training, and doctrine development at the pace that was founded, a pace that drove ruthless prioritization and reassessment.” Please expand on this idea.

Crombe

What we were driving toward in that is when General DePuy created TRADOC, he was really trying to bring training out of these abstract and ambiguous threats and more into a real-time training that focused on imminent threats of the day. The Ukraine War is posing such a real-life experimentation lab for us that we can put into training now as we speak. We can put these young soldiers into learning how to move combat outposts, to be more ambiguous in, you know, hiding from the enemy. And we can take so many lessons right now. We do not need to wait for 10 years to compile these lessons, you know, in the back of a library, eventually put them in a SCIF (sensitive compartmented information facility) and then transfer them to some kind of training manual, eventually put them into doctrine, and then 10 years from now, we're actually exercising or rehearsing on these lessons learned.

Our priority is to make sure that we get these out there in the unclassified environment as the fight is evolving and let units train to the standard that they will need to hold against a similar enemy, whether it be Russia or China, in the future. Another thing that he was really, really focused on, he being General DePuy, was carefully selecting and training soldiers and leaders and them doing this training together. It's not just sending someone out to a national training center one month a year and grading them on a scenario that they know is coming and that they've rehearsed all year. It's putting them in something that is changing by the minute, by the hour, by the day, and putting these leaders and soldiers together to learn to trust each other at echelon; to know that the person above them and below them is going to make the right decision, regardless of how dispersed or distributed they may be; and really build this trust that they'll need to conduct the kind of large-scale combat operation that we see in our future.

Host

TRADOC was established to transform the Army into the best-trained, -equipped, -led, and -organized land power in the world. What possibilities do you see for this organization going forward?

Nagl

I think it still has all those same responsibilities, Stephanie, and what we are doing is calling the organization back to its roots. So, in 1973, the United States Army was coming off of 20 years of not completely successful counterinsurgency campaigns in Asia, and suddenly proxy force for the United States, using American equipment to American doctrine, found itself challenged by the Soviet Union. TRADOC was created in response to that wake-up call, and we think there's a similar wake-up call today in a very similar historic situation in which the United States is again ending, at least for now, 20 years of counterinsurgency efforts in greater Asia. Thinking anew about large scale combat operations, we think TRADOC has the responsibility to learn those lessons, but we have another organization that's being created in the Army, just in the past five years or so.

General (Mark A.) Milley, when he was Chief of Staff of the Army, created something called Futures Command. I'm actually just back from a session at Futures Command. General Jim Rainey (James E. Rainey) and his team are very interested in this study that we've been doing and in what it says about what the Army should look like in 2040. We've been sharing these lessons with him, with Futures Command, and thinking hard about how the Army adapts to this new era of what appears to be persistent surveillance, Katie talked about that a little bit, and increasingly, the artificial intelligence, robotics, human-machine pairing. Those are some of the technologies that we're seeing in their early phases being used in this current war, and we think they have huge implications for what the Army and the entire Department of Defense should look like in the decades that we're preparing for now.

Host

Katie, what lessons from the ongoing war in Ukraine should the American Army be paying particular attention to?

Crombe

I'll give you kind of our top five lines that emerged from this study, the first one being that organizational culture really needs to embrace this change coming in the Army. And what we mean at the root of that is mission command. It's not just talking to talk, but it's walking the walk with mission command. We've talked about that for the better part of two decades. It's much easier to exercise mission command when you have stadium-sized JOCs (Joint Operations Centers), perfect communication, a perfect sight picture of what's going on in the air and on the ground. That trust does not need to emerge as quickly when you have this perfect communication. So, mission command, although we say we've been practicing that, in reality, we probably are not as good as we could be, and, going forward, it's this trust that is going to be at the core of mission command. It's this training and rehearsing that we need to do together. It's understanding our fighting manuals at every echelon. It's knowing what your boss two up is doing so that if he goes that we can execute. That's what happened in World War II. And we would trust a battalion commander to become a division commander overnight because that person understood the training and the doctrine, and they trusted those around them. And that's the kind of fight that we might see in the future. So first, organizational culture needs to really adopt this mission command and walk the walk with it.

The second part, and it's tangential to that, is that we believe the command-and-control nodes will be the first things targeted, and we've seen that throughout this conflict, repeatedly. The Ukrainians have adapted very quickly to this. They have very small command posts, and they move them every hour, every minute. They move them when they need to. They pick up and go. We need to do that. We need to rehearse that at every level across the Army. Along those lines, we need to make sure that our electronic signature is very small. We don't want to be able to be targeted by the enemy. And so, it's just trying to figure out how to, kind of, scramble that and make it more difficult for the adversary.

The third one is that large-scale combat operations is going to produce casualties that would make our eyes water, right now, on things that we have not seen since World War II. The two decades of the fight against terrorism have not produced anywhere near the kind of casualties that we would see. So, it's not only moving casualties from a logistics perspective, but it's figuring out how our culture would accept that and the political-military connection—what we would be willing to absorb as a nation?

The next one goes with that and it's just really understanding our IRR (individual ready reserve), our regular ready reserve and our retired reserve and how we can ensure that it is a more robust system that we have access to. Everyone hears about the recruiting challenges that the US Army faces right now. It's much broader than recruiting and retention. It's if we did go into this fight, we would need to replace casualties at a rapid rate, and our system is just not built for that.

And then, finally, is there's been a fundamental change in the character of war overall. Artificial intelligence and machine learning have changed the way that every military is fighting. It changes the way that we operate as humans in society. Our kids. Us. It's changed everything. And that is especially true in combat. So, we need to embrace that.

That's a big part of our article is that we are at a strategic inflection point because of that. We're not going to stop this evolution. It's coming. And so, we need to rapidly figure out how to incorporate these technologies into our combat and our battle formations and make the best use of them. Akin to that is really understanding the defense industrial base, and also the commercial sector and figuring out how we link better up with them knowing that Elon (Musk) can put a satellite up whenever he wants. And so, it's how do we leverage that for our good and make sure that the adversary does not use it for theirs?

Host

John, what lessons from the ongoing war in Ukraine should the American Navy and Air Force be learning?

Nagl

We started off planning to do just an Army study, but we had a Navy civilian who wanted to join the project. And I was interested in the naval implications, and retired Navy Captain Al Lord was working on the project with me. So, he took that young man under his wing. And, really, we see a lot of applications. What Katie was just talking about with artificial intelligence, unmanned systems, we're seeing that playing out very quickly, very dramatically, in the seas around Ukraine. In fact, while we've been talking, I just received a note from Al pointing out that the world's first specialized explosive naval drone unit has just been formed in Ukraine. So, we're literally seeing this all happen in real time, as we talk. I think there's an awful lot that the Navy can learn from that.

If we had the Navy, I felt bad and thought we probably needed to include airpower, as well, and reached out to Maxwell to the Air War College, where a State Department officer, actually, was doing some really interesting work and wrote what may be one of the best papers in the entire project—a paper called “Potemkin on the Dnieper: The Failure of Russian Airpower in the Ukraine War.” The big surprises of this war, for me, have been Russian failure to establish and maintain air superiority and Russian failure to use cyber in a way that really brought Ukraine to its knees. Neither of those things have happened. And Sean examines why in that Small Wars and Insurgencies journal article already published. And I think the implications of what we've seen there in the air and the sea have huge implications not just for the Russo-Ukrainian War but also for any possible future conflict with China.

Host

Katie, do you have any concluding thoughts you'd like to share?

Crombe

What Dr. Nagl just brought up about the air and the sea is so important. There are some lessons on not only sustainment and logistics, sea lines of communication, but the things that we're learning that the Russians have attempted to do in the Black Sea and have maybe not been as successful as they imagine are lessons that we can take forward for the China fight. If the supply lines are interrupted on the Black Sea, there's land to go across to supply. That's not going to be true in the Pacific. So, these kinds of lessons are even more important.

How do we attack ships from land? It’s kind of an old-school thought. And I think people are thinking more about it now—shore-based artillery that can get after some of these moving targets. Can the Army use HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System)? How can we be creative so that we're not so reliant on single services to approach the adversary in certain ways? So, I think that's a big thing.

The other big lesson air-wise, I think, is air superiority was a given or a guarantee for us for the better part of 20 years, and no one has air superiority right now between Russia and Ukraine. And I think that's why the conflict is in the state that it's in right now after two years. No one can gain air superiority. And I think if the Russians had gained that early on, if the Ukrainians hadn’t been so creative and gotten after them with Stingers, we would be in a much different place than we are right now. So, it's making sure that our allies and partners in the future have those kinds of weapons (and) know how to employ them to ensure that no enemy can gain your superiority like that because that's the kind of fight that we're going to have.

(My) final conclusion is just, you know, rapid learning is the way of the future. That's how people are approaching learning right now. It's the more knowledge, the better. I think that TRADOC really needs to embrace that and not wait to have a perfect body of work that comes out of the Russo-Ukraine conflict, but really take the lessons as they come and immediately transfer them into national training centers, into field manuals, and into doctrine that can be updated later and when necessary. But don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

Host

John, concluding thoughts?

Nagl

This study has just been an extraordinary gift. I got to work with Katie and 17 of her very talented classmates. We presented at the Army War College's Strategic Land Power Conference in May. I was invited to present our work at a joint NATO-Ukrainian conference in Poland in July, and that work is continuing to build and grow. And I'm just delighted that we're continuing the work this coming year. I am recruiting students from the Army War College class of 2024 to look at this current war. We had to knock off most of our research toward the end of 2022, and so we've got another full year of data, of history, of experience to learn from, to take advantage of the contacts I've made now, as this study has spread out across a number of armies and militaries around the globe.

And my hope is that the Army War College can continue to take advantage of the talent we have in the faculty, in the student body, our friends, and our contacts, literally around the globe, to learn as much as we can from the courage of the Ukrainians, who are fighting a force that is absolutely evil, and help them find ways (to the extent that we can) to help them succeed in their efforts. But also, from their courage and from their experience, find ways to save American blood and treasure from the future wars that are inevitably going to occur.

Host

Listeners, you can read the article at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 53, issue 3.

Katie John, thank you so much for making time to speak with me today.

Crombe

Thanks, Stephanie.

Nagl

Thank you, Stephanie.

Host

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