The David Kilcullen Collection (merged thread)

[jmm99]

The Future of Warfare Will Be Urban, Coastal, and Irregular (NAF, 25 Sep 2013):

According to Dr. Kilcullen, there are four environmental “mega- trends” that will be critical in planning future operational strategies.

First, the continuing increase in the world’s population in the next generation will change the global landscape. Dr. Kilcullen noted that most studies that record this data predict that the world’s population will accelerate until it reaches around 9.5 billion around the year 2050, meaning that another 3 billion people will arrive before then.

Second, the urbanization of that population means that these people will not be evenly distributed over the globe. Based on his research, Dr. Kilcullen believes that around two-thirds of the world’s population will reside in cities, and notably, that population will be aggregated in the developing world.

Third, the littoralization (the movement of people from rural, inland areas to the coast) of those densely populated cities will be critical in terms of conflict patterns. Today, around 80 percent of the world’s population lives within 50 miles of the coast and Dr. Kilcullen predicts that this number will only increase.

Fourth, and perhaps most significant, the connectivity of the world’s population is rapidly changing, enabling greater access to information and a higher ability to organize among non-state groups.

This is definitely not my Atlantic-Pacific Littorals worldview, but it is definitely a littorals view.

So, one issue is how should US Armed Forces be organized to meet these megatrends. One answer is Jeong Lee, Why the United States Should Merge Its Ground Forces (24 Sep 2013), arguing (largely for "budgetary" reasons) a merger of the Army, the Marine Corps and the Special Operations Command (SOCOM).

I'd go an entirely different route (leaving "bean counting" aside in this post): turning SOCOM into a separate service branch; and classifying operations (and which service executes them) on a unit size basis -

1. Small unit operations: SOCOM, which it has been doing (IMO, doing well) for the past several decades.

2. Medium unit operations: Marines (MAGTFs of various sizes), which would get them back to their amphibious, littoral function - and, yes, expeditionary warfare and interventions (cf. The Small Wars Manual). Since everyone should know my views on military intervention outside of the Americas, I'll refrain from annexing a set of caveats on that.

3. Large unit operations: The Army (something of a Gian Gentile force), which would be assigned primarily to continental defense of the Americas; although, for interventionists holding a different worldview - land wars in continental Eurasia and Africa, that large unit Army could fill that role as well.

Trying to assign roles to armed services based on the "intensity" of conflict has never made sense to me; nor has trying to turn the armed services into "social engineers" (but that is another rant topic).

Regards

Mike

PS: Some of COL Gentile's ideas (with two flag officers) are in A Cheaper, Stronger Army (15 Aug 2013), e.g. (p.2):

The centerpiece of reorganization for the Army is the combat group, which is smaller than a division but larger than a current brigade. There are five main categories of combat groups: Light Recon Strike Group, Combat Maneuver Group (CMG), Strike, C4ISR, and Sustainment. At the institutional level, MTM achieves improvements through organizational reform, reducing overhead by flattening echelons of command and control, and placing greater emphasis on protected mobility and firepower in tactical formations than is currently the case.

By reorganizing the force from a brigade-centric formation to a combat group-centric one, the MTM would allow the Army to reduce its current size of approximately 551,000 troops to as low as 420,000 and yet in the end produce a force that has greater combat capability, costs less to operate, is more sustainable over the long term, and is more strategically and operationally responsive to joint-force operations. MTM readiness cycles ensure there would be at least thirty-five thousand troops in the ‘ready to deploy’ window. Thus, the President would always know how many and which units can react to a no-notice emergency. Those units would already be tied to specific air and sea transportation assets, and their deployment timelines—even when blindsided by an unexpected event—could be executed within days. The MTM thus provides both significant strategic and tactical improvements.

Theoretically, a MAGTF could be the Corps: 4 divisions, 4 air wings and all the support units; which we haven't seen since Iwo Jima. The MTM proposal (35,000 "ready to deploy" troops) would be akin to a MAGTF based on a Marine division ground component. Somewhere in or below that range would be the "dividing line" between medium and large size units.