Is The US Military Laying The Groundwork To Reinstitute The Draft i 2035?

The US Army War College Quarterly: ParametersThe US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters
Volume 53
Number 3
Volume 53, Number 3 (2023) Autumn
Issue Article 10
8-25-2323
A Call to Action: Lessons from Ukraine for the Future ForceA Call to Action: Lessons from Ukraine for the Future Force
Katie Crombe
John A. Nagl
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Recommended CitationRecommended Citation
Katie Crombe & John A. Nagl, “A Call to Action: Lessons from Ukraine for the Future Force,”
Parameters
53, no. 3 (2023), doi:10.55540/0031-1723.3240.
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In Focus
A Call to Action:
Lessons from Ukraine for the Future Force
Katie Crombe and John A. Nagl
©2023 John A. Nagl
A BSTR ACT: Fift y years ago, the US A rmy faced a strategic
inf lection point after a failed counterinsurgency effort in Vietnam.
In response to lessons learned from the Yom K ippur 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 conf lict
as an opportunity to reorient the force into one as forward-thinking
and formidable as the Army that won Operation Desert Storm.
This article suggests changes the A rmy should make to enable
success in multidomain large-scale combat operations at today’s
strategic inf lection point.
Keywords: strategic inflection point, Ukraine, multidomain operations
(MDO), mission command, large-scale combat operations (LSCO)
Andrew S. Grove, president and CEO of the Intel Corporation,
coined the phrase strategic inflection point in 1988 to describe
a fundamental change in the well-being of an organization.1
He visually depicted the inflection point as the exact moment when the nature
of the organization changes in a subtle but profound and lasting fashion,
leading to a path of growth or decline. At this juncture, adept and creative
leaders recognize and accept this choice, advancing their organizations
to meet the moment. Rigid, hesitant, or risk-averse leaders fail to accept this
departure, leading to irrelevance and, ultimately, organizational failure.
Fifty years ago, in 1973, the United States Army faced a strategic inflection
point. The US intervention in Vietnam left the Army demoralized, and American
leadership watched as the Soviet-equipped Egyptian Armed Forces nearly
defeated the US-equipped Israeli Defense Forces in the Yom Kippur War.
In response, the Chief of Staff of the United States Army established
the United States Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC)
Acknowledgments: The authors would like to thank the paper authors cited in this article as well
as faculty team members Al Lord, Jerad Harper, Rebecca Jensen, and Dan Miller; student members
Dale Caswell, Matt Holbrook, Thomas Kunish, Jason Lojka, Povilas Strazdas, and Darrick Wesson;
and Army War College interns Gabriella Boyes and Jason Du.
1. Andrew S. Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge
Every Company (New York: Currency Doubleday, 1996), 32.
22
Parameters 53(3) Autumn 2023
to reorient thinking and doctrine around the conventional Soviet threat.
Chief of Staff of the United States Army (CSA) Creighton William Abrams Jr.
selected General William E. DePuy, a revolutionary intellectual and combat
leader, to spearhead the effort. DePuy’s new organization was charged with
studying the Yom Kippur War to develop concepts, drive procurement
and materiel changes, and prepare the Army to fight a modern war.2
Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger, Abrams, and DePuy recognized
that the Army was at a critical juncture and that only a monumental
shift could prepare the force for the changing character of war.
It would be 50 years before the next great inflection point suggesting the need
for doctrine and materiel changes emerged.
Fifty years later, the Army faces a new strategic inflection point, a choice
to alter the fundamental way the US Army prepares for the next fight.
As the Defense establishment emerges from 20 years of counterinsurgency
operations and begins to embrace a future of large-scale combat operations,
the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian conflict brings the changing character of warfare
into sharp relief—a future of warfare marked by advanced autonomous
weapons systems, artificial intelligence, and a casualty rate the United States
has not experienced since World War II.
An American Army still grappling with the lessons from Afghanistan must
embrace the Russo-Ukrainian conflict as an opportunity to drive progress
toward the creation of a force and strategic direction as forward-thinking
and formidable as the one TRADOC built for the United States ahead
of Operation Desert Storm.3 In fall 2022, a team of faculty and students
at the US Army War College assembled around this call to action.
The team believed the Russia-Ukraine War unfolding in front of them
was a wake-up call for the Army across the traditional warfighting functions
that also required a culture change across the Army’s education, training,
and doctrine enterprise to embrace new lessons learned and to drive change
across all echelons of the Army.
Education, Training, and the Roots of TRADOC
In his early experience in Normandy, DePuy saw his division lose 100 percent
of its enlisted men and 150 percent of its officers in six weeks, providing him with
a profound lesson on the ramifications of poor leadership and insufficient training.
He spent the rest of his career focused on leader development, specifically
2. Henry G. Gole, General William E. DePuy: Preparing the Army for Modern War (Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky, 2008).
3. John A. Nagl, “Why America’s Army Can’t Win America’s Wars,” Parameters 52, no. 3 (Autumn 2022):
7–19, https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol52/iss3/3/.
Crombe and Nagl 23
on balancing the need for both training and education. DePuy saw the necessity
of linking the what and how (training) with the why and whether (education)
in a performance-oriented training environment.
Importantly, DePuy also reoriented doctrine after the Yom Kippur War toward
fighting manuals that specifically taught both combat and support soldiers
how the Army would fight on a modern battlefield at every level, from weapons
teams to division headquarters.4 The goal of the manuals was to orient soldiers
and officers on practical ways to optimize the US Army’s weapons systems
and minimize vulnerabilities to the enemy’s systems. He wanted to bring
combat development out of the ambiguous and distant future into real-time
training that anticipated imminent threats.5 Finally, DePuy believed that
careful selection and training of soldiers—including training leaders and units
together—mattered in the drive for combat readiness. DePuy’s legacy lives
on in two commands today. The United States Army Futures Command
has responsibility for transformation and innovation priorities and should
certainly pay close attention to the war in Ukraine, but DePuy’s brainchild,
TRADOC, can lead the Army back to the basics of education, training,
and doctrine development at the pace it was founded—a pace that drove ruthless
prioritization and reassessment.
Why Now?
American military leadership recognizes the titanic shift in geopolitics,
with General Mark A. Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
calling Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine the “greatest threat
to peace and security of Europe and perhaps the world” in his 42 years
of uniformed service.6 The conflict in Europe and the arrival of artificial
intelligence and autonomous and hypersonic weapons systems point
to fundamental changes in the character of war and the way military
forces fight.7 As it did after the Yom Kippur War, the US Army must
examine the Russia-Ukraine War to derive lessons learned for doctrine,
organization, training, materiel, professional military education, and Army
leader development—and it must integrate all those lessons into organizing,
4. Romie L. Brownlee and William J. Mullen III, Changing An Army: An Oral History of General William
E. DePuy, USA Retired, Center for Military History Publication (CMH Pub) 70-23 (Carlisle, PA:
United States Military History Institute, 1988), 182–85, 188–89, https://history.army.mil/html
/books/070/70-23/CMH_Pub_70-23.pdf.
5. Brownlee and Mullen, Changing an Army, 189.
6. Jim Garamone, “Potential for Great Power Conf lict ‘Increasing,’ Milley Says,” DOD News,
U.S. Department of Defense (website), April 5, 2022, https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories
/Article/Article/2989958/potential-for-great-power-conf lict-increasing-milley-says/.
7. John Grady and Sam LaGrone, “CJCS Milley: Character of War in Midst of Fundamental Change,”
USNI News (website), December 4, 2020, https://news.usni.org/2020/12/04/cjcs-milley-character
-of-war-in-midst-of-fundamental-change.
24
Parameters 53(3) Autumn 2023
training, and equipping a force that can win future conflicts anywhere
on the spectrum. At the request of TRADOC, a small team of faculty
and students at the Army War College began an examination this year, leading
to a handful of takeaways that merit further study in the areas of command
and control, mission command, casualty replacement and reconstitution,
artificial intelligence, intelligence and deception, and multidomain operations.
While the War College team produced article-length analyses of each
of these areas that we hope to publish soon, this article will hit the wavetops
of each area in turn.
Command and Control
Twenty years of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations
in the Middle East, largely enabled by air, signals, and electromagnetic
dominance, generated chains of command reliant on perfect, uncontested
communication lines and an extraordinary and accurate common operating
picture of the battlefield broadcast in real time to co-located staff in large
Joint Operations Centers. The Russia-Ukraine War makes it clear that
the electromagnetic signature emitted from the command posts of the past
20 years cannot survive against the pace and precision of an adversary
who possesses sensor-based technologies, electronic warfare, and unmanned
aerial systems or has access to satellite imagery; this includes nearly every
state or nonstate actor the United States might find itself fighting in the near
future. The Army must focus on developing command-and-control systems
and mobile command posts that enable continuous movement, allow distributed
collaboration, and synchronize across all warfighting functions to minimize
electronic signature. Ukrainian battalion command posts reportedly consist
of seven soldiers who dig in and jump twice daily; while that standard will
be hard for the US Army to achieve, it points in a very different direction than
the one we have been following for two decades of hardened command posts.8
Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast
Perhaps more important than fielding new command-and-control systems
is the culture shift required to embrace distributed command and control, more
commonly known as mission command. When Milley served as Chief of Staff
of the Army, he explained mission command through a concept of “disciplined
disobedience” in which subordinates are empowered to accomplish a mission
to achieve the commander’s intended purpose—even if they must disobey a specific
order or task to do so. Without perfect communication, a subordinate officer
8. US Army general officer discussion with Ukrainian battalion commander, early 2003, relayed to
the authors.
Crombe and Nagl 25
or soldier must be trusted to make the right judgment call during battle,
unencumbered by the need to seek approval for small adjustments.9
Mission command is not doctrine to be written, tested, and shelved.
It must be lived, trained, rehearsed, and embraced as an integral part
of daily operations and training in garrison and combat at every echelon.
The advent of artificial intelligence affords the US military the opportunity
to reimagine mission command and test it with virtual simulation environments.
We cannot expect a brigade that micromanages garrison tasks to execute combat
operations successfully at the attrition rate incurred in modern large-scale
combat operations. Disciplined disobedience requires initiative both to provide
and to understand the commander’s intent, end states, constraints, and restraints.
Leaders and followers must be brilliant at the basics but must also be able
to embrace change and think critically. Trust is the essential ingredient in mission
command, but changing the Army’s organizational culture to encourage senior
leaders to empower and support subordinates is an enormously difficult task
that will require focused attention from senior Army leaders.10
Casualties, Replacements, and Reconstitutions
The Russia-Ukraine War is exposing significant vulnerabilities
in the Army’s strategic personnel depth and ability to withstand and replace
casualties.11 Army theater medical planners may anticipate a sustained
rate of roughly 3,600 casualties per day, ranging from those killed in action
to those wounded in action or suffering disease or other non-battle injuries.12
With a 25 percent predicted replacement rate, the personnel system will
require 800 new personnel each day. For context, the United States sustained
about 50,000 casualties in two decades of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In large-scale combat operations, the United States could experience that same
number of casualties in two weeks.13
9. C. Todd Lopez, “Future War Requires ‘Disciplined Disobedience,’ Army Chief Says,” Army
(website), May 5, 2017, https://www.army.mil/article/187293/future_warfare_requires_disciplined
_disobedience_army_chief_says.
10. Jamon K. Junius, “Mission Command in the Ukraine War” (Strategic Research Paper, US Army
War College, Carlisle, PA, 2023).
11. Brian Dukes, “Senior Leader Resilience and Replacement” (Strategic Research Paper, US Army
War College, Carlisle, PA, 2023); and Dennis Sarmiento, “Medical Implication of the Ukrainian War”
(Strategic Research Paper, US Army War College, Carlisle, PA, 2023).
12. Headquarters, Department of the Army (HQDA), Sustainment Operations, Field Manual (FM)
4-0 (Washington DC: HQDA, July 2019), 4-4.
13. Department of Defense (DoD), Casualty Status (Washington, DC: DoD, May 22, 2023),

https://www.defense.gov/casualty.pdf.

26
Parameters 53(3) Autumn 2023
In addition to the disciplined disobedience required to execute effective
mission command, the US Army is facing a dire combination of a recruiting
shortfall and a shrinking Individual Ready Reserve. This recruiting shortfall,
nearly 50 percent in the combat arms career management fields, is a longitudinal
problem. Every infantry and armor soldier we do not recruit today is a strategic
mobilization asset we will not have in 2031.14 The Individual Ready Reserve,
which stood at 700,000 in 1973 and 450,000 in 1994, now stands at 76,000.15
These numbers cannot fill the existing gaps in the active force, let alone
any casualty replacement or expansion during a large-scale combat operation.
The implication is that the 1970s concept of an all-volunteer force has outlived
its shelf life and does not align with the current operating environment.
The technological revolution described below suggests this force has reached
obsolescence. Large-scale combat operations troop requirements may well
require a reconceptualization of the 1970s and 1980s volunteer force and
a move toward partial conscription.16
Changing Character of War
Dramatically increased casualty rates, with resulting implications
for force structure and manning requirements, are just one of the many
dramatic changes in the character of war. The ubiquitous use of unmanned
aerial vehicles, unmanned surface vehicles, satellite imagery, sensor-based
technologies, smartphones, commercial data links, and open-source
intelligence is fundamentally changing the way armies will fight
on the land domain in much the same way that unmanned aerial vehicles
have changed the way air forces conduct operations in this century.17
These systems, coupled with emerging artificial intelligence platforms,
dramatically accelerate the pace of modern war. Tools and tactics that were
viewed as niche capabilities in previous conflicts are becoming primary weapons
systems that require education and training to understand, exploit, and counter.
Nonstate actors and less capable nation-states can now acquire and capitalize
on technologies that bring David’s powers closer to Goliath’s.
Beyond the military changes, transnational corporations in the commercial
sector are playing an operationally significant role in the artificial intelligence
and information battlespace. These private companies are exponentially
14. Stephen K. Trynosky, “Paper TigIRR: The Army’s Diminished Strategic Personnel Reserve
in an Era of Great Power Competition” (Strategic Research Paper, US Army War College, Carlisle,
PA, 2023), 22.
15. Trynosky, “Paper TigIRR,” 20.
16. Kent Park, “Was Fifty Years Long Enough? The All-Volunteer Force in an Era of Large-Scale
Combat Operations” (Strategic Research Paper, US Army War College, Carlisle, PA, 2023).
17. Jay Bradley, “Fires in the Ukraine War” (Strategic Research Paper, US Army War College,
Carlisle, PA, 2023).
Crombe and Nagl 27
increasing the effectiveness of intelligence processing, exploitation
and dissemination, dynamic targeting, and fires. A public-private partnership
founded on transparency is essential when preparing for and while engaging
in conflict. This partnership should be formed in garrison, and training exercises
with private companies should be incorporated into war games, planning,
exercises, and experimentation to ensure that soldiers are familiar with the systems
that may prove vital in future combat—and so that the private companies
can gain a better understanding of what capabilities the military needs.18
Embrace Deception and Greater Use of Unclassified Intelligence
The incorporation of open-source and declassified intelligence
into the information space immediately proved effective at the outset
of the Ukrainian conflict, shifting domestic, international, and adversary
reactions upon release. This technique will play an outsized role in future
conflicts and, when advantageous, open-source intelligence should be integrated
into intelligence fusion to ensure expedited dissemination to the public—
always while ensuring the benefit of releasing the intelligence is worth
the possible risk to sources and methods inherent to any declassification
efforts. While many examples of the application of open-source information
to the war in Ukraine cannot be discussed in this article, one that
can is crowdsourcing possible war crimes to enable attribution and eventual
prosecution of the perpetrators.19
Beyond open-source intelligence incorporation, Army professional military
education and training must include basic instruction on deception operations,
given the unparalleled transparency observed during operations in Ukraine.
The Armed Forces of Ukraine are exceptionally skilled at deception across
the strategic, operational, and tactical levels, an effect that requires synergy
and trust to integrate capabilities across domains.20
Multidomain Operations
The US Army continues to make significant headway in the development
of multidomain operations (MDO), with its third MDO task force having
18. Schuyler Moore and Mickey Reeve, “U.S. Central Command Holds a Press Briefing on Their
Employment of Artificial Intelligence and Unmanned Systems” (transcript), U.S. Department of Defense
(website), December 7, 2022, https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/3239281
/us-central-command-holds-a-press-briefing-on-their-employment-of-artificial-int/.
19. Deb Amos, “Open Source Intelligence Methods Are Being Used to Investigate War Crimes
in Ukraine,” Newshour, PBS (website), June 12, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/06/12/1104460678
/open-source-intelligence-methods-are-being-used-to-investigate-war-crimes-in-ukr.
20. Clay Huffman, “Intelligence in the Ukraine War” (Strategic Research Paper, US Army War
College, Carlisle, PA, 2023).
28
Parameters 53(3) Autumn 2023
achieved full operational capability in May 2023. These theater-specific task
forces incorporate long-range precision effects including cyber, electronic
warfare, intelligence, and long-range fires to counter hybrid threats from
Russia and China.21 Although the MDO task forces are modernizing
rapidly, the remainder of the Army must also understand and incorporate
the tenets of multidomain operations that will characterize future wars.
The communication and visualization requirements for an all-knowing, all-seeing
MDO task force are significant and largely immobile, meaning the smaller
maneuver units must understand the capabilities of an MDO task force
without necessarily having unencumbered access to it. The smaller units
must anticipate gaps in enemy defenses and exploit emergent advantages.22
Anticipation, exploitation, and mission command do not happen organically;
all require education, training, and doctrine.
After examining multidomain operations during the Russia-Ukraine conflict,
the study team asserts that the Army should reassess the roles and responsibilities
of headquarters at echelon to account for multidomain operations and other
emerging organizational structures like the Penetration Division.23 The Army must
expand linkages between joint exercises, division-level warfighters, and combat
training rotations to teach synchronization of convergence and combined arms
within the context of multidomain operations.24 DePuy’s “how to fight” manuals
of the past reinvented as chat platforms fueled by generative AI knowledge bases
and layered on top of National Training Center rotations, division and corps
warfighter exercises, and small-unit training would serve as the ultimate
convergence activity.
So What?
Grove believed that a strategic inflection point rarely announces
itself but rather presents as a choice to bring clarity to chaos and take
a new path, one that allows the organization to meet the moment rather than
follow a comfortable but dead-end road. Today’s Army is reminiscent
of the Army of 1973, rife with experience, knowledge, and opportunities
to change. TRADOC was established to transform the Army into
21. Charles McEnany, “Multi-Domain Task Forces: A Glimpse at the Army of 2035,” Association
of the United States Army (website), March 2, 2022, https://www.ausa.org/publications/multi-domain
-task-forces-glimpse-army-2035.
22. Jesse L. Skates, “Multi-Domain Operations at Division and Below,” Military Review
( January-February 2021), 68–75, https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review
/English-Edition-Archives/January-February-2021/Skates-Multi-Domain-Ops/.
23. Nathan A. Jennings, “Considering the Penetration Division: Implications for Multi-Domain
Operations,” Land Warfare Paper 145 (Arlington, VA: Association of the United States Army, 2022), https://
www.ausa.org/publications/considering-penetration-division-implications-multi-domain-operations.
24. Steve Chadwick, “MDO and the Ukrainian War” (Strategic Research Paper, US Army War
College, Carlisle, PA, 2023).
Crombe and Nagl 29
the best-trained, -equipped, -led, and -organized land power in the world.
DePuy’s experiences in World War II and Vietnam and his study
of the Yom Kippur War shaped his belief that transforming the Army into a land
power capable of defeating a modern enemy required an Army-wide conceptual
and doctrinal overhaul. He believed that officers must be intellectually capable
and placed a premium on those who could solve problems with speed and quickly
institutionalize change across the organization.
The Army of 2023 faces a similar inflection point, an opportunity
to reassess the professional military education soldiers and officers
are receiving across the TRADOC Centers of Excellence, their training
experiences at the national training centers, and the daily training
and education they receive throughout their careers. The AirLand Battle
concept derived from the Yom Kippur War (after the failed foray into
Active Defense) may now morph into artificial intelligence land battle informed
by the Russia-Ukraine War and a future of largely unmanned or remotely
manned ground combat vehicles. The Army must look at the scaffolding
of everything from the basic courses to war colleges and orient lessons
on what is being learned today, incorporating real-time, wartime action into
the classroom and simulated battlefields. Although modernization is often
focused on the material aspect of progress, the heavy lifting occurs when
integrating new material with doctrine, organization, training, leadership,
personnel, and facilities. To remain relevant to the pace of the rapidly changing
character of war, TRADOC must lead this initiative now, adapting education
and training in real time. Although crisis acts as a useful crucible for innovation,
the US Army must ensure it captures these rapid changes in a manner that
can be immediately written into doctrine, implemented in training, and woven
into the daily lives of soldiers in garrison and combat.
The Armed Forces of Ukraine are buying lessons with blood that
not only preserve their freedom but can also help the US Army deter and,
if necessary, fight and win future wars at a lower cost of life and treasure.25
It would dishonor those soldiers’ sacrifices and the memory of General DePuy
not to pay full attention.
25. Volodymyr Grabchak and Myra Naqvi, “Ukrainian History and Perspective” (Strategic Research
Paper, US Army War College, Carlisle, PA, 2023).
30
Parameters 53(3) Autumn 2023
Katie Crombe
Lieutenant Colonel Katie 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 during academic year 2023 at the US Army War College.
John A. Nagl
Dr. John A. Nagl is a professor of warfighting studies at the US Army War College.
He was the director of an integrated research project commissioned by TRADOC
during academic year 2023 at the US Army War College.
Crombe and Nagl 31
Selected Bibliography
Bradley, Jay. “Fires in the Ukraine War.” Strategic Research Paper, US Army War
College, Carlisle, PA, 2023.
Chadwick, Steve. “MDO and the Ukrainian War.” Strategic Research Paper,
US Army War College, Carlisle, PA, 2023.
Dukes, Brian. “Senior Leader Resilience and Replacement.” Strategic Research Paper,
US Army War College, Carlisle, PA, 2023.
Grabchak, Volodymyr, and Myra Naqvi. “Ukrainian History and Perspective.”
Strategic Research Paper, US Army War College, Carlisle, PA, 2023.
Huffman, Clay. “Intelligence in the Ukraine War.” Strategic Research Paper,
US Army War College, Carlisle, PA, 2023.
Junius, Jamon K. “Mission Command in the Ukraine War.” Strategic Research Paper,
US Army War College, Carlisle, PA, 2023.
Sarmiento, Dennis. “Medical Implication of the Ukrainian War.” Strategic Research
Paper, US Army War College, Carlisle, PA, 2023.
Trynosky, Stephen K. “Paper TigIRR: The Army’s Diminished Strategic Personnel
Reserve in an Era of Great Power Competition.” Strategic Research Paper,
US Army War College, Carlisle, PA, 2023.
26
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