With the adoption of multidomain operations (MDO) as its central operational concept, the US Army is modernizing its approach to more effectively compete against a variety of state and nonstate adversaries. This development offers a pathway forward for the service to, as argued by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General C.Q. Brown, Jr., “keep focus on what is essential in Jointness—working seamlessly across domains, Services, and the Total Force.” Seeking to compel decision on increasingly lethal battlefields that challenge operational maneuver and formation endurance, the MDO concept—now codified in the Army’s capstone doctrine with corresponding changes in force structure—calls for novel interplay across the land, air, maritime, space, and cyber domains in order, as argued by the chairman, “to fight today’s battles but also to prepare for tomorrow’s wars.”
While the Army must implement MDO and prepare to fight across the spectrum of conflict, conventional and large-scale combat operations pose a particularly important set of challenges. The rise of peer threats around the world and their involvement in such conflicts raise the possibility that the United States may, if deterrence fails, need to fight a war of expanded scale and intensity. At the same time, there is gradually diminishing institutional memory or experience the United States military can draw on to know what to expect during large-scale combat operations. Thus, it is important to balance the requirement to retain hard-won counterinsurgency competencies learned in Iraq and Afghanistan with emerging imperatives to prepare for expeditionary campaigns against peer adversaries.
Trends in recent large-scale combat such as the Battle of Mosul, the Nagorno-Karabakh War, and the Russia-Ukraine War suggest that the dominant character of modern warfare remains positional and attritional; the prospect of employing dynamic power projection to achieve decisive outcomes through offensive fire and maneuver will remain a potentially necessary, if high risk, option. As explained in the Army’s original MDO concept that emphasized “convergence” across joint, interagency, and multinational teams, this may require expeditionary ground forces, through integration of both traditional practices and emerging technologies, to “penetrate, dis-integrate, and exploit” increasingly sophisticated adversary defenses in places such as Eastern Europe and the South China Sea. Given the rising lethality of regional powers’ antiaccess and area-denial capabilities, the prospect of executing maneuver into fiercely contested spaces should be considered with caution and humility lest the venture devolve into catastrophe. Nonetheless, it is important to study successful large-scale maneuver operations to maximize readiness if contributing to one ever becomes necessary.
History is replete with examples of armies that executed this kind of offensive action with decisive effect. Among these are Napoleon Bonaparte’s masterpiece at Austerlitz in 1805 and the German invasion of France in 1940, yet it is the Israeli counteroffensive in the second week of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, also called the Yom Kippur War, that represents a particularly relevant case study that featured mechanized penetration, contested river crossings, disintegration of air defense networks, reduction of antiarmor systems, and deep exploitation in rear areas. This costly campaign, which deeply informed the US Army’s Active Defense and AirLand Battle reforms in the late Cold War, provided a bloody proving ground for new technologies and creative tactics as both Arab and Israeli forces adapted to the reality of a more destructive environment that demanded multidomain solutions to intractable problems.
The 1973 conflict, with its cross-domain innovations, contested maneuver, and devastating losses, thus invites reconsideration by the US Army. Analyzing this war through the lens of the modern operational environment will yield important insights for dealing with new capabilities like precision strike, unmanned platforms, electronic warfare, and informational innovations, alongside age-old challenges posed by massed artillery, constrained logistics, and restrictive terrain. Even as recent conflicts have shown the high cost of modern maneuver, the US Army may nevertheless be required to unleash high-tempo offensives while avoiding attrition and culmination. This kind of campaign, demanding the highest operational art in expeditionary settings, will likely require unprecedented cooperation across arms, services, and agencies in order to mitigate risk and, despite countervailing trends in modern warfare, achieve decisive outcomes under challenging circumstances.
Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Jennings is an Army strategist and associate professor in the Department of Joint, Interagency, and Multinational Operations at the US Army Command and General Staff College (CGSC) at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. With a background as a 19D cavalry scout and armor officer, he served as a platoon leader and troop commander in Operation Iraqi Freedom and as a strategic planner the Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan. Jennings previously taught history at the US Military Academy at West Point and in the Department of Military History at CGSC. He is a graduate of the School of Advanced Military Studies (Advanced Military Studies Program) and earned a PhD in history from the University of Kent.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: IDF Spokesperson’s Unit