Think hard about Force Protection
MAJ Steve Power has made some good points about thinking about Force Protection holistically. However, I think that Mobility, Lethality, Maneuver, and Situational Awareness have only limited utility as a remedy to the Force Protection weight dilemma for both the individual soldier and fighting vehicle. I will just focus on the individual soldier in this thread.
Recent historical experience has demonstrated that the US soldier often makes contact only when the enemy has engaged him (small arms fire, RPG, or IED). Not surprisingly, enemy-initiated contact is much more lethal for our soldiers. Although I lack hard data, I suspect that usually these casualties occur in the first moments of contact (IED explosion, first few rounds of fire). At this most lethal moment, I would argue that Mobility, Lethality, and Maneuver have little impact on soldier survivability.
Now, we ought to ask how Situational Awareness, Mobility, Lethality, and Maneuver could change this situation. First, despite our intensive efforts to improve Situational Awareness through UAVs and sensors, the US soldier has continued to discover that his adversaries exploit complex terrain (especially urban terrain) to avoid detection. For the individual soldier, the question is how much does “body armor” decrease his situational awareness to the point that he does not see the enemy combatant or IED? While certainly the weight degrades soldier performance and alertness over time, is the degradation that significant?
One could argue that an individual soldier with more Mobility (due to less weight) would be able to avoid contact by using different routes. However, in my experiences in Afghanistan, our individual force protection systems prevented dismounted maneuver on only the most treacherous terrain. Otherwise, the body armor had little impact on the dismounted routes we chose.
I would also argue that it is the Lethality of the US soldier and his weapon systems that have caused our adversaries to choose longer-range engagements or the use of IEDs. One could argue that a more lightly equipped soldier could Maneuver better, and kill the enemy more quickly, thus ending the contact more quickly, and providing increased force protection. However, I wonder if we will ever win the “dismounted” foot race – our adversaries will almost always be more lightly armed and equipped than we are, and they will often know the terrain better, and will have preplanned escape routes. Instead, the US soldier gains a Maneuver advantage by maneuvering other elements of combat power (attack aviation, indirect fires, fighting vehicles, other dismounted forces) to kill the enemy.
We ought to also consider the effect of full spectrum/COIN operations on combat engagements. In stability and COIN operations, the US soldier is forced to be somewhat predictable in routes, times of movement, and “objective areas” (location where the soldier conducts a military activity – checkpoints, meetings with local political leaders, joint police patrols, etc.). In these types of military operations, we are requiring the soldier to accept greater risk of the enemy initiating contact, and we place constraints on his Mobility, Lethality, and Maneuver.
Finally, we ought to consider the psychological component of Force Protection. Individual force protection systems give soldiers greater confidence that they can survive contact. Moreover, after they pass through the initial moments of contact, individual force protection systems give the soldier confidence to sustain the contact, assess & develop the situation, and then respond with precise, lethal fires. Also, in some ways, individual force protection systems have made the individual soldier more maneuverable: one reason for our soldiers’ aggressiveness in close combat and the MOUT fight is their confidence in their individual force protection systems to protect them from becoming a serious casualty.
The point of this thread is not to say that soldiers should wear the “full kit” of individual force protection components on every mission – certainly the commander should make decisions about the level of protection based on the mission. However, based on the battlefield environment the US soldier will continue to face (full spectrum missions on complex terrain), the best solutions to our force protection weight dilemma are probably lighter systems (based on realistic expectations of what these systems ought to accomplish). Improvements in Mobility, Lethality, Situational Awareness, and Maneuver will have only a limited effect on protecting the soldier at the most critical and lethal moment: the first seconds of enemy-initiated contact.
MAJ Dwight Phillips, Student, Command and General Staff College
-- The views expressed in this blog post are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.