In a letter to his mother, British World War I poet Wilfred Owen described no man’s land, the piece of territory between belligerent trench lines, as “like the face of the moon, chaotic, crater-ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness.” His description readily captures the popular imagination of the war’s blood-soaked battlefield and its sea of unending trench networks. However, these popular conceptions fail to capture the temporal and geographic variations that produced significant diversity in the war’s combat experiences. While Owen could write of the unescapable oppression of the trench in the winter of 1916–17, just two winters previously, the trench had been merely a temporary defensive measure as the armies of both the Entente and the Central Powers sought to adjust to the September 1914 failures of their initial supposed war-winning offensives. Conversely, for fellow English soldiers serving on the Eastern, Middle Eastern, or East African fronts, even the idea of a trench-locked, static battlefield would have seemed ludicrous, given the vast geographical boundaries and lower force densities of those theaters of operation.
Some one hundred years later, the trench-bound, casualty-heavy, attritional fight that seemingly defines the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War has sparked many comparisons to the war to end all wars. However, just as such statements fail to capture the true tactical complexity of World War I, so too do they overlook battlefield adaptations that have emerged throughout the duration of the Ukrainian conflict. Russia’s military strategy sought to avoid the thickly fortified region of the Donbas in the initial invasion in 2022, as did Ukraine’s subsequent counteroffensives that year—only for both combatants to nonetheless become fixed on the eerily similar fieldworks and fortifications of the Russian Surovikin Line during the long-running Ukrainian 2023 summer counteroffensive. These large-scale networks of trenches and fortifications would in turn become virtually uninhabitable by early 2025 due to persistent reconnaissance and strike capabilities fielded by both combatants. These capabilities forced a nearly universal transition to hidden fieldworks manned by small elements seeking not to engage in direct-fire contact but rather to act as sensing and blocking elements to cue quick-response forces or indirect fires assets to defeat an enemy attack. This adaptation—perhaps best demonstrated by Russian ongoing infiltrations of Pokrovsk—has counterintuitively reintroduced a degree of dynamism and maneuver on the battlefield, as Russian infiltration groups clash with Ukrainian quick-response and rear-echelon forces over increasingly large zones of contestation and mutual occupation.
Thus, even while attempting to absorb lessons from the ongoing Ukrainian conflict, the Army must contend with the ongoing adaptation battle of tactics, techniques, and procedures between the two combatants, which requires a detailed understanding not only of the exact period of war in which the observed phenomena appear but also of their larger context. This challenge is made even more difficult by the need to then determine whether those same contexts and conditions would also occur in any future American war the Army plans to fight.
For the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment “Blackhorse,” the National Training Center’s opposing force tasked with providing a realistic threat to rotational training brigades, these considerations loom large even as the regiment has attempted to more faithfully replicate observed modern battlefield conditions and stay ahead of increasingly capable rotational training units. Nevertheless, we believe that three challenges, heretofore only partially discussed across the Army but observed in both simulated ground combat in the Mojave Desert and real-world battlefields, are vital for military leaders at echelon to understand, as they are likely to remain the cornerstone of any future conflict: the emergence of a tactical dead zone of contested battlespace between combatants, the increasing emptiness of the battlefield, and the decreasing utility of dispersion in light of mass precision strike.
The Dead Zone: A Failure of Extrapolation
Although the trench offered some measure of protection from the brutality of no man’s land during World War I, it too was not immune from the impacts of modern weaponry. British and French artillery barrages dumped so much steel onto thickly manned German first-line trenches during the 1916 Battle of the Somme that the German Army would transition to a doctrine of positional defense in depth to avoid suffering similarly debilitating losses in any future battles. This subsequently forced the Entente militaries to attempt to extend the depth of their preparatory artillery barrages and to seek a technological adaptation in the form of the tank to bring such fires forward with the advancing infantry.
Over the course of the twentieth century, technological advancements in tube artillery, guided missiles, and airpower have enabled the concept of striking across the depth of an enemy formation to become increasingly enmeshed in American military doctrine. This tactical and operational approach was famously captured in AirLand Battle’s attempt to disrupt the Soviet second echelon, but is also evident in calls for the Army to embrace low-cost unmanned systems to attrit defending enemy formations prior to the commitment of manned ground combat power. This is the logical outcome, and potentially one of significant battlefield impact, of the combination of a century-long fascination with massed fires across the depth of an enemy battlespace and the wide availability of modern precision-strike systems.
Unfortunately, technological and tactical advances are rarely confined to just a single user. As the Army ushered in AirLand Battle, the Soviet military investigated the use of its own reconnaissance-strike and reconnaissance-fires complexes to similarly target NATO forces at tactical, operational, and strategic depths and set conditions for its own ground maneuver. This meant that any Cold War clash in the late 1980s would not have featured a leisurely massing of a diverse suite of Army and Air Force capabilities to slowly destroy onrushing Soviet formations as depicted in the 1986 version of Field Manual 100-5, Operations, but rather a complex duel between two opposing strike regimes, each simultaneously trying to survive, support its ground maneuver element, and target the opposite strike complex.
More recently, while commentators proclaiming the need for the Army to adopt massed unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) use have not been shy in citing the more advanced capabilities of various nations including rivals such as Russia and China, these arguments sidestep the reality that any such US adoption would not automatically cause a corresponding decrease in the capability of any adversarial military. An admittedly incomplete survey of multiple force design proposals, new warfighting concepts, and field reports (including our own) on continuing experimentation with UAS reveals a disturbing tendency to ignore or minimize the degree to which an opposing adversary strike system must be initially and continuously challenged and defeated. Authors instead focus on the potential for new US Army strike complexes combined with increased layered protection schemes to drive an inexorable massing of kinetic and nonkinetic fires in support of traditional ground combat elements to restore maneuver to the battlefield.
The danger of this myopic view can easily be seen in a recent rotation in which the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment fought an armored brigade combat team that had adopted a multifunctional reconnaissance company construct combining the brigade’s electronic warfare platoon with a new UAS reconnaissance and strike platoon. The formation had an immediate impact; both Blackhorse mortar platoons spent the initial days of the rotation dodging persistent reconnaissance and strike UAS that inflicted high levels of attrition and disrupted critical fire support to defending mechanized infantry battalions that were similarly fighting off persistent waves of drones. At the exact same time, however, the regiment’s own reconnaissance-strike formation, Centaur Squadron, was inflicting similar levels of destruction and disruption across the brigade’s frontage. The squadron established drone-emplaced minefields on critical ground lines of communication, coordinated first-person-view drone strikes on valuable bridging assets during the brigade’s wet gap crossing, and answered brigade tactical group priority intelligence requirements. It simultaneously targeted the multifunctional reconnaissance company directly to reduce its effectiveness, hijacking the rotational brigade’s UAS signals to neutralize enemy platforms while targeting ground control stations to destroy the human component of the supposedly unmanned system, its operators.
Thus, while the creation of the multifunctional reconnaissance company and Centaur Squadron, each within its respective employing organization, had proved critical in enhancing the combatants’ ability to shape their opponents, the true noteworthy outcome was the complex interaction between the two systems. Blackhorse leaders had previously spoken of a so-called dead zone to describe an area extending some ten to fifteen kilometers behind a training brigade’s front line, where Centaur Squadron’s mix of various legacy reconnaissance and strike platforms would disrupt, degrade, and desynchronize the brigade’s attempt to mass combat power. This description, however, had been revealed as incomplete. Instead, as the ongoing rotation was quickly demonstrating, such a zone could also be extended some significant distance into the regiment’s rear. The true dead zone is therefore a mutually contested area ranging deep behind each belligerent’s forward lines in which combat power must be deliberately committed, lest it be destroyed. Even more critically, although the term had been borrowed from Ukrainians’ descriptions of their own mutually contested frontline battlespace, the emergence of similar conditions in the Mojave had occurred without the presence of thickly layered obstacle belts and fortifications to constrain maneuver and reinforce attrition. Combined with the preceding brief historical survey, this suggests a dead or contested zone of mutual attrition and degradation is merely the logical outcome of expanded mutually opposing tactical reconnaissance-strike regimes and not something the Army can choose to easily wish away.
The Empty Battlefield: A Reaction for Every Action
Although the Germans were likely oblivious to it at the time, their transition to an operational strategy of a positional defense in depth due to the threat of massed artillery was simply another example of an army reacting to an increase in battlefield lethality by further embracing dispersion. This trend began in the mid-1800s and lies at the heart of former School of Advanced Military Sciences Professor James J. Schneider’s theory of the empty battlefield. According to this theory, not only has the battlefield become increasingly depopulated over time, but despite an increase in weapons lethality, average combatant casualty rates have been steadily declining.
For Blackhorse, dispersion is not an unfamiliar concept. The regiment’s mechanized infantry battalions have long parceled out their subordinate platoons and companies across a wide front to prevent seams in a defensive area of operations spanning some five to fifteen kilometers in width and up to twenty kilometers in depth. However, while this dispersion certainly had the benefit of reducing the indirect fire threat from opposing artillery battalions, the long-standing impetus for such an arrayal had been due to concerns over security, not force protection.
In contrast, analysis before the rotations of both the armored brigade combat team described above and a designated transformation in contact brigade with enhanced reconnaissance and strike capabilities suggested that Blackhorse must invert its previous operational paradigm and focus on dispersion as a measure of protection, even at some cost to security. In both rotations, such additional increases in mechanized infantry battalion dispersion made it challenging to ensure a cohesive defense. It also made it more difficult for defending platoons and companies to concentrate enough massed firepower, or be supported by enough indirect fire missions from more dispersed artillery batteries and mortar platoons, to break up an incoming assault and achieve a given tactical task. This in turn forced the regiment into a repeated series of local counterattacks to expel the often badly attritted rotational unit formation and restore the position—at least temporarily. Both sides quickly learned to simply remass reconnaissance and strike capabilities against the position until again confident enough to commit traditional maneuver elements for its seizure.
Recalling the existence of a mutually existing dead zone over both combatants does much to explain why the attacking brigades could not simply commit additional combat power to an attacked position to reliably thwart any Blackhorse local counterattacks and maintain an uninterrupted steady advance; it would not have survived. The consequent reality is that although the fielding of increased reconnaissance and strike systems to brigades has restored some degree of maneuver, these systems have not been fielded in sufficient strength or with enough of a corresponding counter-UAS network to make such maneuver decisive or relatively cheap. Interestingly, while the ratio of attrition between Blackhorse and its opposing brigade combat team during these two rotations decreased compared to other rotations, the overall amount of attrition dramatically increased. These rotations saw the highest total losses on both sides in over two and a half years. It was almost as if leaders on both sides had, to various degrees of understanding, taken advantage of an increased ability to attrit their opponents and to more frequently commit traditional maneuver elements to battle and destruction. In essence, it is attrition enabling maneuver—simply to enable further attrition.
Dispersion: A Troubled Savior
That modern precision-strike regimes are built around a core group of reconnaissance and strike UAS is key to understanding Blackhorse’s final discovery: the declining value of dispersion on the modern battlefield. These systems’ combination of sensors and precision shooters over hyper-reactive communication networks challenges key assumptions about dispersion that have made it the de facto reaction to increased battlefield lethality for over a hundred years.
For example, while the German Army in 1917 could count on smaller, more dispersed elements in the first line of trenches being able to avoid Entente air and ground reconnaissance, the modern variety and depth of battlefield sensors have inverted the reconnaissance challenge from one of scarcity to one of abundance. This decreases the chances that even small formations will go undetected and untargeted by opposing forces. Equally importantly, whereas World War I artillery systems had limited ability to destroy small targets without prodigious munitions expenditure or to ensure adequate communications with advancing infantry forces to rapidly adjust indirect fire on identified surviving German elements, modern precision-strike regimes carry no such limitations. Blackhorse received a nasty shock as each of the two brigades discussed above employed a suite of reconnaissance UAS, which rapidly transmitted real-time locations of identified vehicles to strike UAS whose precision enabled assured targeting with high probability of kill regardless of the level of dispersion.
Perhaps more troubling, at the same time additional dispersion was having limited success in reducing the effectiveness of the rotational brigades’ reconnaissance and strike systems, it was also proving deleterious to Blackhorse’s operational success. This is due in part to the difficulty discussed above in ensuring a favorable balance of attrition against attacking rotational unit formations and acceptable rate of withdrawal, but also to too limited regimental air defense capabilities. Mechanized infantry battalion commanders quickly discovered that the provision of just two to three Dronebusters and SA-24 man-portable air defense systems per battalion was not sufficient to completely cover a widely dispersed force. Platoons with assets or capabilities that were not important enough to receive a layered, even if primitive, air defense bubble were left unprotected—reliant on only additional layers of camouflage and last-ditch individual weapons such as shotguns and rifles.
When combined with the immutable physical limits on the amount of battlespace that exists for a dispersed formation to occupy, and the amount of dispersion a formation can achieve before rendering it unable to fight as a coherent body to achieve an assigned tactical task, it became apparent to Blackhorse leaders that while still useful, dispersion had likely passed its point of maximum utility as a measure of force protection. The amount of sensors and massed precision weaponry on the battlefield confirms the endurance, in enhanced form, of General William DePuy’s Cold War observation that what could be seen could be hit. At the National Training Center, this is forcing Blackhorse to develop more comprehensive schemes of protection to include multilayered and multiechelon countertargeting, counterreconnaissance, and active air defense measures. It should encourage the Army as a whole to adopt a similar focus or risk battlefield destruction commensurate with the simulated destruction on display in the Mojave.
In his book Other People’s Wars, Professor Brent L. Sterling asserts that nations struggle to adapt their militaries following observations of foreign wars. One factor explaining this is the degree of compatibility: If an innovation emerging from a foreign war is at odds the learning military’s “organizational culture, values, and needs,” adoption is less likely. For the United States, this point is particularly salient when attempting to study the war in Ukraine now grinding along in its fifth brutal year. Both combatants are comprised of heavily mobilized militaries fighting with limited industrial and economic support and deprived of the benefit of friendly air support. These conditions may not match how the Army envisions its future fight, but based on detailed historical study, battlefield observations, and our own experiences in simulated combat across the Mojave Desert, we believe that the Army cannot afford a failure to learn from the war. It must be prepared for a dead zone of mutual contestation stretching across friendly and adversary positions to significant depth. It must contend with an increasingly empty battlefield resulting in greater battlefield dynamism at the lowest tactical level. And it must acknowledge and respond to the decreasing utility of dispersion. All of this combines to demand greater investment in a variety of active protection measures at echelon.
Combat has never been more complex.
Colonel Kevin Black is an armor officer who currently serves as the 71st colonel of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment at Fort Irwin, California. Previous assignments include command of 3rd Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, multiple staff assignments in the Pentagon, G3 for the 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Georgia, and operational deployments to Afghanistan, to Iraq, and in support of the Security Assistance Group–Ukraine.
Lieutenant Colonel Tarik Fulcher is an armor officer who currently serves as the regimental deputy commander of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment at Fort Irwin, California. Previous assignments include executive officer to the commanding general of the Security Assistance Group–Ukraine, US Army Europe and Africa G5 plans branch chief, School of Advanced Military Studies, and key developmental positions in the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment and 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment at Fort Hood, Texas.
Captain Joshua Ratta is an armor officer who currently serves as the commander of Headquarters and Headquarters Troop, 1st Squadron, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment at Fort Irwin, California. Previous assignments include commander of Bravo Troop, 1/11th Armored Cavalry Regiment and tank platoon leader, distribution platoon leader, tank company executive officer, and battalion maintenance officer with 1st Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team at Fort Carson, Colorado.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: 1st Lt. Tyler Williams, US Army
