At 250, the U.S. Army Remains the Indispensable Service
People and purpose are key to confronting geopolitical and technological challenges
In a few days, June 14th to be exact, the U.S. Army will celebrate its 250th birthday since its founding amid the first fires of the American Revolutionary War in 1775. Two and a half centuries later, the United States stands athwart the world, if precariously, very much like the 18th century British colossus that it first faced off against. Since then, the American Army has borne the brunt of the nation’s conflicts, from saving the Union in the Civil War to liberating Western Europe in World War II. And while technological and strategic revolutions come and go, the key to the Army’s effectiveness has always been the determination and resourcefulness of the American soldier.
Still, one of the key questions of modern warfare is whether large land forces continue to have an important role to play, given the proliferation of missiles and the advent of drones on the battlefield. The Russo-Ukraine War, Israel's campaign against Hamas in Gaza, and major (and largely unreported) wars in Sudan and Congo show armies are still relevant. At the same time, the most superbly trained and motivated soldier remains ever vulnerable to the fast pace of technological change.
Still Relevant
If the Army's scorecard is checkered with regard to the interventions, police actions and military operations of the post-World War II era, it still carried much of the combat load in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan with distinction. The men and women under arms as soldiers have earned their legacy as minutemen.
This is not to minimize the contributions of the Marines, Navy and Air Force. However, the Army remains at the forefront when allied nations need to be defended and enemy territory must be seized and held. Even if this is not as true in the Indo-Pacific, where air, naval, amphibious and space forces will be deciding factors in any war with the People’s Republic of China, at least in its early stages, the service will almost certainly become more, if not the most, crucial if the conflict becomes more protracted.
Certainly, large land wars involving major powers are not relegated to history, as the Russo-Ukrainian war shows. Any such war with America as a combatant will inevitably involve major deployments of Army units. If U.S. soldiers can be counted on to display their customary skill, fortitude and adaptability in the face of any enemy, will their political leadership, congressional support and officers provide the conditions, resources and command vision necessary for them to achieve victory on the modern battlefield?
The Once and Future Army
Contrary perhaps to the popular imagination, the minutemen responding to the alarms of the midnight riders in April 1775 were not a mere assemblage of farmers and tradesmen. In his first volume of a planned trilogy on the history of the Revolution, Rick Atkinson notes that an estimated quarter of the able-bodied men in the Massachusetts militias were veterans of the French and Indian War, which had ended less than a decade earlier.
When a column of about 800 British elite grenadiers and light infantry marched out of Boston to raid colonial militia arms caches in Concord and environs about 20 miles away, they attracted swarms of town militia formations over the course of the day that totaled an estimated 4,000 minutemen. If these armed bands were largely uncoordinated, they were fierce: inflicting 273 casualties, with 73 killed, while suffering a loss of 95 casualties, with 49 dead. Atkinson writes:
British survivors emerged from the maelstrom with a new respect for American fighters. “Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob will find himself very much mistaken,” [British commander Hugh] Percy wrote General Harvey, the adjutant general in London, a few hours after returning to Boston. “They have men amongst them who know very well what they are about.”
After the Redcoats retired from their Concord sortie, the American militia fighters essentially bottled them up in Boston. A British attempt to expand and improve its position resulted in the Battle of Bunker Hill, which gained some ground at the cost of a thousand British casualties, including 225 dead. American losses were half that, and they still had the enemy surrounded and contained. The British undertook no more major attacks out of their Boston redoubt and ultimately evacuated the city in March 1776, never to return.
In the interval between what Ralph Waldo Emerson would later famously call “the shot heard ’round the world” and what is now celebrated in the towns around Boston as “Evacuation Day,” the Continental Congress created the Continental Army and appointed George Washington, a celebrated French and Indian War veteran, as its commander. Thus, the armed service that would become the U.S. Army predates the nation’s founding by about a year.
Today, the U.S. Army again finds its ranks filled with volunteers, although in the form of professional soldiers who have emerged from the miasma of conscription and defeatism of the Vietnam era. If many of the soldiers who fought in Vietnam did not consider themselves defeated, certainly the country they returned to did.
Arguably, the high-water mark of the Army in modern times is its role in the liberation of Kuwait and the crushing of Saddam Hussein's expansionist ambitions in the Gulf War of 1990-91. While it was an effort involving all U.S. armed services and an unprecedented assembly of allied forces (and a high-water mark for U.S. diplomacy, thanks to President George H.W. Bush), one of the most notable elements was the Army’s wide, flanking offensive into southern Iraq, preceded by a massive and extended air campaign.
The “100-hour war” on the ground using equipment, tactics and training developed as the so-called AirLand Battle doctrine of using overwhelming air power coordinated with armor to fight the Warsaw Pact in Europe succeeded beyond expectations and sent a shudder through the armed forces of nations constructed, equipped and trained along Soviet lines, as Iraq’s had been. Operation Desert Storm wasn't supposed to have been such a walkover. But it was.
And this got America's enemies thinking.
Forever Wars
In his 2020 book, “The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West,” Arizona State University professor and military analyst David Kilcullen says the Gulf War shocked those powers that were opposed to the U.S.-led world order or chafed under it. The U.S. and its Western allies, particularly Great Britain, which also deployed large air and mobile land forces, demonstrated that the AirLand Battle approach could dominate the contemporary battlefield.
Kilcullen, who is also president and CEO of the strategic research firm Cordillera Applications Group, said the victory had an inevitable downside: “The Gulf War showed everybody how not to fight us.”
Little over a decade later, the 2003 invasion of Iraq also featured U.S. airpower and land forces. However, the campaign and subsequent occupation, and vicious insurgency, revealed the limits and weaknesses of the Western approach to war. The ultimate defeat and ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 after another extended occupation and counter-insurgency effort seemingly put a period on the AirLand Battle era. America’s enemies had relearned how to outlast—if not outfight—the superpower. Winning initially on the battlefield is not enough.
According to a report from the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the U.S. Army was unequal to the task of helping countries it occupied stand up new security forces more to America's liking. This was due to the size of the mission, lack of adequately trained personnel and a skeptical George W. Bush administration that did not prioritize the effort, the report said. The Army’s Special Forces units along with specialized regular formations, such as the 10th Mountain Division, served as advisers to friendly factions in Iraq and Afghanistan, but were overwhelmed by the scale of the mission. Regular and reserve units rotated in to help carry the burden but lacked appropriate training and resources.
“In both wars, the advisor system was hastily created and tasked with a mission beyond its capabilities,” the report concluded. “The Army’s attempts to reform this system between 2001 and 2017 were equally ad hoc and never fully corrected its flaws.”
If the primary fault for these inadequacies may rightly be laid at the doors of U.S. political leadership and policymakers, the Army committed to a course of “transformation” motivated by a perceived revolution in military affairs. The foundational concept of this movement was that rapid advances in information technology would enable smaller, lighter, more interconnected forces to fight modern wars more effectively. Agility, lethal smart weapons and shared battlefield situational awareness would enable the leaner, meaner Army supported by air dominance to overpower its dinosaur-like foes.
Transformation was widely popular across administrations because the technological superiority displayed in the Gulf War and even Kosovo made it seem like wisdom. The Clinton administration supported it because the transformational Army would be cheaper than its Cold War version—the siren call of the peace dividend. For George W. Bush, such a force seemed like just the thing to fight the global war on terror against less well-equipped tribesmen and urban insurgents. President Barack Obama looked to technology to aid him in his quest to reduce the size of the armed forces, and the Army in particular, and to emphasize social and environmental goals alongside fighting wars.
For its part, the Army leadership bought into the revolution in military affairs, seeking even to eliminate heavy tanks and infantry fighting vehicles in favor of the nebulous Future Combat System, where “the network is the weapon.” After spending $20 billion through 2009 on what RAND Corp. called “the largest and most ambitious planned acquisition program in the Army’s history,” the Pentagon canceled the program, although some technologies derived from the effort have been incorporated into other programs.
Capricious history intervened in the form of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s expansionist campaigns against Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine beginning in 2014. These and subsequent waves of Russian invasions convinced the Army to hold onto its tanks after all.
Dawn of the Drone
My colleague Michal Fiszer and I have chronicled the events, character and technologies of the evolving Russo-Ukrainian War in a series of article in Discourse (see snapshots here, here, here, here and here). The overarching lesson is that major wars with armor, artillery and hundreds of thousands of troops engaged on each side remain a reality in the 21st century. As the U.S. Army whipsaws between the AirLand Battle to fighting insurgents and back again, it must understand that it may be called upon to battle enemy tanks and terrorists going forward, conceivably at the same time and in different parts of the world.
The lessons of the war in Ukraine are many and still unfolding. However, a key threat that will directly affect American soldiers deployed in any theater and capacity (even possibly the homeland) is that undeniable revolution in military affairs: the drone. The term “drone” means different things to different people. For the purposes of the existent and increasing threat to land forces, drones are inexpensive, low-flying aircraft like quadcopters carrying sensors for self-guidance or remote control and explosive payloads for killing troops and destroying tanks, other vehicles and even field fortifications.
One important aspect of the drone is that its size and low-level flight mask it from sensors designed to detect and track other flying battlefield threats, such as helicopters and ground-attack planes. Another is that it is cheaply assembled from widely available commercial components. This combination makes drones accessible by any conceivable enemy, even insurgents, and deployable in huge numbers. Strategists fret about defending against drone swarms.
The bad news is that the U.S. Army has largely given up its capability for short-range air-defense (SHORAD) in general. This is because battlefield air superiority is assumed, courtesy of the U.S. Air Force, and the enemies it has fought in recent decades haven’t had much in the way of air capability. It has limited numbers of Avenger vehicles built on the Humvee chassis and firing Stinger missiles, which are themselves out of production. By contrast, Russian and Ukrainian army units are festooned with SHORAD systems.
Even so, Russian troops have produced a number of improvised and manufactured attachments, such as cages and porcupine-like protrusions to protect their vehicles from drones. This is an acknowledgement that some enemy drones will get through. They are inexpensive enough to expend in large numbers, and air-defense networks are not tight enough to keep many from hitting home.
The war in Ukraine has produced a new stalker of battlefields in the form of the first-person view (FPV) drone, which is controlled by a remote operator via radio or even fiber optic lines unspooled in flight to prevent jamming. The internet is loaded with videos recorded during FPV drone attacks that show soldiers running frantically from a pursuing aerial hunter. Many of these videos would be grimly comical if they didn’t end with the death of a human being.
A French military expert recently reported that he had analyzed 5,000 videos of soldiers trying to escape FPV drones, and that 92% of these encounters in open fields resulted in kills. That high success rate of attacks is not so surprising given that failures would likely not be posted. Nevertheless: “No matter the escape method—running on foot, driving, riding a motorbike, or sitting on top of an armored vehicle—the drones outpace and outmaneuver almost every attempt to flee in open terrain.”
That idea that U.S. Army personnel might be subjected to FPV drone attacks should cause Pentagon planners sleepless nights. The idea that videos of such attacks on American soldiers would be posted on the internet should be terrible enough that American political leaders should do anything to prevent it.
Back to Basics
The U.S. Army has created a new office to examine the threat posed by inexpensive small drones and how to deal with them. According to its director, Maj. General David Stewart, the office is looking at a number of means, such as inexpensive air-defense missiles, electronic warfare, lasers and microwave emitters, along with new sensors for detecting and “queueing” threats to be engaged more effectively. Drones are forcing the Army back into the SHORAD business.
Yet in January 2024, the first recorded incidence of U.S. soldiers killed in an enemy drone attack occurred when Iranian-backed militants hit an American observation post in Jordan on the Syrian border. The weapon was identified as an Iran-built Shahed attack drone, which is more properly thought of as a poor-man's cruise missile. However, it is one of the categories of weapons that the Army’s drone defense office is working to counter. Sometimes the drone will get through.
“Conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine have demonstrated how advances in hardware, software and tactics have enhanced speed and range while making drones more autonomous, more easily acquired and deadlier,” Stewart said in May during a congressional hearing. “Moreover, the proliferation of drones is significantly greater and more universally employed than were improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in select conflict zones. Unlike IEDs, [drone] threats can actively surveil and target as well as deliver effects, which further increases the need for detection and defeat options.”
The Army is experimenting with expensive, Israeli-made “smart scopes” that use electronics and AI to help soldiers shoot down drones with their rifles. One intriguing drone defense option, at least against FPV drones, is to equip as many soldiers as practical with shotguns. According to a recent article from Armada International, both sides in the war in Ukraine have adopted commercially available shotguns as an easy and effective way to protect against drones.
Even though this practice hasn’t yet been adopted by the Army, it sounds like the most American idea ever and one likely to find an enthusiastic reception among the troops (given appropriate training and safety doctrine). When they hear the whine of the quadcopter, every soldier becomes a minuteman.
As the U.S. Army turns 250, and as the U.S. prepares to do so next year, the nation remembers the foundational role and sacrifices of its first armed service. Recruiting is up over recent years, although as Michael Ard has recently noted in Discourse, it is an open question whether an all-volunteer force will be able to supply the numbers needed in a great power war. Spooked by drones, Army leadership is flirting with another transformation initiative, again promising a leaner, meaner force to deal with evolving threats while still being able to fight a major land war. Whatever the Army of the future looks like, America is counting on its ranks to have men and women “who know very well what they are about.”
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